1tb 5400rpm 25 Sata Solid State Hybrid Drive Review

What practice the McLaren P1, the Porsche 918, and the Ferrari LaFerrari all accept in mutual? They're limited-edition supercars with price tags well out of accomplish for mere mortals. Also, they're all hybrids. Even in the world of loftier-end exotics, internal combustion engines are beingness paired with electric motors.

Correct now, hybrids seem likely to be the next evolutionary footstep for automobiles. Their electric motors are both efficient and environmentally friendly, while their fuel-based engines provide the road-trip range people have come up to expect. There's a similar parallel in the PC storage manufacture.

Modern SSDs are much faster than traditional hard drives, only fifty-fifty with Moore's Constabulary chipping away at NAND prices, they remain relatively expensive if you lot want loads of storage. SSDs in the 240-256GB range typically price around $200, and they nevertheless don't give yous a lot of space, especially if your media library is going to share the drive with your OS, applications, games, and other data.

While mechanical hard drives can't go along up with the operation of SSDs, their spinning platters can store a lot more data per dollar. Marrying the ii in a hybrid configuration is a no-brainer, and information technology's incredibly easy to do in desktop systems that tin accept multiple drives. Notebooks, however, are a whole other creature. Some laptops permit mechanical drives to ride shotgun alongside mini mSATA SSDs, simply most are limited to a single bulldoze.

Since mid-2010, Seagate's solution for single-drive notebooks has been the Momentus XT, a hybrid that combines flash retention and mechanical platters in one two.5″ chassis. The original model and its second-generation successor have had some appeal, but they've been hampered by read-only wink caches that ignore incoming writes from the host. That limitation has been lifted in Seagate'due south latest hybrids, which tin cache both read and write requests.

The first of this new generation to hit our labs is the Laptop Thin SSHD 500GB. (SSHD stands for solid-country hybrid drive, in case you lot're wondering.) Although painfully generic, the model name gets the point across. This is a laptop bulldoze with a thin form factor and 500GB of storage. And it'southward eminently affordable, with a street price hovering around 80 bucks. Naturally, nosotros had to take a closer look.

Sparse is in

Almost ii.v″ hard drives are 9.5 mm thick, just the Laptop Thin SSHD squeezes its guts inside a seven-mm case. This thinner chassis is a ameliorate fit for the growing field of super-slim notebooks spawned by Intel's ultrabook initiative. It also represents a first for Seagate's hybrids, which have previously been limited to 9.5-mm models.

The 9.5-mm Momentus XT (left) next to its Laptop Sparse sibling (right)

To assist its hybrid diet downwardly to the smaller grade factor, Seagate removed one of the platters. The Thin Laptop SSHD has a single disc with a 500GB chapters. $.25 are packed with an areal density of 705Gb/in², which allows each side of the platter to store 250GB. That bit density is 30% higher than that of the old Momentus XT 750GB, whose dual platters pack 541Gb/in².

An increase in areal density usually leads to better operation for sequential transfers. The more bits per square inch, the more than data passes under the drive caput with each revolution of the platter. On the Laptop Thin SSHD, withal, there is one rather significant catch. The platter spins at only v,400 RPM—25% slower than the Momentus XT's vii,200-RPM spindle speed. This slower rotational speed negates much of the advantage of the increased chip density.

Seagate contends that spindle speed is less of import for hybrid drives, and the benchmark results later on in this review will shed some low-cal on that claim. The firm is certainly confident, because it's committed to stop making vii,200-RPM notebook drives altogether. 5,400-RPM hybrids will replace high-speed drives in Seagate's notebook lineup, assuasive the company to focus development on a single mechanical platform for mobile PCs. That platform will presumably be shared past SSHDs, notebook difficult drives, and external storage products.

We tend to recommend 5,400-RPM drives but when they're existence paired with SSDs, which is essentially what'south happening here. In addition to 500GB of mechanical storage, the Laptop Thin SSHD has 8GB of flash memory. Like in previous Seagate hybrids, the wink is governed by a caching mechanism dubbed Adaptive Memory. This scheme categorizes information based on 2 criteria: how oft it'southward accessed and whether relocating it to the flash volition better functioning. Solid-state storage is orders of magnitude faster than mechanical storage for random accesses, but the two are more than evenly matched when information is accessed sequentially.

Adaptive Memory can run into precisely how information is organized on the disk, a level of insight absent from software-based caching mechanisms like Intel's Smart Response Technology. According to Seagate, this low-level visibility allows its hybrids to make amend decisions virtually what to put in the flash. Because the caching magic works entirely within the drive, the Laptop Sparse SSHD requires no drivers or software. Information technology'll work with any operating system and hardware platform.

