Seagate SSHD 2TB Solid State Hybrid Drive Review

BootRacer 4.7

The real strength of SSHD’s are their improved boot times and loading times. BootRacer is a great application to measure this as it in its simplicity measures how long Windows requires for its boot process. It will show both the time for Windows itself to be loaded as well as the overall time until everything is loaded and you have arrived at the desktop.

I will be testing this feature on a fresh Windows 8 Pro installation with basic drivers for the motherboard, network cards, and storage controllers. The installation was initially made on a mechanical hard disk drive to prevent the smart caching mechanisms to sort the data ahead of testing. After the installation was complete, I cloned the whole drive with Acronis True Image HD 2014, allowing me to use the same installation for comparable results.

The chart below shows how the smart algorithms of the SSHD are able to sort the hot data very fast and create a more optimized Windows boot. We are down to 29 seconds after the 4th boot up and on the 10th we get below the 29-second marker.

Drive Comparison

To put these figures into context, I’ve cloned the exact same drive image onto a mechanical hard disk drive and a solid state drive to test their performance against an SSHD. What might surprise many people, Windows is only marginal faster to boot into the desktop on an SSD over the 2TB Seagate SSHD.