Seagate Desktop SSHD ST1000DX001 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Solid State Hybrid Drive Bare Drive

Pros: This drive combines a small 8GB SSD with a giant 2TB HDD to provide a balance of performance and capacity. For small transfers (~150MB of photos) from a fast source (an SSD drive), the transfer was nearly instantaneous. Copy, paste, it's there. However - this was also true for traditional HDD's in my system. For larger transfers, (1GB+ video files), there was a clear boost at the start, but then the drive settled into a more average transfer speed of around ~100MB/s - no slouch, but not the blindingly fast ~500MB/s boasted by top SSDs. With my experiments on installing and booting Linux Mint from this drive, I did experience some pleasant speedups on subsequent boots after the first few. While I'm sticking to a dedicated SSD myself, this sort of setup would be my second choice, especially for builds on a budget.

Cons: At the end of the day, 8GB is just a hair shy of being relevant. OS + one or two large games can easily overwhelm this cache, causing the user to hit the HDD portion more often than I'd like to see. This drive can be outclassed by a mix of a 64GB SSD and a traditional 2TB drive paired to work together (on modern intel motherboards) for a few dollars more overall.

Overall Review: Where this drive shines is for the keep-it-simple use case of those who want one big, fast-ish drive, at a reasonable price. If that's you (or your grandparent!) this drive is your best bet. To break the rating down: Performance: 5/5 - notable boost over traditional HDD's without compromising on capacity Value: 3/5 - significant premium over traditional HDD's Convenience: 5/5

Pros: Seagate quietly launched this 3.5" Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) a few months ago, building on the solid foundation they built with their 2.5" Momentus XT Hybrid drives. These 3rd gen 3.5" SSHDs address some of the biggest deficiencies compared to their predecessors, increasing performance and capacity, while bringing the price point closer to conventional mechanical HDDs. Before getting into performance details, some initial impressions I got from the drive: -Very quiet, much quieter than previous top-performer WD Black drives. -Very cool, these drives only hit 37C under load where the WD Black hit 40C and were hot to the touch when I hot-swapped them. -Lighter than drives with more platters, obviously. Only 2 platters and the housing is lighter, PCB smaller. Here are some results I took compared to the WD Black 1.5TB on a Gigabyte Z87 board with native SATA6G ports. ***HD TUNE*** Read Speeds Seagate SSHD- Min: [86.5] Max: [186.5] Avg:[149.4] Acc: [14.5]Burst: 233.9 WD Black HDD- Min: [66.7] Max: [141.3] Avg: [112.2] Acc: [11.7] Burst: 199.9 Sandisk SSD- Min: [336.2] Max: [427.9] Avg: [396] Acc: 0.119 Burst: [149.6] WD ***CrystalDiskMark*** WD Black: SEQ/512K/4K/4Kq32 READ: 135.7/49.93/0.698/1.69 WRITE: 132.7/71.78/1.28/1.343 Seagate SSHD: SEQ/512K/4K/4Kq32 READ: 137/51.3/0.666/1.653 WRITE: 154.6/76.91/1.288/1.353 Sandisk SSD: SEQ/512K/4K/4Kq32 READ: 495.3/308.5/32.62/314.5 WRITE: 478.6/395.7/147.9/239.3 ***FILE COPY*** 10GB game folder copied from SSD RAID0 array to disk Seagate SSHD: 800MB/s max burst, 180MB/s sustained WD Black HDD: 500MB/s max burst, 140MB/s sustained The Seagate SSHD also was able to sustain burst speeds longer, for about 5GB worth of the transfer most likely due to the solid state cache in addition to the standard onboard RAM cache.

Cons: None of these are going to detract the number of eggs, they are simply things that can be improved upon in future versions. -Capacity is not quite up to par with standard mechanical drives, which go up to 4TB now. -More onboard cache would be nice, 8GB is more than previous versions but I think 32GB or 64GB would be the bare minimum to notice a major difference. -Seek speeds and access times are still pretty slow, not that much better (and in some cases worst) than standard mechanical HDDs. -I kind of miss the Momentus XT branding, as it clearly signified a difference in the hybrid drives vs. mechanical drives. I had a much harder time distinguishing this drive as an "SSHD" vs. the standard "HDD" because most sale sites and discount sites miss this detail. I have seen this drive on sale before on TechBargains but had to check 2-3x to figure out why it seemed to be overpriced compared to other mechanical drives, because the top label looks the same as the mechanical drives. Seagate should consider using a different color labeling system, similar to WD to help differentiate product lines!

