Question 1

is this for a laptop?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it fits any laptop with a standard 2.5" SATA drive, or you could get an adapter kit to put it in the 3.5" bay of a desktop. 
Over a year ago I did a full drive copy from my Laptop OEM to this (using external USB-SATA adapter) and when I put it in it booted up with no tweaks. It's still running great, boots Vista in under 30 seconds or Linux under 20 seconds. Yeah, it's probably past time to step up the MS side, but the laptop is still working better than when new and does what I need.

Question 2

So what is the advantage of the hybrid SSD if the speeds are the same?

Accepted Answer

The disk rpm is the same, however the controller will load frequently used items such as OS components and such in the Solid State portion. The solid state access rates are significantly faster than a conventional drive. This equates to faster boot and program access. The benefit of a Hybrid over an SSD is the fact that the rotating platters will carry the brunt of the disk writes on a Hybrid, where this does not exist in an SSD. SSD's have a write maximum lifespan which will eventually slow and fail (brick) the drive. Reads do not carry this constraint.

I noticed significant performance gains around boot and application access after installing the hybrid with no additional change required.

The larger the SSD portion of the hybrid the better, as it can store more. Think of this in terms of running your PC with low memory, seeing the disk cache related delays vs having a large reserve of ram memory. That is essentially what is happening here in a hybrid, only with the SSD, the data written is persisted rather than flushed as seen in RAM.

Question 3

Is this a SATA 3.0 or SATA 6.0 drive and will it work to replace a SATA 3.0 Laptop drive Hitachi P/N: h2t500854s   ?

Accepted Answer

The difference between SATA 1, 2 and 3 is data transfer speed, my friend.

SATA 1 can transfer data at a maximum of 1.5 Gb/sec. (That's Gigabits per second, NOT Gigabytes per second.)
SATA 2 can transfer data at a maximum of 3.0 Gb/sec. 
SATA 3 can transfer data at a maximum of 6.0 Gb/sec.

The data cables are interchangeable, though I'm sure you'll find companies that will charge you a hefty premium for 'special' SATA 3 data transfer cables.

SATA 3 and SATA 2 are backwardly compatible with SATA 1, so you could use a SATA 3 drive on a SATA 2 motherboard. You would, of course, only get transfer speeds at the SATA 2 level though.

This particular drive is SATA 2.0 with a transfer rate at 3.0 Gb/sec. SATA 3.0 is rated at 6.0 Gb/sec. but most standard mechanical drives and many solid states will not be able to saturate the connection speeds of SATA 2.0 or SATA 3.0 without the assistance of multiple drives using the entire I/O Buffer.

In Short, This drive will perform as well as your Hitachi SATA 3.0 drive if not better with the assistance of the SSD partition to assist with frequently accessed files. The SSD is an automatic partition of the HDD that will intelligently cache files that are used frequently like the OS.

Question 4

What is the read/write speeds?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the Seagate website specs state average 100 MB throughput, matching the benchmark someone already posted. That number does not tell the whole story.
That number is fine for a normal 7200 RPM drive, but ONLY applies to parts of massive read/write tasks when forced to work directly with the 500GB spinning platter.

During most routine usage you're pulling several often used objects and subroutines from the 8 GB SSD portion with virtually NO seek times to wait on.  That leaves the drive heads to do less work getting those less often used items from the spinning platter.

End result: Some tasks that took 4 minutes now complete in under 25 seconds in an old laptop using the same hardware, OS, and programs; no other change than replacing my fast hard drive with this Seagate Hybrid.  Some who use less total data will get better results than I do, others maybe not so much.

Another thing, this drive is adaptive. That means: 
1) When I first put it in, I shutdown and restarted five times and each time was faster than before as the drive noticed I was doing that more than anything else. After that it leveled off, once most boot routines are in the fastest 8 GB, the HD can't get much better. 
2) I started MS Word, Publisher, PowerPoint, and Excel five times each, and they got faster each time till they nearly blink on and off.  Single processor (dual core) opening a four page Publisher document in under half a second. 
3) I actually do more sound editing than any of the above, but I doubt anyone cares how fast Audacity loads and processes batch filters on multiple files, or that it didn't retrain from my earlier testing/training till 6 or 8 uses of what I really want.

Hope this helps,

Question 5

These days the drive thickness specification is key. This is 9.5"mm so will not fit ultra book with the the 7mm requirement. The dimension should be listed in the "details" as it is part of the form factor?

Accepted Answer

Not sure why you are asking me this question. I liked it and it worked great for my wife's laptop - speed it up beyond my expectations.

Question 6

What is the hight of this product( 9mm, 7mm , or 5mm)?

Accepted Answer

This is a 9.5MM Hard drive.

Brand	Seagate
Series	Momentus XT
Model	ST95005620AS

Interface	SATA 3.0Gb/s
Capacity	500GB
Flash Memory Capacity	4GB
NAND Flash Memory Type	SLC
Cache	32MB
Average Seek Time	11ms
Average Write Time	13ms
RPM	7200 RPM

Form Factor	2.5"
Height (maximum)	9.5mm
Width (maximum)	69.85mm
Length (maximum)	100.35mm

Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5" Solid State Hybrid Drive -Manufacture Recertified

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Item#: N82E16822178359