Legit Reviews

Seagate 500GB SSHD Thin Hybrid Drive Review

Hard drives with solid state cache storage, also known as hybrid drives, have been around for awhile. They are popular with laptop users but until now, those that have equipment designed to work only with 7mm high drives have been out of luck. Seagate's latest SSHD has been redesigned to a smaller, 7mm form factor as well as improved performance. See how it compares to the previous generation Momentus XT drive.





Article Title: Seagate 500GB SSHD Thin Hybrid Drive Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2160/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $83.71 Shipped

Since they first appeared, I've never cared for the hybrids. Their performance is about the same as non-hybrid HDD's and HDD's I only use for storage. With all the laptops in my family, the first thing I did was throw out the HDD and replace it with an SSD. for a little more than this hybrid, you can get a nice 128GB SSD and if you want more sytorage, just get an external drive, or get a docking station and 2GB+ HDD and off you go! I even prefer, to get a 60GB SSD in a laptop, than 1TB HDD. Hybrids? No thanks - just a gimmick in my opinion. BTW, I just bought a 1TB HDD for storage, that has over 200Mb/s read/write speed for $15 more than this hybrid. I will take that any time over this, even though it is bigger and heavier (3.5"). Other than that, it was a nice review. Proved again, how useless are the hybrid drives, to all those, who were not sure

The situation where they make the most sense is on a laptop that's limited to 1 drive and the user needs 500GB+ of space because of all their media files, apps, etc. Very few can afford to shell out for a 480GB SSD. As I mention in the article, if they bump the spindle speed and up the NAND on board, it could be a better drive although it would draw more power. Given the choice between the 2, I'd bump the SSD capacity on the drive to cache more stuff.