Overall Review: It was just a matter of time before an innovative HDD company merged the benefits of SSDs with the massive storage capacity of HDDs. It's great to see Seagate has made this a reality by bringing SSHDs to the 3.5" form factory, which will allow for more, larger HDD platters. Given this SSHD is only slightly more expensive than the HDD version, it is an easy recommendation, however, for those that would still prefer the extra 1TB they may opt for a standard 3TB HDD for the same price. Personally I enjoy the advantages of the extra NAND cache and will continue to look for SSHDs from Seagate in the future.

Pros: I have to admit going in, up until now I have considered hybrid hard drives that combine a small SSD with a conventional hard drive to be more a marketing strategy than a real speed advantage over a conventional hard drive. I was mistaken. This noticeably improves boot and access times--see test data under "other thoughts," below. It's a quiet drive and doesn't run excessively hot, holding in my test system case at a steady 95 degrees. No special drivers are required; the drive's own firmware handles moving files in and out of the onboard SSD as needed. The SSD is not visible as a separate drive.

Cons: No cons noted at this time.

Overall Review: To test, I am using the sort of system that I believe is the target audience for hybrid drives: systems that are not the newest and most expensive technology (as these are the most likely to have full-size SSD drives), but which are still current enough that the speed boost of a less expensive, faster drive is wanted. The test system is a Core 2 Quad 9505 on an i750 SATA-II motherboard in AHCI mode with 8 GB RAM, Creative X-Fi sound, and AMD 6870 graphics. It has Windows 7, an antivirus program, motherboard drivers, sound driver, and graphics driver loaded. Windows 7 64-bit install time (not counting post-install updates): 25 minutes on conventional drive, 22 minutes on hybrid Boot to login prompt: 46 seconds on conventional drive, 26 seconds on hybrid Boot to full desktop 1 minute 15 seconds on conventional drive, 48 seconds on hybrid drive Interestingly, the speed increases over time as the drive learns what files are the most frequently accessed. Windows 7 on the conventional drive boots at roughly the same speed no matter how many times it has previously been booted. Window 7 on the hybrid drive on the seventh boot to login prompt: 24 seconds (a 2 second gain) Windows 7 on the hybrid drive, seventh boot to full desktop: 35 seconds (a 13 second gain) Conclusion: this is a relatively inexpensive and simple way to get a large system drive with some of the speed increases of an SSD. No installation of third-party drivers is needed, neither is any special configuration required.

Pros: - Capacity of traditional platter drives mixed with a dash of solid state speed. - Sequential reads and writes were around a very respectable 150MB/s+ during testing. It should be noted that data coming off the solid state cache (referred to as SSC moving forward) is going to be accessed significantly faster. - The drive automatically manages the SSC so there is literally nothing for you to do on your end except use your PC like you normally would. It will move your most commonly accessed files to the cache over time which is where you see the performance increase. ie, the more you use an application the faster, in theory, it will automatically become. - One of the first things I tested with this drive was boot times: (including post) 62 seconds 1st boot of a freshly imaged windows 7 x64 install 47 seconds after half a dozen reboots. This is where that SSC works its magic. By comparison a 10k rpm raptor on the same build/image took 116 seconds and a 2 year old 60GB SSD took 33 seconds. As you can see you don't quite get the full benefit as you do booting off a SSD, but then again, for this price range, you won't get anywhere near the capacity of this drive in a SSD! - Opening small apps such as a web browser became a second or so faster. Apps which require access to a larger number of files (think photoshop) were several seconds faster after regular use. - Gaming on this drive is a tough one to call. Using it for both your OS drive and a gaming drive isn't optimal in my opinion unless you really only play one or maybe 2 games at most at a time. Personally I would stick with a true SSD for your OS and use this drive for your constantly expanding library of games.