Folks familiar with hybrid storage volition note than the Laptop Thin SSHD's 8GB wink cache is relatively small. The NAND footprint hasn't grown since the last Momentus XT, which is a item business concern given the new model's power to cache data for writes in add-on to reads. Product managing director David Burks told united states of america Seagate experimented with different enshroud sizes and found that 8GB was large enough for mass-market workloads. The data access profiles of typical consumer and commercial workloads don't change dramatically, he said.

Seagate hasn't revealed many details on exactly how the write caching mechanism works, but Burks confirmed that data is prioritized in much the same mode that it is for reads. Whether an incoming write can be candy faster by the wink plays a role in determining whether it volition exist buried in that location. We oasis't heard back from Seagate on how much of the wink is reserved for incoming writes and whether the distribution is static or dynamic. Burks did, yet, tell us that the drive has enough onboard capacitance to ensure that the contents of its write cache can be written to the deejay in the event of unexpected power loss.

Hybrid NAND, too

Unlike the final two generations of Momentus XT hybrids, which utilise SLC NAND for their flash caches, the Laptop Thin SSHD is equipped with MLC memory—sort of. Co-ordinate to Samsung'south decoder ring, the NAND on the bulldoze's circuit board is indeed multi-level jail cell memory. However, the Laptop Sparse employs a new flash subsystem with a special "combo mode" that treats part of the flash as SLC and the rest as MLC. Seagate hasn't answered our questions about exactly how this combo mode works, but at that place doesn't appear to exist any customization at the wink level. I suspect Seagate has only elected to write only ane bit per cell for the portion of NAND allocated as SLC memory and two bits per prison cell for the rest.

To empathise the benefits of this approach, it helps to know how $.25 are really stored. Writing to flash retentivity is achieved by causing electrons to migrate into the cell, generating a negative charge that changes the cell'southward threshold voltage. After each write, a control voltage is applied to read the jail cell and verify its contents. If the command voltage is college than the threshold, electric current flows through the cell. If it'southward not, the process is repeated with a college control voltage.

With one flake per jail cell, SLC memory just needs to worry almost whether the jail cell's threshold voltage represents a 0 or 1. The extra bit in MLC NAND allows for values of 00, 01, x, or 11, which means more control voltages need to be applied to read the data in the jail cell (or to verify a successful write). Cycling through those additional voltages takes time, and SLC flash tends to take faster write functioning than MLC every bit a result. SLC memory also offers better endurance than the MLC stuff. Over time, as flash cells are written, electrons slowly build upwardly in the insulator layer, shrinking the voltage range that can be used for programming. SLC has to differentiate betwixt fewer values within that express range, making information technology more tolerant of normal wink wearable.

Seagate doesn't publish an endurance specification for the Laptop Thin SSHD's flash component, but the drive is covered by a three-year warranty. Even for worst-case workloads, Burks says there's a "really high level of habiliment-level margin."

Burks also told the states that the hybrid NAND in the Laptop Thin SSHD is faster than the older SLC memory inside the Momentus XT, although he didn't have specific numbers. The Momentus tin can read data from its flash cache at upwardly to 180MB/s, so the Laptop Thin is faster than that. If 180MB/s seems a lilliputian sluggish, continue in heed that the SSDs pushing into 500MB/southward territory are typically 240-256GB models with as many equally 32 individual NAND dies. The Laptop Thin SSHD's 8GB flash component has only two dies, giving information technology much less parallelism to exploit. (You can read about the effect of SSD capacity on performance in this article.)

The write speed of the last-gen Momentus XT's wink was quoted as 100MB/s, but that was for transfers coming from the mechanical platters. Interestingly, Seagate claims the Laptop Thin's "average data throughput" rate is besides 100MB/s. Due to its combination of a higher areal density and a slower v,400-RPM spindle speed, the new model's mechanical component may be no faster than the quondam one's.

The effective size of the NAND inside the Laptop Thin SSHD may be smaller, likewise. We're talking about an 8GB MLC chip. If some of the NAND is configured as SLC memory, which has half the data density of MLC NAND, the total capacity of the chip must subtract.

We don't know how much of the NAND is treated equally SLC memory, just Burks did tell us this portion of the flash is dedicated to ii purposes. In addition to hosting the write enshroud, the SLC slice houses information associated with the Windows kicking process. This department of the wink is populated automatically and reserved exclusively for boot information. Adaptive Retentiveness's other caching activities won't encroach on its territory.

We'll exam boot operation in a moment. Starting time, I should take a moment to explain where the Laptop Thin SSHD fits into Seagate's next-generation hybrid lineup. The 7-mm Sparse bulldoze is accompanied by a 9.5-mm model dubbed the Laptop SSHD. This standard-sized mobile unit of measurement has dual 500GB platters, doubling the storage capacity of its skinny counterpart. The spindle speed is the same, and and then is the caching component. Performance should exist comparable equally a upshot.

