SSHD’s provide affordable choice for those who are looking for extreme performance and trusted storage solution. This drives has an active 8GB Nand Flash chips that take care about your regular applications. And the left part consist of hardware architecture. When it comes to data reliability SSHD’s are more trusted over regular drive. The reason lies with movable parts. SSHD’s has flash chips which are durable, long lasting and faster. Regular drive runs on platter and the speed is managed through rpm. The higher it is the faster data will be. Moving parts makes this drives high on power usage and there is more risk of damage. Head crash, media failure, etc; are common things that might be faced by many of us. This does not mean people will stop using regular drives. They are cheaper compared to SSHDs. To give people better performance and reliable solution, manufacturers’ came up with SSHD. A hybrid hard drive that takes care about both things. Storage space is powered by the regular platters, but performance is controlled by high speed controller and further supported by 8GB Nand Flash chips. Most of the SSHD’s come with similar hardware config. We are going to test today Seagate's Desktop SSHD 2TB. This hard drive promises two things. First a high storage solution. 2TB space is quite high where you can store many things. And second a fast controller to boost application behaviors. This drive costs around Rs.10,500 on online shops. It is affordable and a bit reliable due to hybrid solution. 3.5mm thick design makes the drive usage limited to server or desktop pc only. I recommend the drive for those who want their own portable file server. Before moving ahead you can check out the features and specs below.
Features:
- The first solid state hybrid drive (SSHD) in a 3.5-inch form factor
- Boots up and performs like an SSD1
- SATA 6Gb/s with NCQ for interface speed
- Faster than a traditional HDD1
- All-in-one design for simplicity and ease of installation
- Installs and operates like a standard hard drive: cross-platform, no drivers or additional software required
- Massive 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities combined with SSD-like performance
- Backed by a 3-year limited warranty
Specification:
- Interface – SATA 6Gb/s NCQ
- NAND Type/Size – MLC/8GB
- DRAM Cache (MB) – 64
- SATA Transfer Rates Supported (Gb/s) – 6.0/3.0/1.5
- Seek Average, Read (ms) – <9.5
- Seek Average, Write (ms) – <9.5
- Average Data Rate, Read, Avg All Zones (MB/s) – 156
- Average Data Rate From NAND Media (MB/s) – 190
- Max Sustained Data Rate, OD Read (MB/s) – 210
- Heads/Discs – 4/2
- Bytes per Sector – 4,096
- Load/Unload Cycles – 300,000
- Non-recoverable Read Errors per Bits Read, Max – 1 per 1014
- Annualised Failure Rate (AFR) – <1%
- Operating, Typical – 6.7
- Idle2, Typical – 4.5
- Standby Mode – 0.75
- Sleep Mode – 0.75
- Operating Temperature – 0 to 60
- Non-operating Temperature – −40 to 70
Design:
Seagate's Desktop SSHD 2TB is a 3.5mm thick drive with storage capacity of 2TB. The series offers you upto 4TB space. It features SATA 6GB/s interface offering high speed data transfer speed. The drive has nothing special in the design. You can see those in the images. A standard sticker on the front with all relative information about the drive. The top part features a shiny finish and thick black plastic enclosure at the bottom side.
Being a thick drive you cannot use it in mini-ATX case. There will be no room for other drives. But it is ideal for Micro and Full ATX towers. A single drive like this can handle all day to day operations. This drive can be an affordable treat for gaming pc also. From side you can see in the images, it is quite thick and also heavy weight. Mounting holes are available to fix it on different mounting panels. The drive is ideal for Desktop PC, Workstations and DAS devices.
Performance:
The prime object of SSHD drive is offering a budget friendly solution for all. It not only gives a very high storage space but somehow boost the system output also. It is possible in coming time much regular hard drive will be replaced with SSHD. They are typically designed for desktop pc. Due to their massive capacity it acts like an ideal source to save everything. Seagate offers you upto 4TB storage space with performance like SSHD. You can expect a fast responsive system through this upgrade. Expecting too much is not good. The drives are still limited in output on the basis of old drive architecture. The drive is accompanied with high speed NAND flash chips. Seagate Adaptive Memory keeps a track of what application or data you are using frequently. The data or application reference is stored in the drive. So the next time when you double click on software or access any data this will be much faster.
All this things are done through Caching. Seagate's Desktop SSHD comes in 5900 & 7200 RPM. Along with NAND chip there are certain additional things that make this drive a bit reliable. Like the one which I had mentioned above – Seagate Adaptive Memory Technology. This technology allows your program and data to load much faster. The drive also features three amazing technology that makes it more reliable. They are Seagate OptiCache, Seagate AcuTrac servo & Seagate SmartAlign. Seagate OptiCache makes drive 45% faster compared to its old series. DDR2 RAM on it makes it faster and a full 64GB RAM Cache boost the output. Seagate AcuTrac servo deals with hardware tracking. It makes the drive reliable under extreme usage and also offers advance performance monitoring. SmartAlign is actually the firmware of Seagate's Desktop SSHD 2TB hard drive. This thing takes care about partition mis-alignment. This avoids major impact on the drive performance. This technology works internally and is not relied on the host operating system. The drives are capable of giving around 150mb/s of read and write speed at constant rate. The speed can fluctuate depending on the OS and data size. If the same is hooked with 32GB ReadyCache SSD, then this drive can give extreme performance.
Test System:
- CPU Cabinet – Corsair Graphite 600T Cabinet
- Processor – Intel Core i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz (LGA 1155)
- RAM – 4GB Kingston HyperX Blu RAM (2×2) 667Mhz
- Motherboard – Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH-CF
- Graphic Card – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST 2GB
- Hard Drive – Western Digital 3TB + WD 160GB Internal Hard Drive
- Antec Neo ECO 620C Power Supply
Conclusion:
Equipped with the SATA III 6Gb/s for quick transfer of your data and 64 MB cache dedicated to writing this Seagate 1TB Desktop SSHD also features Adaptive Memory technology to launch your applications in a snap. This technology is to identify and select the most frequently used programs and difficult to access, and then copy them to the flash memory. And for a quick start of your system, hybrid hard drive also uses the FAST Factor technology. With this hybrid hard drive Seagate 1TB Desktop SSHD (ST1000DX001) with a capacity of 1000 GB quickly and easily increase the performance of your PC or your desktop. The cost of this hard drive is Rs.10,500.
Pros:
- Ideal for Backup
- Seagate Technologies make it reliable
- High Storage Space
Cons:
- Bit slow on heavy usage due to limited cache
