- Fastest 2.5-Inch PC compute and gaming Hard Drive
- 5-year warranty within a thin 7mm z-height
- Up to 2TB capacity store up to 80x 25GB games
- Flash-accelerated technology delivers up to 5x faster load times
- Multi-tier caching technology (MTC) boosts performance
Great drive for single drive systems
12/04/2016
This review is from: Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSHD 1TB SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" Notebooks / Laptops Internal Hard Drive ST1000LX015
Pros:
For the price, this is a great 2.5" HDD that incorporates an 8GB MLC SSD cache. With a 7mm height it is small, lightweight, and great for thin devices that require a lower profile 2.5 HDD. It has a SATA3 6.0Gb/s interface, runs at 5400RPM, and operates extremely quiet with zero noticeable vibration noise. It comes with a 5 year warranty, which alone might be worth the extra $20-25 cost over the Barracuda drive with a 2 year warranty and no SSD cache.
I tested this drive in a laptop, which previously had an SSD to see how it compared. I also cloned to a standard 2.5 1TB Seagate 5400RPM drive to include in testing.(see data below) It increased the Windows 10 boot time by a few seconds over the standard HDD, but was not quite as quick as the SSD. Generally speaking, I noticed the laptop to be a bit snappier than the HDD when opening browser windows and other applications as I continued to use the laptop. My understanding is the SSD cache retains frequently used data as you work. So it's safe to say initially it will perform similar to a standard drive, but over time will perform better as it retains frequently used data.
Cons:
I really have no cons to report on this drive.
However, when testing with a standard disk performance utility, it performed nearly identical to the standard 1TB 2.5 drive I tested in this laptop. (see Crystal DiskMark score below) I also did some testing by coping files to and from this drive and an SSD in another system along with a 2TB WD Green drive for comparison. I saw ZERO increase in performance when copying large files or any files for that matter. I ran through several iterations of the same files and still no performance increase. This leads me to feel that whatever logic the SSD cache uses does not benefit normal file transfers and data storage. There may be some scenarios that it does increase performance, but not during my observation.
Overall Review:
This drive is a fantastic option for laptops or PC's where the only option is a single drive and storage is required. The price of this drive is equivalent to about a 256GB SSD. So for the same price you get 4X the storage at the same price and performance somewhere between a traditional HDD and an SSD drive. Also, to note these drives are fantastic in a PS3/PS4. I have had an older Seagate Momentus XT 500GB in my PS3 for years with a 4GB SLC Cache and load times on games are very noticeable.
Crystal DiskMark Results:
-------------------------
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 136.059 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 127.049 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.712 MB/s [ 418.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.340 MB/s [ 327.1 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 135.065 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 134.221 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.156 MB/s [ 282.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.311 MB/s [ 320.1 IOPS]
Test : 4096 MiB [D: 0.0% (0.3/931.4 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/12/04 12:59:04
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)
Windows 10 startup from shutdown (in seconds x 5 tests)
--------------------------------------------
Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSHD 1TB
1)20.1
2)17.4
3)16.4
4)16.4
5)17.0
OCZ VECTOR SSD 128GB
1)16.0
2)14.4
3)14.2
4)14.1
5)14.5
Seagate ST1000LM035 1TB 128MB
1)31.8
2)20.7
3)21.1
4)19.5
5)19.5
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