A mobile SSHD with more flash is in the works, only that variant won't come up out until the center of the yr. Instead of relying on Adaptive Memory to manage the cache, this model will work in conjunction with Intel'south Smart Response Engineering. An SRT-uniform platform will exist required, of form.

Seagate is also prepping SSHDs for desktop systems. The commencement iii.5″ models will offer 1TB and 2TB of storage, respectively, and they'll sport 8GB flash caches similar the mobile drives. Those first desktop models volition sport faster 7,200-RPM spindle speeds. A higher-capacity desktop hybrid is as well on the way, merely information technology volition take a slower spindle speed, likely in the five,400-RPM range.

Afterward several years of honing its hybrid technology with the Momentus XT, Seagate is ready to spread SSHDs across multiple platforms. This could exist the beginning of a hybrid revolution.

Lining up the contenders

At the moment, Seagate's SSHDs are without peers outside the firm's own lineup. The fact is that nobody else sells hybrids right at present—at least not ones that fit inside the 2.v″ mobile form factor. We accept assembled a drove of solid-state and mechanical notebook drives to put the Laptop Thin SSHD's functioning into perspective, though. Seagate wasn't able to provide united states of america with the standard Laptop SSHD for testing, so we'll accept to make do with the Thin model for now.

Seagate's older Momentus XT hybrids are as well in the mix, of course. The 500GB model belongs to the beginning generation, and the 750GB variant is its successor. Keep in mind that both XTs have 7,200-RPM spindle speeds.

	Interface	Cache	Spindle speed	Areal density
Seagate Momentus XT 500GB	3Gbps	32MB	7,200 RPM	394 Gb/in²
Seagate Momentus XT 750GB	6Gbps	32MB	7,200 RPM	541 Gb/in²
Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD 500GB	6Gbps	64MB	5,400 RPM	705 GB/in²
WD Caviar Blackness 1TB	6Gbps	64MB	seven,200 RPM	400 Gb/in²
WD Scorpio Blackness 750GB	3Gbps	16MB	7,200 RPM	520 Gb/in²
WD VelociRaptor 1TB	6Gbps	64MB	10,000 RPM	NA

Western Digital's Scorpio Black 750GB represents the purely mechanical notebook field. This drive is devoid of wink memory, only it has a faster spindle speed than the Laptop Thin. Like the Momentus XTs, information technology also has a thicker nine.five-mm chassis.

To provide some broader context, nosotros've also tossed WD's Caviar Blackness 1TB and VelociRaptor 1TB into the band. The former is a 3.5″ desktop model, while the latter is a 10k-RPM monster.

Naturally, these desktop drives aren't direct competition for the Laptop Thin. 2.v″ solid-state drives are more than appropriate rivals, especially since a handful of them are similarly skinny 7-mm cases. Here's the collection nosotros've rounded upwards for comparison:

	Cache	Flash controller	NAND
Corsair Neutron 240GB	256MB	LAMD LM87800	25nm Micron async MLC
Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB	256MB	LAMD LM87800	25nm Intel sync MLC
Crucial m4 256GB	256MB	Marvell 88SS9174	25nm Micron sync MLC
Intel 320 Serial 300GB	64MB	Intel PC929AS21BA0	25nm Intel MLC
Intel 335 Series 240GB	NA	SandForce SF-2281	20nm Intel sync MLC
OCZ Agility four 256GB	512MB	Indilinx Everest ii*	25nm Micron async MLC
OCZ Vector 256GB	512MB	Indilinx Barefoot 3	25nm Intel sync MLC
OCZ Vertex iv 256GB	512MB	Indilinx Everest two*	25nm Micron sync MLC
Samsung 840 Series 250GB	512MB	Samsung MDX	21nm Samsung Toggle TLC
Samsung 840 Pro 256GB	512MB	Samsung MDX	21nm Samsung Toggle MLC

These ten drives pretty much cover the gamut of pop controller and NAND combinations on the market correct now. None of them can match the Laptop Thin's 500GB capacity, a fact that our value analysis will take into account.

Our testing methods

If y'all're already familiar with our storage exam arrangement and methods, now would be a good fourth dimension to skip alee to the performance results. I'll only be offended if you bound straight to the conclusion.

