Seagate Desktop 3.5″ 4TB Solid State Hybrid Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Hybrid drives are still rather uncommon in the marketplace when marked against standard HDDs and the SSD divisions. That said though, they offer up a highly respectable price point, with only a slight premium over a straight forward hard drive. With a remarkable low price of around 5 Cents or 4 pence per GB of space, US retailers Amazon, Newegg and TigerDirect have the 4TB model on sale for $204.99, $217.99 and $214,18 respectively and a SSHD kit, which over a drive only price offers cables, screws and a manual for fitting, can be found for around $3-4 more. In the UK Amazon, Scan and Overclockers offer prices of £136.99, £143.28 and £149.99 respectively, once again with a package including a fitting kit available for around £5 extra.

Overview

As I’ve spoken about previously when I looked at OCZ’s and Western Digital’s hybrid products, the benefit that is on offer my moving up from a straight forward SSD is quite notable, especially when you’re on a fairly tight budget and want a boost in speed, but also a large area of storage to work with. Over the two previous drives that I’ve looked at, Seagate’s 3.5″ SSHD offers up a number of advantages, to most notable of these being the 4TB capacity. As we are moving towards a technologically driven work where digital media is more of a common place in the home, the era where 500GB, 750GB and even 1TB drives are used the most is diminishing and systems with a minimum of 1-2TB are starting to crawl in. For the basic home user who is more focussed on storage over speed; especially when office type work is the main use for the system, having a blazing fast SSD is simply going to be overkill to be honest. The small boost that is seen on this drive, may only be slight over a standard hard drive, but it is enough for the home office users needs.

The plug and play setup that Seagate’s drives offer is also a key benefit over other available options, having to install windows to one volume and then having to install some software to get the cache to work is a little time-consuming and should you have a problem with the software, the benefit of the cache area is immediately lost, leaving you with no solid state speed at all. This is simply not an issue with the SSHDs as the cache control is handled directly through the drive, additionally making the drive compatible with virtually every operating system that is available today.

Overall then it is a good thumbs up for Seagate’s desktop solid state hybrid drives. With a notable gain in performance over a standard counterpart and only a slight premium to suit, anyone who is in the market for a new drive [but cannot go down the pure SSD path for one reason or another] no longer has to put up with bog standard hard drive performance. Given the fact that other hybrid options require more setup and also carry a higher price tag, Seagate’s hybrid drives are right at the front of the hybrid pack.

Pros:

• Massive 4TB capacity
• No larger than any other 3.5″ drive
• No setup required – works out of the box
• Benefit of faster boot times over a standard HDD

Cons:

• Only 8GB of solid state cache

“Pure solid state drives may be the best option out there on the market for a fast system all round, but for those who are on a tight budget and want the space to work with, hybrid drives are more suited to the job. With a plug-n-play setup and a whopping 4TB of storage space on offer, Seagate’s Desktop SSHDs are a suitable option to consider, bringing a boost of life to an ageing system is just on of a multitude of uses for this class of drive.”

Thanks to Seagate UK for providing us with this review sample.