Seagate Solid State Hybrid ST500LM000 500GB 64MB Cache 2.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Laptop Thin Hard Drive -Bare Drive Seagate Solid State Hybrid ST500LM000 500GB 64MB Cache 2.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Laptop Thin Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Pros: Really easy way to get into the world of SSD caching drives. It's relatively inexpensive compared to other solutions, flexible to use on multiple form-factors(IE Laptops, Desktops, MediaPCs, external drive enclosures) and it performs very fast. It actually got faster over time. While I was hoping my Window Experience Index score would increase as I used it(it didn't) I still experienced increase performance in the apps I used, the more I used them. Firefox starts up almost as fast as my Pure-SSDs, Photoshop starts up nice and quick. Checking the temperatures on the drive, I didn't find any issues. It ran nice and cool and is a very quiet drive. This is great for a Gaming laptop where you want to install a bunch of Steam games, but need more room than any SSD in this price range can offer. You almost get your cake and eat it too with this drive, and for me that's a win, as a 500GB Hybrid is much more useful to me than a 128GB Pure SSD.

Cons: I wish this had a 7200RPM hard drive. It may have provided even better performance than this drive already offers. Another point to that effect is the NAND Flash portion which is just 8GB, had they made it 32GB or 64GB it probably would have taken on Pure-SSDs head on. As it stands, those upgrades would likely upgrade the price, so, while I'd like to see them. I'm happy with the drive as is.

It would be also great if they offered a 3.5" version, as the larger size may make it easier to offer a 7200RPM HDD with a larger SSD-Caching partition. As well as help it fit better in a desktop computer.

Other Thoughts: Tested this for a while to give the caching a chance. Definitely felt a big performance increase on the most used apps and when I started using a new game it would take some time, but, booting it actually got faster overtime.

Pros: Super fast boot up , quiet. Great price

Cons: So far none

Pros: both physical size and capacity are pluses. also gen less heat that a 3.5" drive...

the best quality is that i get twice the capacity and 1/4th the cost of a SSD I replaced. boot speeds are at least as fast as the ssd...

Cons: through put is slower for large files and backups, but as long as you're doing repeated tasks the per formance is there...

Pros: Uses an 8GB SSD built in partition as a cache drive for a 500GB standard HDD.

7mm Height to fit in the laptops that accept the smallest 2.5" drives.

Absolutely zero extra work for the consumer. Treat it like a regular hdd.

A good price for what you get, which is, ssd like boot up times, and a faster initial launch of your programs. Everything isnt faster, but a lot is.

I have been on the SSD bandwagon for the past 3 years and have upgraded for myself and my customers many times. I love SSDs because everything just loads, and fast.
With this drive, my boot times are roughly what I get with an ssd, and my post windows load experience is much better than a standard hard drive as well.

Compatibility #1. As long as you have AHCI capabilities (which im almost positive ive never seen a sata computer not have AHCI) then this will work.

A perfect upgrade for old laptops where SSDs are questionable or problematic.

Cons: Its just not as fast as I want it to be, but I have real high expectations. To non-ssd people, this thing will fly.

only an 8GB SSD cache block.

I would really like to see one of these with a 64GB cache block. With 8GB, for a heavy user, it varies a lot what loads fast as there is simply not enough space to hold all the vital bits of several large programs to get that insta speed you expect from an ssd.

500GB is pretty small for someone who is buying a drive for its capacity. tho at 7mm, this is semi-understandable, this year.

Other Thoughts: After testing this drive out, I decided to change my main rig up a little. I ditched the 256GB SSD I had in there and put in a 64GB SSD and used intels cache thing to use it as a 64GB SSD cache block for a 2TB drive.

Voila, after I run everything once,, all acts like an SSD.

My point is.. I would easily pay $200 for a laptop hard drive that had a 64GB block with a 1TB or better HDD. or $150 for a 500GB. I know they have the ability to currently make this,, physical size and everything, and seems like a no brainer. I personally dont think ill ever buy an ssd over 64GB again unless money is no issue and instead keep it somewhat like i have now.

8GB is just too small for anyone who is really looking for real speed, but this is perfect for a light user.

This drive is real good,, but,, it just makes me want more.