We used the following system configuration for testing:

Processor	Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz
Motherboard	Asus P8P67 Palatial
Bios revision	1850
Platform hub	Intel P67 Limited
Platform drivers	INF update 9.2.0.1030 RST 10.six.0.1022
Memory size	8GB (2 DIMMs)
Retention type	Corsair Vengeance DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
Memory timings	ix-9-9-24-1T
Sound	Realtek ALC892 with ii.62 drivers
Graphics	Asus EAH6670/DIS/1GD5 1GB with Catalyst 11.7 drivers
Hard drives	Corsair Neutron 240GB with M206 firmware Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB with M206 firmware Crucial m4 256GB with 010G firmware Intel 320 Series 300GB with 4PC10362 firmware Intel 335 Series 240GB with 335s firmware OCZ Agility iv 256GB with 1.5.2 firmware OCZ Vector 256GB with 10200000 firmware OCZ Vertex 4 256GB with 1.5 firmware Samsung 840 Serial 250GB with DXT07B0Q firmware Samsung 840 Pro Serial 256GB with DXM04B0Q firmware Seagate Momentus XT 500GB with SD22 firmware Seagate Momentus XT 750GB with SM12 firmware WD Caviar Black 1TB with 05.01D05 firmware WD Scorpio Black 750GB with 01.01A01 firmware WD VelociRaptor 1TB with 04.06A00 firmware Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD 500GB with SM11 firmware
Ability supply	Corsair Professional person Series Gold AX650W
OS	Windows seven Ultimate x64

Thanks to Asus for providing the systems' motherboards and graphics cards, Intel for the CPUs, Corsair for the memory and PSUs, Thermaltake for the CPU coolers, and Western Digital for the Caviar Black 1TB system drives.

We used the post-obit versions of our test applications:

• Intel IOMeter i.one.0 RC1
• HD Tune four.61
• TR DriveBench i.0
• TR DriveBench ii.0
• TR FileBench 0.2
• Qt SDK 2010.05
• MiniGW GCC 4.four.0
• Duke Nukem Forever
• Portal 2

Some farther notes on our exam methods:

• To ensure consistent and repeatable results, the SSDs were secure-erased earlier almost every component of our test suite. Some of our tests so put the SSDs into a used country before the workload begins, which better exposes each bulldoze's long-term performance characteristics. In other tests, like DriveBench and FileBench, nosotros induce a used state before testing. In all cases, the SSDs were in the same state earlier each examination, ensuring an even playing field. The performance of mechanical hard drives is much more consistent between factory fresh and used states, so nosotros skipped wiping the HDDs before each test—mechanical drives have forever to secure erase.
• Nosotros run all our tests at least three times and report the median of the results. We've found IOMeter operation tin can fall off with SSDs subsequently the first couple of runs, and then we use five runs for solid-state drives and throw out the starting time two.
• Steps have been taken to ensure that Sandy Span's ability-saving features don't taint any of our results. All of the CPU's depression-ability states take been disabled, effectively pegging the 2500K at 3.3GHz. Transitioning in and out of different power states tin affect the functioning of storage benchmarks, especially when dealing with short burst transfers.

The exam systems' Windows desktop was ready at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Most of the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If y'all have questions almost our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Hd Tune — Transfer rates

We'll kick off the festivities with Hd Tune, which lets u.s.a. take a closer look at sequential transfer rates and random admission times. The results in the graphs accept been color-coded for easy reading, with the Laptop Thin SSHD appearing in a different shade of dark-green than the other Seagate drives. To keep the bar charts from turning into multi-colored rainbows, we've dressed all the solid-state drives in gray.

The SSDs have besides been omitted from the line graphs below. They take much higher transfer rates than the mechanical drives, which throws off the scale and makes things harder to read.

Our average read speed results bear witness a stark contrast between mechanical and solid-state storage. The hybrids are in the same league every bit the mechanical drives, likely because this test is entirely sequential in nature. The Laptop Thin SSHD is actually 2MB/southward slower than its Momentus XT 750GB predecessor here.

Check out the difference in transfer rate profiles highlighted past the line graph. Like virtually all of the other drives, the Laptop Thin SSHD exhibits a irksome decline in transfer rates equally the test progresses through the deejay. Even so, at that place's an odd jump in performance at about the 97% marker. A similar blip is visible in the write speed results.

If we focus on the boilerplate speed across the unabridged disk, the Laptop Thin SSHD again finds itself well behind the solid-land drives only competitive with the old Momentus XT 750GB. It doesn't look like the Laptop Thin's write-caching capability is being exploited past this exam.

HD Melody's burst speed test targets a different sort of drive cache: the DRAM retention commonly found on mechanical drives, hybrids, and even SSDs. This DRAM cache weighs in at 64MB on the Laptop Thin SSHD, which is double what you go on either Momentus XT.

