Seagate 1TB 5400RPM Solid State Hybrid Drive Benchmarks

Are Solid State Hybrid Drive's Worth Their Price for Laptops?

Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives are extremely fast but are still quite expensive per GB of memory. A 120GB Solid State Drive is about $1.00 per 1 GB of memory while a 2.5 1TB Hard Drive is about $1.00 per 12 GB's of memory.

Solid State Hybrid Drives
Solid State Hybrid Drives are a compromise between price and speed. They are a cheap way to increase your computer's load times for a modest price. A 2.5 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive goes for about $1.00 per 8 GB's of memory. The benchmarks are similar to that of normal hard drive, but the magic happens when you start using the device. Solid State Hybrid Drives remember your most accessed files and  programs, loading them faster and faster each time. 





I did some bench marking on my Seagate 1TB 5400 RPM Solid State Hybrid Drive with HD Tune and the first test reveals that the transfer rate is similar to that of a normal laptop hard drive. No surprise there since these kind of drives only speed up your your access times. 

First Test

Second Test

In the second test you can see that access times are drastically reduced to that of a SSD. You can expect access times to decrease each time you use your drive as it remember's your most used files.

Seagate 1TB 5400RPM Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6Gbps 64MB Cache 2.5" benchmarks

From these benchmarks you can see that benchmarking doesn't give you accurate results since they don't take into account the "solid state" part of hybrid drives. You can expect faster loading times and normal write speed but you wont be able to test them through benchmarking.