Pros: Ordered two of these drives on sale to have on hand for my customers. Tested both drives using HDTune and found no bad blocks. I did not benchmark them as the connection to my system was USB 2.0.

They are very quite, almost no noise or vibrations.

I have previously installed one of these in an XP machine about two years ago and it performed really well. Great alternative to SSDs for systems that wouldn't fully utilize them (No TRIM in XP\Vista)

Cons: Their not SSDS, but the next best thing.

Other Thoughts: As I mentioned these were ordered to be re-sold, so this review is based on previous experience and the initial testing of the drives I received.

Pros: What a great cross between the speed of solid state drives and the space of conventional mechanical drives! I’ve always wondered about getting a solid state drive (this is my first shot at something similar to one), but I can never decide how much space is a good idea. With this, I don’t have to!

The drive itself is pretty snappy, and the HDD-to-SSD algorithm seems to work quite well. A few weeks of using this drive and the things I like to be loaded quickly still do so. This includes Linux Mint (my personal choice of OS for my laptop) and Steam. Waking from standby is also a breeze! I won’t clutter my Pros section with too many numbers, but I recorded times which can be found at the end of my review.

The read and write speed are both more than satisfactory for a 5400 rpm drive. Write speeds ranged from 105-136 MB/s, while read speeds ranged from 110-143 MB/s. This was a huge upgrade for me, as my previous drive was an older (probably about 2 years) 3 Gb/s drive that might get 25 MB/s if I was lucky. So if you have a computer that can support a 6 Gb/s drive are debating on the worth and hassle of getting a new one, I promise it’s worth it.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the usefulness of this drive. It’s a great hard drive and I’m looking forward to using it more.

Cons: Oddly enough, resuming from a hibernated state was relatively very poor. In fact, resuming from hibernation took *longer* than actually booting the computer by about 15 seconds. What’s even stranger is that it got worse the longer I used the drive. Not a big problem for me, as my computer only ever hibernates if I leave it in my bag without realizing I left it in standby.

Other Thoughts: Now for a few approximate (at best) times with some descriptions of improvement:
[Boot Times]
00.52.35 - First boot after a fresh install of Linux Mint. Updated everything then rebooted.
00.46.32 - Boot after updating everything. Installed video driver, rebooted again.
00.27.88 - Wow. Big improvement. Installed Steam and Bastion, played some then rebooted.
00.15.37 - Again, wow. Bastion now starts instantly and I am at the loading screen in 2 seconds.
00.14.44 - Steam now starts in 5 seconds. I had transferred over a few videos to try to trick the algorithm.
00.12.37 - Firefox now also loading instantly. My efforts to trick the algorithm to boot slower were unsuccessful. Perhaps I didn’t open the files enough times, though many were sufficiently large (HD videos).

Resuming from standby took about 3 seconds on average consistently.

There is one thing I’m not entirely sure on: defragmenting the drive. Not an issue for me personally, but I am curious. Many internet communities seem split on this, but Seagate’s site has a couple pages that say to turn off things like auto-defragmenting. I don’t honestly know, but this would be something I’d like to see officially stated before I go try anything.

Pros: This SSHD does boot up the programs that I use the most much faster than my old HDD. However, this is after I have been using it for a day or two. At the start, programs were much slower. I believe this has to do with the "learning" part of the SSHD. Also, since this drive is smaller and design for a laptop, I am sure that it is more energy efficient and will drain less of your power supply compared to regular HDDs.

Cons: After I swapped the new drive in, I had a problem with Windows 7 crashing during installation. After playing around with the BIOS, I found out that this drive does not seem to support AHCI or XHD modes for the SATA interface. It only seems to work with the IDE mode. My previous Samsung HDD supported all of the modes. So if anyone is having a hard time getting this drive to work, you might want to check your BIOS and fiddle with the options or maybe even a quick BIOS reset might help.

Other Thoughts: This review is for the Solid State Hybrid ST500LM000 500GB 64MB Cache 2.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Laptop Thin Hard Drive. I received this hard drive via the Eggxpert Review program. I was very excited to be able to test this product because my old hard drive was the performance bottleneck when I built my PC back in July of 2010. Even though that this drive is designed to fit a laptop, I tested it in my desktop PC. I had previously been using a SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive. At the time when I built my PC, it was one of the fastest SATA HDDs available on a budget. I even bought two and RAID 0 them, but there was no noticeable performance increase. I didn't buy a SSD at the time because the cost vs performance was not worth it. Not to mention a SSD would just be use as a boot drive, you'll need a regular SATA drive for your storage anyways. This 500GB solid state hybrid looks very promising since it would blend both drives into one at a very affordable price.