Cons: - I only have one annoyance with this drive. 8GB of solid state cache and 2TB of platter storage just seems like not enough of one and more then is needed of the other. Based on my own experience with this drive I would have much rather preferred a 16GB or 32GB SSC paired with about 1.5TB of storage. I think that would be the sweet spot for a single drive solution offering the best of SSD speed and platter storage capacity. Worth knocking an egg? Nope, but most certainly worth mentioning.

Overall Review: Hybrid solutions are an interesting animal. While this is NOT a laptop drive, laptops are definitely where solutions like this make the most sense. In the desktop world however, providing you have the space, a separate SSD for your OS and a platter drive for your data/games still offers you the best performance and bang for the buck. There are two scenarios I can see where this drive makes perfect sense. 1. If you only have room for 1 drive and want the best compromise of speed and storage. 2. If you're a gamer with a SSD already and looking for a very fast drive with enough room to store your entire library. Now, whether or not the price difference between Seagate's standard 2TB drive and the hybrid is worth it is a discussion best left to you and your wallet.

Pros: Uses 1 TB platters 3 year warranty Came with latest firmware installed (CC43) 8 GB MLC NAND Speed: 190 MB/s (According to Seagate) Very quiet, never made a sound while in use. The only time I ever heard it was when it went into its standby phase and I could hear it spin down as it was shutting off. Boot Tests: Motherboard Post Time: 9 Seconds • Boot 1 = 29.733 Seconds • Boot 2 = 24.944 Seconds • Boot 3 = 23.727 Seconds Crystal Disk Mark • Sequential: Read = 162.3 MB/s, Write = 169.86 MB/s • 512k: Read = 56.62 MB/s, Write = 113.1 MB/s • 4k: Read = 0.864 MB/s, Write = 1.655 MB/s • 4k QD32: Read = 1.692 MB/s, Write = 1.668 MB/s HD Tune • Minimum: 86.7 MB/s • Maximum: 192.7 MB/s • Average: 157.8 MB/s • Access Time: 14.2 ms • Burst Rate: 158.7 MB/s Power Consumption • Idle Drive Off – 1.25 Watts • Idle Drive On – 4.75 Watts • Load Read – 8.35 Watts • Load Write – 8.65 Watts Temperature While Testing: 96.8 °F I also tested the new drive on a SATA II connection and as I figured the results were within a margin of error as some values were higher and some were lower than when on the SATA III connection. So if you don’t have a SATA III capable motherboard, don’t worry about it.

Cons: The 8 GB NAND as many have said is too small as the operating system (If running Windows) is roughly 24 GB for my system for example. Granted there is stuff within that 24 GB that is not necessary to have accelerated on the NAND such as system restore files for example but at 8 GB it’s mostly just going to cache the OS. If they made it around 16 GB it would be better as this would be big enough for all of the important OS files and still have some room for your programs like Photoshop for instance. At its current size I get the impression that it is constantly trading files for who is important because the NAND is always full. Also if the NAND was faster it would make this an even more compelling deal (Rated speed of 190 MB/s). For example I feel it would be better if it could at least saturate SATA II so around 260-280 MB/s.

Overall Review: Overall this drive is great if you either don’t have the budget for an SSD or just need a lot of storage space. By having the NAND flash onboard it really helps speed things up like booting which is not as fast as and SSD but is way faster than any hard drive I’ve ever tested. This acceleration was also seen with the opening of programs such as Photoshop which opened very quickly. With this drive you have to remember that it needs a couple tries on certain things for it to start to cache it to the NAND, so don’t think it doesn’t work because it isn’t fast on the first try. Not related to the drive but Newegg’s new hard drive packaging is fantastic as the drive is held together so tightly I could barely get it out of the box. *All tests were conducted three times to ensure accuracy and repeatability of results.