Solid-state drives don't ever fare well in this examination, perhaps because they can utilize their caches differently than mechanical drives. The Laptop Sparse doesn't look and then hot either; its burst speeds are faster than those of the kickoff-generation Momentus XT simply much slower than those of the second-gen model.

Hard disk drive Tune — Random admission times

HD Tune lets the states test random access time using dissimilar transfer sizes. We've shown all of the results in a pair of line graphs. To become a better look at the numbers, nosotros've also busted out separate graphs for a couple of the transfer sizes.

The line graph nicely illustrates the Seagate hybrids flirting with the access times of the solid-state drives, at least with 512-byte and 4KB random reads. However, the Laptop Thin SSHD has a much higher access time than both Momentus XTs in the 64KB test. The new hybrid'south access times are withal lower than those of the mechanical models, at least until we get to the 1MB transfer size.

In the 1MB exam, the hybrids appear to exist serving read requests entirely from mechanical storage. Their random access times are substantially higher; in fact, they're comparable to those of the Scorpio Black. Note that the Laptop Thin SSHD is a couple of milliseconds backside the WD notebook drive, which sits a millisecond shy of the Momentus XT 750GB.

Here, we run across the first benefit of the Laptop Thin SSHD'south write caching capability. Dissimilar the Momentus XTs, whose random write access times resemble those of mechanical drives, the Laptop Thin hangs much closer to SSD territory. I'k not sure why a few of the drives have unusually high access times in the 512-byte exam, though. I suspect those results accept something to do with 512-byte emulation on drives with native 4KB sectors.

Taking a closer look at the 4KB random write results reveals that the Laptop Thin SSHD is still an order of magnitude slower than the solid-state drives. Of course, it also beats the fastest Momentus XT by an guild of magnitude. The Laptop Thin has an edge over the Momentus drives in the 1MB test, likewise. The advantage there is about six milliseconds, which works out to a 28% delta.

TR FileBench — Existent-world copy speeds

Concocted past resident developer Bruno "morphine" Ferreira, FileBench runs through a series of file copy operations using Windows vii'south xcopy control. Using xcopy produces nigh identical copy speeds to dragging and dropping files using the Windows GUI, so our results should be representative of typical real-earth performance. We tested using the following five file sets—note the differences in average file sizes and their compressibility. We evaluated the compressibility of each file gear up past comparing its size before and after being run through 7-Goose egg's "ultra" pinch scheme.

	Number of files	Average file size	Full size	Compressibility
Movie	6	701MB	4.1GB	0.v%
RAW	101	23.6MB	two.32GB	3.2%
MP3	549	six.48MB	3.47GB	0.5%
TR	26,767	64.6KB	1.7GB	53%
Mozilla	22,696	39.4KB	923MB	91%

The names of near of the file sets are self-explanatory. The Mozilla set is made up of all the files necessary to compile the browser, while the TR set includes years worth of the images, HTML files, and spreadsheets behind my reviews. Those two sets incorporate much larger numbers of smaller files than the other three. They're also the near amenable to compression.

The SSDs were tested in a faux used state that should be representative of their long-term performance. We didn't simulate a used land with the mechanical drives or hybrids, which tend to offer consistent performance regardless of whether nosotros've run our used-state torture exam.

These unmarried-threaded copy tests are entirely sequential in nature, then I wouldn't look the Laptop Thin SSHD'south wink component to have much impact on functioning. Depending on the file set, the Laptop Thin is either a fiddling bit faster or a little bit slower than the newest Momentus XT. That'southward not a bad event, since the Scorpio Blackness is slower across the board. However, the hybrids have a long way to go earlier they tin match the copy speeds of the solid-state drives. The SSDs' performance advantage is peculiarly pronounced with the larger files in the movie, RAW, and MP3 sets.

TR DriveBench ane.0 — Disk-intensive multitasking

TR DriveBench allows us to record the individual IO requests associated with a Windows session and and then play those results back equally fast every bit possible on different drives. Nosotros've used this app to create a set of multitasking workloads that combine common desktop tasks with disk-intensive groundwork operations similar compiling lawmaking, copying files, downloading via BitTorrent, transcoding video, and scanning for viruses. The private workloads are explained in more detail hither.

Below, you'll find an overall average followed by scores for each of our private workloads. The overall score is an average of the mean operation score for each multitasking workload.

Uh oh. In our showtime wave of trace-based tests, the Laptop Thin SSHD scores lower than not only the last Momentus XT hybrid, but also the first-generation model from 2010. The Laptop Thin does manage to beat out the Scorpio Blackness, though. Allow'due south examine the individual test results to see what we tin can acquire.

