Final Thoughts
Pricing
At the time of writing, the Seagate SSHD with 2TBB capacity can be had at NewEgg for $89.99 or Overclockers UK for £69.95. That is a more than fair and very competitive price for a drive like this.
Conclusion
Solid state drives are getting cheaper every day, but there is one thing that they still don’t deliver for the average consumer and that is the amount of capacity of hard disk drives. The solid state hybrid drives bridge this gap by giving you terabytes of available storage with an intelligent caching mechanism that puts the hot and frequent used files into its NAND buffer for speedy access. The result is a system with a significantly improved response as we’ve seen in our benchmarks on the previous pages of this review.
The Seagate SSHD 2TB could boot our test installation in almost the same time as the tested SSD and in PCMark 8 we saw double the performance of a mechanical hard disk drive. Both tests are real-world test scenarios and not synthetic benchmarks and they are the most important ones to show for a hybrid drive. The traditional synthetic benchmarks show results that are very similar to a mechanical drive, as it was to be expected. With around 165MB/s at both reading and writing, the drive doesn’t need to hide this fact and those are some good results in this category. The random performance was also quite nice, no doubt aided by the 7200 RPM speed of the drive.
Despite having the fast 7200RPM motor, the Seagate SSHD stayed surprisingly quiet and at a noise level of a 5400 RPM drive or one with an intelligent motor speed. This is another aspect that makes this drive awesome and it would be well suited for any office PC, media center or living room gaming PC.
Pros
- Windows boot times close to SSD speed
- Improved system response
- Faster game and application loading
- Large capacity and low price
- Good performance in all areas
Cons
- Not as fast as an SSD
- Mechanical parts do make noise
“Solid State Hybrid Drives hit the sweet spot between performance and capacity and Seagate’s 2TB SSHD is a great example of this. Great boot times, better overall response, and a more than fair price makes it a winner.”
Thank you Seagate for providing us with this sample.