Pros: Seagate says you can have your cake and eat it too. Let’s say you want 2TB storage and SSD speeds for booting and launching applications. You could: 1) buy two 1Tb SSD drives -> $1300. 2) buy a 500 GB SSD for OS+apps and a spinning 2TB drive for data -> $350 + $100 3) get one of these -> less than $140 in a single drive DOES IT WORK? In a word: YES. See my “Other Thoughts”. HOW DOES IT WORK? This is a fast (7200rpm, 2 platter) hard drive mated to 8GB of NAND flash (SSD type memory). There is an “Adaptive Memory” controller that identifies the most frequently used data and caches it to the NAND using a pretty intelligent voting algorithm. This is Seagate’s third generation of this technology and they call these hybrid drives “SSHD’s”. This technology works no matter what OS you are running. WHY DOES IT WORK WITH JUST 8GB FLASH? A typical corporate computer user reads almost 20Gb of data from hard drive over 5 days. About 10Gb of that is the same data being read over and over again. Putting some of that repetitive read data into only 2GB of flash cache will give 95% the performance of an SSD. This drive has 8GB of flash so it should do even better.

Cons: You should not buy this drive in place of an SSD if: 1) you need an SSD for environmental reasons (shock resistance, high altitude use, etc.); or 2) primarily use large, rapidly-changing datasets (eg a fileserver where all the files on disk have an equal chance of being requested, high-definition video editing, etc.). If you are like 98% of the people who use computers, however, this will get you pretty close to SSD performance at a fraction of the price. If you have a ton of apps you use regularly, you may experience going back down toward regular hard drive speed if you haven't used that app or data recently. The regular non-cached data rate for this drive is still very good for a spinning disk.

Overall Review: The way I tested this device was to take a somewhat older motherboard with: a Q9550 Quad CPU / 12Gb mem / no cache to prevent confusion / a bloated Win7 64 OS (antivirus, multiple start-up progs and apps) installed on one 7200rpm Hitachi / a Mac OS on a second 7200 Hitachi (iBoot). I used the free Seagate-branded version of Acronis DiskWizard to clone the Win OS onto this SSHD and then I also made a second Win clone to an SSD. Later, I cloned the Mac OSX to SSHD and SSD using SuperDuper! for the mac tests. I tested Win boot times (with BootRacer) and various application launch times (using AppTimer or a real stopwatch). I did 15 runs of each on the SSHD (they didn’t improve much more after 5). Then spent half a day doing other things on the machine and then re-checked the apps to see if they were still launching fast. I repeated the process with MacOS. I then timed the boot/app times on the original drive and the SSD. Incidentally, although sleep & hibernation are not really relevant on a desktop machine/drive, they get sped up a lot with this thing too. Space is limited so here are some Win examples (5 runs): Boot to Welcome Dialog (seconds): 70, 64, 60, 49, 46. PowerPoint: 0.6367, 0.5497, 0.4117, 0.3607, 0.3637. JetBrains PhpStorm to Open Project dialog: 9.5292, 6.2827, 5.3940, 5.0699, 5.0939. Photoshop: 6.1258, 5.4846, 3.4709, 2.8508, 2.4028. I got similar trends and percentages with Visual Studio, InDesign, and WebStorm. After doing other stuff for awhile (email and browsing), I rebooted and retested each app to see if the improvement stuck for a while. The times were close (eg. boot was 50, phpstorm was 5.1139). Mac tests mirrored this trend. The SSD was slightly faster but way more expensive. So what am I going to do? Each new employee single-drive desktop with OS plus locally installed apps gets an SSHD instead of a regular drive. I can see single drive laptops that need more than 250GB storage benefiting even more because laptops are booted/slept/hibernated often. I expect to save a lot of time and therefore $$ with this alternative drive as long as there is a big price differential for similar sized SSDs.

Pros: This is a great compromize between the speed of an SSD and the capacity and price of a HDD. I installed this as my primary OS drive replacing a 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11. I cloned the old drive onto the new drive so the installations were identical on the two drives. The first time the SSHD booted it was no faster than the old drive. I used it the rest of the day and didn't really notice much of a difference. However, after using it for a few days boot up times to a usable desktop became noticeable faster, almost as fast as the SSDs I've tested in the past. In fact it was so fast that one of my other friends, who is just as knowledgeable about computers as I am, sat at my computer and thought I had an SSD in it because it booted so fast. Also, my common programs start up a lot faster as well. Chrome opens almost instantly. Photoshop, which usually takes a good 15-30 seconds to start with a normal HDD, now starts in about 5 seconds. Thanks to the improved write caching with the latest generation of SSHD drives, shutdowns are also a lot faster. The words Shutting Down barely flash on the screen and the computer turns off.