For my test I completely took out my old Samsung HDD and swap in the new Seagate SSHD as my only hard drive. I did not use any special tools or software to compare the performance of each drive. The only program I used was the Windows 7 Experience Index Rating for comparison and both drives were on the low 5.9 index. So according to windows there was no performance difference between the two drives. However, I have been using my PC daily with the HDD for almost three years, so I have a good feel of how fast it runs. My PC was built for one main purpose and that is for gaming.

I have been using this new SSHD for the past three weeks. After using this drive daily for playing Guild War 2 and web surfing, I can say that it is only a bit better than my old HDD. The reason being that even though it does boot the programs that I use most often faster, it is still on a 5400rpm disk with only 8GB of solid state cache. I feel that certain programs are faster and certain programs are slower. My old HDD was on a 7200rpm disk, which is more consistent and averages out to about the same overall speed. I am sure that the SSHD technology will improve over time, but for now I believe it is only slightly better than a HDD.

My Desktop PC setup:

-Processor: Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz 8MB L3 Cache socket LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor

-Heatsink & Fan: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212

-Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P55-USB3 LGA 1156 Intel P55 USB 3.0 ATX

-Memory: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3
SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

-Graphics Card: XFX HD-585X-ZNFC Radeon HD 5850 1GB 256-bit DDR5

-Optical Drive: ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS Black

-Chassis: COOLER MASTER HAF 922 RC-922M-KKN1-GP

-Power Supply: CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W

-OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

-Monitor: Hanns-G HZ281HPB 27.5'' 3ms Full HD 1080P HDMI

Pros: - Cheaper solution for faster operation
- Small form factor, great for netbooks
- Excellent packaging on Newegg's part
- Laptop resuming seems to be more responsive
- Computer is overall faster in all areas
- If you have an older netbook and are just looking for a bigger hard drive this is what you are looking for.

Cons: - Not nearly competitive to a true SSD drive
- No clear battery improvement

Other Thoughts: I strongly recommend using Windows 8 with this drive as it seems to definitely make a different. If you are to stubborn to upgrade operating systems you are better off buying a true SSD drive and combining it with an older hard drive.

IMPORTANT - You must reboot your computer 10-15 times before this drive will start booting the operating system at an accelerated rate. Please use this product for a few weeks before you make a review. My boot times have cut in half over the two weeks I've been using this SSHD.

Pros: Fast boot times, fast application launches

Cons: None so far, but I wish this drive was a 7200RPM.

Other Thoughts: I bought this drive to revive an older Mac mini mid-2007. I expected a bit of a speed boost from the SSD and 64MB cache, but I didn't expect it to work almost as fast as my late 2012 Mac mini. I plan to use this system mostly as a testing platform, but I might even take it down to my office to use as a workstation for when I don't feel like taking my laptop out of the bag. I definitely recommend this drive for anyone who has an older system that they want to continue using. I wouldn't use this system as a graphics or video workstation, but for all of the basic computing tasks, it works great with this drive.

Pros: This drive performs like any other drive. I replaced this drive with a WD 500 gb 5400 rpm drive. As of now i see almost no Performance differences. The only thing i see that is faster is my boot time. Programs start at the same speed as they did on the other driver.

Iv seen lots of comments about what rpm this drive is here is a link to there data sheets

http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/momentus-xt-data-sheet-ds1704-4-1209-us.pdf

Cons: expected to boot programs faster after time... its been almost 2 weeks now and i do not see any increase in boot times.

Other Thoughts: I use my computer all the time any where between 7-12 hours a day.
over all not much of a differences.

Do not get me wrong I like the drive just wish it would of lived up to the hype it was given.

PC Build
CPU - AMD fx 6 core
Ram - Gskill sniper 12 Gig
MainBoard- Asus sabertooth 990fx
Video - MSI OC Geforce 660 Ti 2G GDDR5
Power- CORSAIR AX860 860W
HDD- Seagate ST500LM000 500GB