Seagate SSHD 1TB Hard Disk [Review + Benchmark]


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bhvm

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Dear all,
I am pleased to bring you, The Honest, Most detailed and Practical review of Seagate 1TB LAPTOP SSHD.

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The Prologue-

One fine morning, I wake up to discover that my Primary Desktop computer was dead. All said and done, I had made my mind that this time, my primary computer will be a Laptop, and that did happen. Excitement aside, Moving to laptop also had a few let-downs, and the major one was HDD performance. My desktop PC had some very nice Black edition Drives in RAID 0. As a result, I was able to get SUBSTAINED File copy speeds of 250MB/s and Burst speeds of over 400MB/s. Moving to Laptop's Non-RAID , slow Storage made me feel very claustrophobic.

The buy-

I had an eye on Seagate's new Hybrid Disks since long. I have spent better part of my Sundays reading reviews and browsing the forums about this revolutionary product. However the earlier models were just 500GB (Seagate Momentus XT) and price was hard to digest. After a few months, Snapdeal offered me to buy the 1TB SSHD model for just a shade over 8k. I booked it immediately and the product was delivered within 3 days. Mind you, seagate did not send the retail package with retail BOX and manual, But an OEM product in Antistatic Bag , Brown cardboard and some bubble wrap. Perhaps the reason it was so cheap.

Install- (windows 7 Ultimate 64)

I was of thought that i'd restore my System image and be Happy within 20 Minutes. Wrong. After burning the Midnight oil and many failed installs, I figured out that Seagate SSHD is not friendly to Clone or Image installs. Take my word for it. You WILL need a fresh install for it to work, and Internet if full of such episodes.

Performance-

So here's what you people were waiting for. I Started copying my well over 800GB of DATA. I started in the Morning at 7.30 and the copy had suceeded by night 9pm. Quite longer than I had expected but system was rock stable. The copy was from SONY 1TB USB 3 HDD which gave speeds of around 45~65 MB/s. The Maximum Temperature I had seen was 46.c after a full days of Excersize. Perhaps the performance will open up after the Drive LEARNS usage patterns and caches them. And soon enough, its true after a couple of Restarts, the system boots to desktop in 22 sec. Regular programs like Opera Browser, Messenger, Open office, Desktop widgets, system monitor pop up in a blink. I am finally getting the pleasure of High end RAID array on a laptop. However, the substained speeds and long file transfers still remain a dream.

Benchmarks-

I have attatched ATTO disk mark screenshots for you. At first I was astonished to see bursts of 450MB/s. As result I ran the benchmark 3~5 times, but the results were consistent. I guess that the SSHD uses pretty high quality NAND cache with Read speeds over 400MB/s. A pat to Seagate on this one.

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Summary-
What I liked- System Boots in 22.sec
Regular Programs Pop out in no time
Cool operation compared to previous Gen Momentus XT 7200 RPM
Less power consumption and decent battery life.
Very snappy system FEEL

What I didn't like- Non cached Transfers fall back to usual 70~90 MB/s of traditional laptop HDD
Spindle speeds of only 5400 RPM opposed to Previous Gen 7200 RPM.
Quite Expensive in India compared to USA and Europe.
OEM product available compared to Retail BOX as advertised by Seagate.

Should you buy one? HELL YEAH!

Links-
Samsung NP355E5x [Honest Review, OC] (AMD APU Vision E1 1.4Ghz, AMD 7310, 2GB DDR3, 500GB)
 
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