The Laptop Thin SSHD actually performs better than its predecessor in our multitasking-infused compiling workload, but information technology crunches fewer IOps with the file re-create workload and is perilously close to concluding place with the virus-scanning workload. Autonomously from those two hiccups, the Laptop Thin at to the lowest degree outperforms the Scorpio Black.

As one might expect with real-world workloads laced with random I/O, the SSDs boss the field. None of the mechanical drives or hybrids comes close.

TR DriveBench 2.0 — More disk-intensive multitasking

As much as we like DriveBench 1.0's individual workloads, the traces cover just slices of deejay activity. Because we fire the recorded I/Os at the disks as fast as possible, solid-state drives also take no reanimation during which to engage background garbage collection or other optimization algorithms. DriveBench 2.0 addresses both of those issues with a much larger trace that spans two weeks of typical desktop activity peppered with multitasking loads similar to those in DriveBench 1.0. Nosotros've also adjusted our testing methods to give solid-state drives enough idle fourth dimension to tidy up later on themselves. More details on DriveBench ii.0 are bachelor on this folio of our terminal major SSD round-upwards.

Instead of looking at a raw IOps charge per unit, we're going to switch gears and explore service times—the amount of fourth dimension information technology takes drives to complete an I/O request. Nosotros'll starting time with an overall mean service fourth dimension earlier slicing and dicing the results.

Well, that's not a good sign. The Laptop Thin SSHD's mean service fourth dimension is nearly lxx% slower than that of the Momentus XT 750GB. That puts the new model in the same ballpark every bit Seagate's first-generation hybrid and the purely mechanical Scorpio Blackness notebook bulldoze.

Nosotros can learn a little more about what's going on in DriveBench past splitting the mean service time between read and write requests, which should yield interesting results given the Laptop Sparse's ability to enshroud both.

So, yep, that's interesting—merely not in a good way. Despite its ability to cache host writes, the Laptop Thin has a college mean write service fourth dimension than whatever of the drives nosotros've tested, including the mechanical models. The Momentus XT's mean write service time is just over one-half that of the Laptop Thin.

Surprisingly, the new hybrid is more competitive when we await at read service times, where information technology'south a footling more responsive than the Scorpio Blackness and the first-gen Momentus.

There are millions of I/O requests in this trace, so we can't easily graph service times to look at the variance. However, our assay tools exercise report the standard deviation, which can give us a sense of how much service times vary from the mean.

While the Laptop Thin SSHD'southward response-time variance isn't high enough with reads to fix off alarm bells, writes are another matter. The bulldoze's standard deviation for write service times is more than double that of the Momentus XT 750GB. Higher degrees of variance aren't necessarily a problem if response times are sufficiently low, but that's clearly not the case for the Laptop Sparse.

We can also sort DriveBench 2.0 service times to get a better sense of how they're distributed. The graphs beneath plot the percent of service times that fall below diverse thresholds. You can click the buttons below the graphs to see how the Laptop Thin SSHD compares to various competitors.

Versus its Momentus XT predecessor, the Laptop Thin SSHD has a lower percentage of read service times at each threshold on our scale. The tables turn when we consider write service times, which show an advantage for the Laptop Thin across much of the range. That advantage doesn't exist when nosotros compare to the WD Scorpio Black, though.

Equally you can meet, the majority of service times for all the drives fall below one millisecond. That threshold is much lower than the Laptop Sparse SSHD's mean service times for both reads and writes. Information technology looks like the Laptop Thin's average is being pulled up by longer service times, some of which are tracked by our "beyond 100 ms" graphs below. These charts quantify the percentage of requests that have longer than 100 milliseconds to procedure.

The Laptop Thin SSHD doesn't look so bad in the read department. Writes are some other story, withal. Nearly 1.ane% of DriveBench two.0 write requests took 100 milliseconds or longer on the Laptop Thin, which is well-nigh four times equally many as the adjacent-closest drive.

IOMeter

Our IOMeter workloads feature a ramping number of concurrent I/O requests. Most desktop systems will only have a few requests in flight at whatsoever given fourth dimension (87% of DriveBench 2.0 requests take a queue depth of four or less). Nosotros've extended our scaling up to 32 concurrent requests to reach the depth of the Native Command Queuing pipeline associated with the Serial ATA specification. Ramping up the number of requests as well gives us a sense of how the drives might perform in more demanding enterprise environments.

The SSDs are so much faster than the difficult drives and hybrids in these tests that we've had to go out them off the graphs entirely. Scaling the Y axis to deal with tens of thousands of IOps makes the mechanical results impossible to read. You tin can run across how the solid-country drives compare on this page of our Samsung 840 Pro Series review.

