Conclusion

The Seagate Laptop Solid State Hybrid Drive represents the next logical evolution of the hard disk drive industry. When it comes to performance, the hard disk drive has already lost the battle to the solid state drive. As they say, if you can't beat them, join them.

Although Western Digital chose to focus on the Dual Drive concept, Seagate chose to adopt the lower-cost SSHD concept. Instead of pairing a full solid state drive together with a hard disk drive, the SSHD concept uses a small solid state cache to provide some of the SSD's performance advantage without breaking the bank.

Of course, the 8 GB flash memory cache used in the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD is not even enough to store Windows, much less your applications. That's where Seagate's Adaptive Memory Technology comes in.

It maximizes the effectiveness of the small solid state cache by not only storing the most frequently used pieces of data, but also filtering out data elements that wil not benefit much from being stored in the cache. The effectiveness of the solid state cache and the Adaptive Memory Technology was proven when we tested the drive.

In the real world test of Business Disk WinMark, the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD was more than 2.5x faster than its HDD competitors, the 1 TB WD Blue Slim (WD10SPCX) and the 1 TB WD Blue (WD10JPVT). Only when it started dealing with data elements that did not benefit from the solid state cache did its performance drop to the same level as its HDD competitors.

Due to its unique performance characteristics, the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD is best used as the boot drive, if you have two hard disk drives in your laptop. You can use it as a secondary storage drive but its solid state cache may not have much effect on performance, especially if you are using the drive to store multimedia files like movies, video clips, audio files, etc.

We have to point out though that the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD consumes quite a bit more power than regular hard disk drives. When compared to the 1 TB WD Blue (WD10JPVT), the SSHD uses more than 2.5x more power during reads and writes, and even worse, almost 3x more power when it sleeps or is on standby. All that extra power it consumes also translates into a higher thermal output.

If you can live with that, the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD is a great upgrade for those who want better performance in a laptop without resorting to an SSD with limited storage capacity, or paying top dollar for the Western Digital Black² Dual Drive. It only costs a little more than a regular 1 TB hard disk drive - just US$ 10 (13.3%) more as of 2014-06-27. So it doesn't make sense to buy a regular hard disk drive when you can enjoy pseudo-SSD performance with the Seagate Laptop SSHD.

Find the lowest current prices on the WD10SPCX on Amazon!

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