- Backed by a 5-year limited warranty
- Boots and performs like an SSD, PC & Mac Compatible
- Up to 5x faster than a traditional 5400 RPM HDD
- Height: 7.00mm
Slightly Better than HDD
04/09/2013
This review is from: Seagate ST500LM000 500GB 5400 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" Laptop Thin SSHD Bare Drive
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.
Overall Review:
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
Share this review:
Did you find this review helpful?
Yes
/
No
LOADING...