The web server access pattern is comprised exclusively of read requests, and the Laptop Sparse SSHD struggles with information technology. Seagate's new hybrid hotness has lower IOps rates than not just the Momentus XT 750GB, only also the Scorpio Blackness. At to the lowest degree its performance doesn't flat-line as the number of concurrent I/O requests increases, though. That behavior is unique to the offset-gen Momentus XT.

Our other IOMeter workloads combine read and write requests. However, the Laptop Sparse SSHD's write-friendly cache appears to exist of no help. The Laptop Thin again finds itself between the last two generations of Momentus XT hybrids and behind the Scorpio Black.

Kick duration

Before timing a couple of real-earth applications, we outset take to load the OS. Nosotros can measure how long that takes by checking the Windows seven boot elapsing using the operating arrangement'due south performance-monitoring tools. This is actually the commencement test in which we're booting Windows off each bulldoze; upwardly until this point, our testing has been hosted by an OS housed on a carve up organization bulldoze.

Our timing tests are run at to the lowest degree three times, and functioning is consistent from one run to the adjacent on both mechanical drives and SSDs. Hybrids tend to speed up through the first few runs, then nosotros accept our median effect from v runs rather than three.

The Laptop Thin SSHD proves its mettle in our Windows kicking test, where it manages to crush the Momentus XT 750GB by half a second. Equally expected, the bulldoze'due south boot time decreased over the first three runs and stabilized after that; the Laptop Thin took nearly 17 seconds to load the Bone on its commencement try.

Note that the Laptop Thin isn't much slower than the solid-land drives in this test. Its boot time is less than two seconds shy of the fastest SSD and only 0.3 seconds behind the closest competition. The purely mechanical drives are much slower. The Scorpio Black takes nearly twice as long to kick the Bone, and fifty-fifty the 10k-RPM VelociRaptor is a couple of seconds behind the fastest hybrids.

Level load times

Score 2 more victories for the Laptop Thin. If you ignore the VelociRaptor, the Laptop Thin SSHD loads our game levels faster than anything curt of a total-on SSD. The hybrid has nearly a ane-second edge over the Momentus XT 750GB in Duke Nukem Forever and a wider 3-second gap over its predecessor in Portal 2. The SSDs are only a few seconds faster, and the Scorpio Black is substantially slower.

Again, the Laptop Sparse took a few runs to get up to full speed. Loading our Duke Nukem save took 18 seconds on the first try, and Portal ii took 22 seconds. Do the math, and y'all're looking at caching-related gains in the 30-45% range.

Noise levels

We're a little OCD here at TR, so we've constructed a Box 'o Silence to test the noise emitted by mechanical hard drives. This eighteen″ x xx″ anechoic bedchamber is lined with audio-visual foam, and we suspend hard drives inside information technology, exactly 4″ away from the tip of our TES-52 digital audio level meter. You lot tin can read more about the setup here.

To ensure the lowest possible ambient noise levels, we swapped the exam system'southward graphics bill of fare for a passively-cooled Gigabyte model and unplugged one of the Frio CPU cooler'south dual fans. Racket levels were measured after one minute of idling at the Windows desktop and during an HD Tune seek test.

Although the Laptop Sparse SSHD'due south 5,400-RPM rotational speed is less than ideal for performance, information technology's groovy for noise levels. The Laptop Thin is several decibels quieter than any other drive we've tested. Single-platter models tend to be quieter than their multi-disc counterparts, and so I'm curious to see how the dual-platter Laptop SSHD fares in the Box 'o Silence. I doubtable information technology would also be quieter than the final Momentus XT.

Power consumption

We tested ability consumption nether load with IOMeter's workstation access pattern chewing through 32 concurrent I/O requests. Idle power consumption was probed one infinitesimal after processing Windows 7'due south idle tasks on an empty desktop.

Surprisingly, the Laptop Sparse SSHD consumes more than power at idle than its Momentus XT kin, which have more platters and higher spindle speeds. Perchance Seagate has inverse how quickly the drive slips into a low-power state. After all, the Laptop Sparse does have lower power depict than the other hybrids in our load test.

The value perspective

Welcome to another one of our famous value analyses, in which we add capacity and pricing to the performance information nosotros've explored over the preceding pages. With the exception of Laptop Sparse SSHD, which is much cheaper (and closer to Seagate'due south suggested retail price) at Amazon, we used Newegg prices for all the SSDs. We didn't take postal service-in rebates into account when performing our calculations.

First, we'll look at the all-of import price per gigabyte, which we've obtained using the amount of storage chapters attainable to users in Windows.

Take that, SSDs. Flash retentiveness may be more affordable than ever, merely solid-state drives are still pretty pricey per gigabyte, at least versus their mechanical and hybrid contest. The Laptop Thin SSHD is slightly cheaper per gig than the other hybrids, but it's not quite as affordable every bit the Scorpio Blackness.

