Question 1

Is this an internal or external drive?

Accepted Answer

It is an internal drive. I put it in a Dell Vostro 420. It increased the speed of the pc. I suspect the SSD portion of the drive had something to do with that. I replaced an existing sata drive. Had all the right connectors and I think an older 4 pin power connection.

Question 2

Is this product compatible with windows 7 64 bit?

Accepted Answer

I just installed it on Windows 7 Ultimate on 12/14/2013.  It works fine.

After physically installing it in the case, I entered the BIOS to make sure my boot sequence was correct, so it wouldn't try to boot from it without software on it.  Once booted, windows auto detected and installed its drivers and asked to reboot.

After it rebooted, I went to Control Panel->Administrator Tools->Computer Management to give it a drive letter and format it.  So far, so good.

Question 3

Do these drives really have as poor of reliability as the reviews state? 3/5 stars seems oddly low. If these drives really are not reliable, is it due to the nature of hybrid drives, or is Seagate a bad designer?

Accepted Answer

We have a small network and use hybrids as boot drives in 6 desktops, 3 laptops, and 2 netbooks.  We only had one arrive DOA, and it was replaced promptly by Newegg.  No problems over the last 18 months with any of the others, and we've seen marked performance improvements in boot times and program starts. We use Norton 360 for routine protection and auto utilities with occasional O&O defrag.  We plan to upgrade when hybrids start using 16 & 32 NAND down the road.  Perhaps we have no other problems as we do not use hybrids as data drives, only boot drives.

Question 4

Is this Hard Drive boot-able or not? I am looking for a boot-able as second hard drive for my PC so that I can load a Linux OS on it

Accepted Answer

If the Linux OS is installed correctly it will boot up on this HD.  All hard drives are bootable.   I would use this hd as the primary one and partition the hd into different contains - one for windows and one for linux.

Question 5

is this drive all solid state or disc and solid state?

Accepted Answer

It's a combination hard disk and solid state... From windows, for example, you will see it as a single 2tb drive ...  The solid state part is hidden and acts as a fast cache... There is a notable difference with response speed for frequently used files... So far as I can tell, it's zero configuration, the solid state portion is hidden from the user.

Question 6

Is this compatible with http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132046

Accepted Answer

Oh yes. this is a very good unit. you get the best of both worlds with this fast access with lots of storage. The z 87 Asus is a pretty high end mother board and should work well. My computer is I 5 Hp with upgrades video card 8 gb of ram . A friend of mine build a monster with the I7 all the the extras liquid cooled processer etc and i think the same mother board, and used this sata 3 [6 .o gb] are the same , and is very happy.. you should enjoy.

Question 7

Do I have to do anything special to use this as my sole hard drive in a new build? Or do I just plug it in like any other drive?

Accepted Answer

Use like any other drive.

You should immediately notice improvements in writes (esp. short block length random writes).  After you boot your system a few times, the Hybrid aspect of the drive will learn the most used blocks and have them cached in the SSD making reads much faster.  You should see some improvement (50% reduction) in boot time and especially I notice the improvement after logging in and all of the systray icons load - this should be noticeably much faster after you have booted up a few times.  Good luck.  And -- always make sure you are backing up your data to one or more additional external drives or some cloud backup service.

Question 8

Does this SSHD come with the cables you need to install it?

Accepted Answer

I want to say it didn't. I bought this a couple years ago when I was building a new rig. I'm pretty sure the cables I used came with the motherboard, and that this item only contained the hard drive.

Question 9

I currently have a 1TB drive installed.  Can I replace it with this drive and copy (or clone) it to this new larger drive?

Accepted Answer

You should have no problem cloning your old drive to this one. It may take a few weeks for the full effects of the hybrid drive to show, but thats more of a general heads up on this style of drive.

Question 10

Hi I'm wondering if this drive will identify mac osx swap files as frequently used so as tp speed up page-in/outs on a computer which is only capable of having a small amount of ram?

Accepted Answer

Hi CH!,

Ok I'll give your question my best shot. The Hybrid drive I purchased did what it was described it can do. Boot-up is under 9 secs. As you use it more and more it actually remembers the goto pages or files, and does bring them up quicker. Now the bad news for ya. If you have very limited ram in your computer I don't know if this hd will help you. Here's the thing. The computer is basically information in and information out. as it is coming into the computer, it is getting stored for a short time (ram) then the motherboard sorts it out, and then stores it to the hard drive.  Ok that being said, if you don't have much ram then the info coming in is getting hung-up before it goes into the hd. I'm assuming you computer is hanging up? Or it freezes until the bottleneck is cleared. Remember your hd is only a storage place. My suggestion is to increase your ram if you can first, then if you need more storage then yes get this hd, because its lightening fast compared to the standard hd. Thanks for asking!

Questions & Answers