Cons: Don't expect miracles with these drives. They improve a few common tasks and boot speed of the computer, but sustained file transfers are still going to be at normal HDD speeds. Though I've noticed writes under about 3GB are extremely fast, which I assume is because the write is being cached to the SSD portion. I tend to play a lot of different games, so really this drive didn't help me at all with game loading times. The cache just isn't big enough to keep up with changing between games. I'd like to see a bigger SSD cache on the desktop versions of these drives. Integrating a 16GB SSD would have probably helps with game loading in my situation as it would have allowed for more than just a single game to be cached in the SSD.

Overall Review: These drives do exactly what they are intended to do. I did take off one egg, and that was really only because of the small size of the SSD. This is the 3rd generation of these drives, and I think it is time that the SSD size be increased, especially on the desktop versions of the drives. I don't think 16GB of SSD cache is an unreasonable expectation. Other manufacturers announced they will be releasing SSHD drives in the future with 16GB and 32GB of SSD cache, it would have been nice if Seagate went ahead and put at least 16GB on these drives so they are ready to compete in the future. That being said, Seagate has had almost 2 years to perfect the caching algorithm on these drives, That really shows with how well these drives perform. So even with 8GB of SSD cache, the Seagate drive might very well perform just as good as another manufacturers drive with 16GB or 32GB, simply because Seagate's caching algorithm is so much more mature.

Pros: This product does offer a measurable performance advantage over conventional spinning disks, as claimed. But your mileage will vary depending on what you actually do with the drive. This is a unique product that gives you a very small solid state disk (SSD) and a very large conventional hard disk drive (HDD) bundled together, which the computer sees as one drive. Trick firmware allocates which files go on which for you, automatically. If you only need SSD speeds for a very small proportion of your files, this could be a best-of-both-worlds arrangement. Physically, the drive is about what you’d expect from a contemporary spinning-disk hard drive. Dimensions are identical to any other 3.5" hard drive you have owned. Acoustic properties are very good, with no noticeable no buzzing, whining, or clicking on long sequential writes. Thermal properties are par for the course. I threw 1.5tb of data on it in a 3-hour sequential write with the drive in a “toaster” style drive dock (exposed to ambient air, no fans) and recorded 103ºF max surface temperature after an hour in comfy 63º ambient conditions. One hour later, no change. So far so good.

Cons: This product suffers from confusing, even skirting disingenuous, marketing. You really need to read to figure out what exactly is being sold here. This product is a 4tb conventional spinning hard drive (HDD) with a 8gb NAND solid state flash storage device integrated into it. If the data you seek to access is stored on the HDD, it is accessed at speeds you would expect for a decent-quality 7200 RPM hard drive, including spin-up and seek time. If the data is stored on the SSD portion of this product, it is accessed at speeds you would expect for a NAND flash device (i.e. stupid-fast). The question that will immediately come to mind for potential buyers is “how often can I expect SSD speed versus HD speed?” This is a critical question, as the NAND flash represents a mere 0.2% of the total storage offered by the device. Seagate explains that "a set of advanced algorithms” running within the drive’s firmware handles the allocation of files between the two storage devices. Essentially what is happening here is that the drive is keeping a running tally of what files are popular, and keeping those files in the flash memory. The flash acts like a gigantic cache for your "greatest hits" files. The rest of the drive is no faster than a conventional 7200 RPM drive, which most certainly does not “perform like an SSD,” as Seagate suggests in the product feature list. If you are expecting 4tb of storage that offers SSD speeds, you will be disappointed, because that is not what this product provides. While it very well may offer accelerated boot times if you use it as your system drive, this drive cannot pull off other tricks that people expect of solid state drives, like the ability to play back large video files. 4k footage of any variety is a no-go. 2k doesn’t make the cut, either, and nor does 1080p24 at 16-bit (4:4:4). In fact, you need to drop all the way down to 1080p24 10-bit (4:2:2) footage to find an uncompressed video format that this drive can play back in real time. In this regard, it’s comparable with other high-end HDD’s, and is not even playing in the same league as SSD’s.

