Toshiba 2.5-inch 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

With this being an OEM drive, the price is in fluctuation quite a bit. There are a lof of refurbished drives on the market as well as a lot of drives that were plugged and replaced before they’re ever used. Even when we’re picking brand new drives that come with a warranty, it’s worth shopping around. In the U.S. the cheapest offer via the Amazon marketplace was $61.37 inclusive of shipping while NewEgg carries it at a more average price of $89.99. At the time of writing, NewEgg includes a Rosewill aluminium mounting kit worth $12.99 when purchasing this drive, this however is a limited offer.

In the U.K. the price is a bit higher, with the cheapest at Amazon being £66.45. At CCL it can be had for £63.96 while Scan carries it for £64.16. Overclockers UK want a little more and are charging £72.98, and all prices include VAT.

Overview

The Toshiba MQ01ABD100H 2.5-inch 1 TB Solid State Hybrid Drive delivered what it promised over the entire scale. It showed us, in every test, how it can perform better than any traditional 5400 RPM hard drive, yet it doesn’t cost much more then the traditional disk and the extra £10-15 are well spent for the increased performance. While there are faster spinning 2.5-inch drives on the market, it’s not an ideal solution for most laptops. The sound levels will rise to much for most peoples taste and you might end up paying more for them than this little performer.

This could be a great upgrade for any laptop with an included traditional hard drive, especially if you only have one drive slot available. You gain the fast boot times close to those of a SSD while keeping the large storage capacity. This is also a solution that doesn’t blow your wallet the same way a large capacity SSD would. At the same time you save yourself the decision on what applications you would want to have on the small SSD and what to put on the larger HDD.

While the form factor invites to use this drive in a laptop or notebook, there is nothing to hold you back from using it in your stationary PC or console. It will do just as great a job there as it will in the mobile gadgets.

Pros:

• Improved speeds over traditional hard drives
• Price friendly
• Reliable
• Toshiba’s many years of experience in the field

Neutral:

• OEM drive – No accessories

“The Toshiba 2.5-inch 1 TB Hybrid drive shows consistent results through all of the tests and is a worthy upgrade from any traditional hard disk. It will give you great boot times and overall quicker response times without the high costs that a typical SSD demands.”

Thanks to Toshiba for providing us with this review sample