Our remaining value calculation uses a single operation score that we've derived by comparing how each drive stacks up against a common baseline provided by the Momentus 5400.4, a 2.five″ notebook drive with a painfully ho-hum five,400-RPM spindle speed. This index uses a subset of our performance data described on this page of our last SSD round-upwardly.

Ouch. Due to its poor performance in a number of tests, the Laptop Thin SSHD lands at the bottom of our overall performance rankings. According to this metric, the drive is barely faster than the ancient 5,400-RPM model we use for reference. The Momentus XT hybrids practise much better, and so the Laptop Sparse's low score isn't an artifact of its hybrid nature alone.

Now for the existent magic. We can plot this overall score on one axis and each drive's price per gigabyte on the other to create a besprinkle plot of performance per dollar per gigabyte. The best place on the plot is the upper left corner, which combines high operation with a depression price.

None of the drives occupy the platonic region of the plot. With higher performance and prices to friction match, SSDs dominate the upper right corner. The mechanical drives and hybrids are amassed in the lower-left corner, where their lower performance is matched by lower prices. Perhaps more than any other, this chart makes information technology clear that we're dealing with two very different classes of storage.

Even if you ignore the solid-land drives, the Laptop Thin SSHD doesn't look particularly attractive overall. The Scorpio Blackness has a higher overall performance score and a lower cost per gigabyte. The Momentus XTs toll more per gig, but they offering higher overall performance.

Conclusions

From a purely technological standpoint, the Laptop Thin SSHD is an impressive accomplishment. Seagate has stuffed 500GB of mechanical storage and 8GB of flash retentivity into a vii-mm notebook drive that's slim plenty to make a supermodel jealous. The NAND is capable of caching both reads and writes, a first for Seagate'southward hybrids, and its funky SLC/MLC configuration is different annihilation we've seen before.

Oh, and the drive's caching mechanism is completely contained of the host organization. The SSHD volition play nicely with any platform and operating system without the need for special software or drivers. Pretty slick.

Fifty-fifty on paper, though, the Laptop Thin SSHD is a stride down from Seagate's previous hybrids. Its v,400-RPM spindle speed is much slower than the 7,200 RPM of older Momentus XT drives. Seagate says rotational speed matters less for hybrids, and that's true to some degree. Co-ordinate to our test results, the Laptop Thin offers faster Os and application load times than latest Momentus XT. Yet, its sequential transfer rates are slower than the previous model'due south.

To be honest, we didn't expect the Laptop Thin SSHD to eclipse the sequential throughput of its predecessor. Seagate has e'er been up-front well-nigh the fact that Adaptive Memory'due south caching algorithms prioritize random access patterns over sequential streams, and nosotros knew the slower spindle speed would nullify most of the benefits of moving to a higher-density drive platter. Simply nosotros did await the Laptop Thin to have an advantage over the old Momentus in our trace-based DriveBench tests, which hammer the drives with existent-world I/O patterns that should be ripe for write caching. So much for that theory. In simply about every DriveBench metric, the Laptop Thin lags behind its predecessor. The Momentus XT 750GB actually scores quite highly in our DriveBench tests, suggesting that the problem is specific to the Laptop Thin and not to hybrids in general.

At least the new SSHDs are affordable. The Laptop Sparse model's $84 asking price yields a much lower toll per gigabyte than SSDs, and the fatter terabyte version can be nabbed for only $120.

Even at those prices, information technology's tough to requite the Laptop Thin SSHD a strong endorsement for employ in single-drive notebooks. Its load times are wicked-fast, and the random access times indicate that the write cache works, but there are too many red flags elsewhere in our results.

The ix.five-mm Laptop SSHD variant may offer better operation than the Sparse model overall, simply with the same caching scheme and spindle speed, I wouldn't anticipate a large difference between the 2. Until I run into what the standard-sized Laptop SSHD tin can do, I'yard inclined to keep recommending the Momentus XT 750GB to folks with unmarried-drive notebooks who need more than storage than they tin beget to buy in an SSD. At $124 online, the Momentus XT 750GB is a adept value when you consider its all-around functioning and the importance of fast load times.

With Seagate ruling out new vii,200-RPM hybrids for notebooks, the outlook for mobile SSHDs is a tad gloomy. I am, all the same, quite intrigued by the potential of the upcoming desktop variants, which volition combine wink caches with 7,200-RPM mechanical components. Those SSHDs could exist a benefaction to low-end systems that demand lots of storage but don't have the budget for dedicated SSDs.

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Source: https://techreport.com/review/24561/seagates-laptop-thin-sshd-500gb-hybrid-drive-reviewed/

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