Overall Review: Of course, a 4tb SSD doesn't even exist as of this writing, and SSD storage costs around $0.33/gigabyte, whereas this product is over 4tb formatted and offers this massive storage at a tenth of that cost. I would speculate that the scenario Seagate engineers had in mind for this product was a single do-all drive for a home user, in which the drive is hosting 100% of the user’s data, including the OS. Thus the OS would invariably land on the NAND flash, giving the user SSD-like boot speeds, and perhaps improved commonly-used application launch speeds as well. In this case, this unusual configuration of a tiny SSD and a big HDD would represent an ideal storage solution. In other use cases, this drive falls short. I formatted it Mac OS Extended with a GUID partition table (the drive arrived unformatted) and installed it in my video post-production workstation. My use scenario involved using it as a bulk storage drive for project files, while my operating system and scratch space were each allocated to separate true SSD’s. I replaced a Western Digital 2tb “Black” (WD2002FAEX) drive with this one. Using the BlackMagic Design disk speed test tool, the WD drive topped out at a sustained write of 116.5 mbps and read of 118.3 mbps. The Seagate swung 135.8 mbps read and 135.3 mbps write on this same test. So, this drive is no slouch, but it sure as heck isn’t a SSD. The cheapest “bargain-brand” SSD I have ever tested nailed 227.2 read on this same test, whereas my primary drive, an admittedly quite expensive OWC Mercury Elite, delivers what I paid for: a staggering 497 mbps write and 515.2 mbps read. With the drive loaded with data but still brand-new, I ran the Blackmagic speed test repeatedly in an effort to get the firmware to allocate it to the NAND flash portion of the drive and get a sense for what this product might offer at its fastest. It did in fact get faster, getting up to 155.8 mpbs read and 156.1 mbps write. This is the fastest I have ever seen single 7,200 RPM HDD go. But it is still nowhere near SSD speeds, nor speeds that can be achieved by two conventional HDD's in a RAID 0 configuration. Qualitative real-world use over the course of a week does show a fast, responsive product by the standards of a 7,200 RPM HDD. It is noticeably quieter than the WD drive it replaced, but there is no perceptible speed change. Annoyances like latency introduced by needing to spin up the drive when you hit an “open” dialog in a program are still present. The long and short of it is that if you have a VERY minimally data-intensive workflow but still need massive storage (think family email and web browsing box that also hosts a big pile of media) , and intend to make this your one and only drive, it may represent a very good value to you. It will deliver better-than-HDD speeds overall, and provide massive, inexpensive storage in one convenient package. For users on small form factor machines that can only accommodate one drive, this product might be a uniquely appealing option. But most users will find that the 8gb of flash memory included here is wildly inadequate to provide anything resembling SSD performance. I’m not sure why Seagate decided that 8gb of NAND flash was satisfactory in an age when everyday apps like iTunes weigh in a 300mb. 8gb is far inadequate for most modern operating systems as well, so while I don't doubt that boot times are improved, I question the claim that boot times are in any way SSD-like. Bottom line: this product offers great speed for a conventional hard drive, and is a really nice value, but it doesn’t even begin to perform like a true SSD. I would add to this conversation that I have had checkered experience with Seagate hard drives over the years, and I can’t find published MTBF (mean time between failure) data on this product anywhere online. There are two storage devices in this product, each with it's own controller, plus some kind of extra controller to run the firmware. Added hardware complexity generally doesn't do much to improve reliability. So far so good in my short experience with this product, so I can't hold these qualms against it, but suffice it to say that none of this inspires confidence. I would advise users who prize reliability above all else to avoid this product until the manufacturer publishes MTBF statistics, or online user reviews offer this data anecdotally. ***Update*** After one year of production use, this drive is still holding up, and the disk speed benchmarks remain the same. As the drive has filled, the seek times have seemed to get worse, but I can't quantify this. Overall, my conclusion is that this drive is a good quality HDD, but the "hybrid" functionality is a gimmick, and doesn't add any significant benefit in my use-case. I had hoped that this drive would bridge the gap between expensive but fast SSD's and cheap but slow HDD's, but it does not. This product fundamentally still works like a what 99.8% of it is, a 7200rpm hard drive.