Review of Seagate SSHD ST1000LX001 the high capacity hybrid drive TechRevo 17 May 2016
For DIY or SOHO users, HDD has always been part of our lives. Be it on your PC or notebook, we always go for the fastest and higher capacity. In the past years, another new storage the SSD is catching up in capacity. Unfortunately the price is still too high and the reports of data loss remains a turn off.
Seagate pioneered this new product which is primarily a HDD but it is embedded with a fast cache powered by 32GB on NAND flash. This new product ST1000LX001 comes in the form of a 2.5″ drive and is 9.5mm thickness. It has 1GB of storage which is sufficient for large chunks of data, e.g. videos, games and multimedia files.
Does the extra NAND cache help ? Seagate utilises Adaptive Memory Technology that tracks data usage and prioritises data for faster access in the NAND flash. The good news is that the prioritisation and scheduling is all done behind the scenes. Thus, there is no requirement to install system drivers to power the NAND portion of the SSHD. Thus, the SSHD can be a direct replacement of existing HDDs on PCs, MACs, PS/4 etc after being cloned by software.
The internals of the Seagate SSHD
The ST1000LX001 PCB showing the NAND flash on board and other controller chips. Specifications
According to the specifications, it claims that games load test can be 200% faster than a conventional drive and application loading time can be 600% faster than a normal drive.
Benchmarking
The SSHD drive is tested against the WD Blue 500GB Slim Drive, both attached to a PC powered by an Intel processor on the ECS Z97 motherboard.
ECS Z97 motherboard
Intel Core i7-4770K
8GB SODIMM DDR3-2400
WD Blue UltraSlim 500GB HDD
Seagate ST1000LX001 SSHD 1000GB
We will start with synthetic benchmarks followed by real world tests. CrystalDiskMark on Seagate SSHD
CrystalDiskMark is a defacto benchmark used to test the performance of HDD. The first screenshot is for the WD Blue Slim Drive followed by the Seagate SSHD.
The two drives runs equally fast. The 4K and Seq test shows that it runs slightly faster. The results are average of 5 test runs. WD Blue 500GB UltraSlim DriveSeagate ST1000LX001 1GB SSHD ATTO Disk Benchmark on Seagate SSHD
We observer that both HDD has slightly different characteristics. The Seagate Hybrid drive seems to be faster when dealing with smaller blocks of data.
For example 8K block, the read/write is 105 MB/s (WD) vs 119 MB/s (Seagate). Will this results translate to improved performance in gaming, application launch? ATTO Benchmark results of WD Blue UltraSlim 500GB ATTO Benchmark for Seagate ST1000XL001 SSHD Share this:
PC MARK 7 Secondary Storage Test
PC Mark 7 Secondary Storage runs through a suite of tests targeting the HDD and an average score is obtained.
As real life applications are simulated, we should be able to see an improvement over conventional HDD when the adaptive caching kicks in.
Here is our result :
The results shows a 127% improvement over a conventional HDD. Secondary Storage Test Scoreline
We tabulated the breakdown of the PC Mark 7 scores for both HDD and SSHD as shown below.
The results is in the transfer speed (MB/s). As we can see Gaming, Application Launch, Importing Pictures, Windows Defender are the biggest beneficiary of the Hybrid Drive.
In fact, Gaming gets a improved transfer of almost 4X (400%), Application Launching is 8X (800%) and Windows Defender is 3x (300%).
For multimedia users, Video editing and Windows Media Centre tests also shows s slight improvement over the traditional HDD. Detail scores of individual tests
Workload tests
The first test uses the software TeraCopy to time the transfer of files from one source to another. In the test, the source installation files of Windows 10 were first copied into the drives respectively.
A copy of the folder/files were executed and TeraCopy was invoked to time. Timings were taken for 3 runs.
The first run both drives completes around 49 secs. The 2nd and 3rd run, we see improvements in the timing while the same timing is required to do the transfer on the normal HDD.
For Application launch, the LIbreOffice application is installed onto the target drive (and not on the drive we install the OS).
We used the smartphone to time the launching of LibreOffice for 3 times. The 2nd and 3rd launch is faster, slashing down launch time by almost 1 sec.
We timed the opening of a Document file using LibreOffice. From the test, it actually took a shorter time to open the file as compared to a traditional HDD.
LibreOffice Calc was also tested, again, the time taken to open the same file is faster as compared to a conventional HDD. Share this:
Conclusion
HDD vs SSHD vs SSD, which will you choose ? This is sometimes a difficult question to answer. Would you want to pay more for speed and a smaller capacity or a drive that has a large capacity with slower speed ? Well, if you can’t decide, Hybrid Hard Disk e.g Seagate ST1000LX001 should fit the bill. It has a larger capacity, improved performance over conventional HDD and it won’t break the bank.
A 1TB SSD, now costs around USD 300 but the Seagate SSHD 1TB ST1000LX001 is only USD 116. A similar 1TB Seagate HDD is USD 77. In fact, a last on Amazon shows that the first generation 8GB NAND SSHD is also selling for USD 77.
In addition, the Seagate ST1000LX001 comes with a 5 years warranty which should suffice for most users.
If you are a notebook user and intend to upgrade the aging drive, the upgrade should see your performance improve. Of course, it is not recommended if you use your laptop on a bus as a SSHD is effectively still a HDD with moving parts. For Small Form Factor PC users, it might be worth doing a RAID 0 for even better performance on these drives.
In Conclusion, the Seagate ST1000XL001 is an intelligent choice for upgraders, gamers, video editors and office productivity users.
Seagate ST1000LX001 SSHD
