Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drives

Solid state drives are rapidly outpacing hard disk drives in performance. This has resulted in a bevy of new storage technologies, from the use of Flash Cache Modules (FCM) in laptops, the Western Digital Black² Dual Drive concept, and of course, solid state hybrid drives, to capitalise on solid state memory's significant performance advantages while providing the storage capacity of hard disk drives.

Seagate has been the foremost proponent of the SSHD - the solid state hybrid drive. It's basically the integration of a regular hard disk drive with a solid state cache. This allows them to significantly improve the performance of their hard disk drives with just a small bump in the price tag.

Seagate considers the SSHD to be superior to the Flash Cache Module (FCM) because of potential data integrity issues during power or device failures, and superior to the Dual-Drive concept because of cost reasons. That's why they are not just offering this technology in their laptop HDDs, they are also offering it in their desktop HDDs.

Today, we are going to take a look at their top SSHD model for the laptop market - the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD (ST1000UM000). Check out its key features :

• Boots and performs like an SSD

• Capacities up to 1 TB

• All-in-one design for simplicity and ease of installation

• Installs and works just like a traditional hard drive in any laptop, PC, Mac or
  game console, and with any OS and application

• SATA 6Gb/s with NCQ for interface speed

• Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) versions available to maximize data protection and
  minimize the risk of confidential information breaches

• Backed by a 3-year limited warranty

Of course, the main concern that users generally have is whether the 8 GB solid state cache is sufficient for the job. That's where Seagate's Adaptive Memory Technology comes in. Seagate claims it's more than enough because "most computer workloads rely on a relatively small amount of the total data stored to achieve performance". Well, we will put it to the test when we compare it to a regular hard disk drive. Let's see how much faster the SSHD is over the HDD.

Specification Comparison

Packaging

The Seagate Laptop SSHD came in a small cardboard box with foam padding. In the cutout is a sealed anti-static plastic pouch containing the SSHD.

All you need to do is just cut open the plastic pouch and slide out the drive. Be sure to ground yourself before removing and handling the hard disk drive as static can damage it. In particular, you should try to avoid touching the exposed PCB located at the base of the drive.

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