Review of Seagate 2TB Hybrid SSHD Hard Drive

The SSHD is short for Solid State Hybrid Disk. It is a hybrid disk which combines the traditional HDD and the SSD. It is known that the HDD offers a large capacity e.g. 2TB, 4TB even 10TB at a cheap price e.g. usually less a dollar per GB.

The traditional HDDs have evolved that they are reliable. However, the mechanical limit on HDD is 7200 RPM (Revolutions/Rotations per minute). On performance-critical scenarios, the HDD may seem a performance bottleneck. In this case, the SSD offer a much faster read/write access. The SSD, however, is expensive. The 2TB pure SSD costs more than 500 dollars.

I have recently purchased a 2TB SSHD from Seagate, to replace the previous old 2TB HHD from Hitachi hard drive (7200 RPM and 32MB Cache). Below is the purchase link from Amazon.

Packaging Choices

The Amazon offers the OEM package at a cheaper price i.e. the SSHD comes sealed with a amazon box while the SSHD style means that the SSHD is fully branded. Both versions have no differences in terms of quality. The warranty for OEM is 3 years.

seagate-2tb-sshd

The full specification for this SSHD is: 2TB, 8GB Nano SSD, 7200 RPM and 64MB Cache.

How to Check if HDD/SSD/SSHD is Brand New?

You could use the software CrystalInfo to view the Power-Count and Power-On-Hour of the new disk.

crystaldiskinfo – 2TB Seagate SSHD

How to Benchmark 2TB SSHD?

Open a Windows Command Prompt as Administrator, and Run the command:

1

winsat disk -drive C

winsat disk -drive C

Assume, the 2TB SSHD is installed at C drive.

harddrive-test-seagate-2tb-sshd

The Disk Sequential Read/Write for 2TB Seagate SSHD is 161 and 220 MB/s respectively. Using another software i.e. CrystalMark, we obtain the following performance statistics.

crystaldiskmark-seagate-2tb-sshd

The 2TB SSHD is a 2TB HDD with a 8GB Nano SSD (Super Cache). However, it is not possible to decide which files go to the 8GB Super Cache. Internally, the 2TB SSHD decides what files to cache. So it might take a few days for SSHD to pick up speed, e.g. System boots faster than HDD but slower than a pure SSD.

The 2TB SSHD is affordable at the price of Traditional HDD and you will benefit from the speed of SSD although only 8GB Nano SSD, which is used to speed up frequently-used applications. So, if you only use it for data storage (instead of System C Drive), you will not benefit much from the 8GB Cache.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —