Seagate Desktop SSHD in the test: Hybrid drive with 2 TB to 3.5 inches

introduction

Hybrid drives or SSHDs are not only available in the 2.5-inch format that we recently tested. Seagate offers with the Desktop SSHD also a 3.5-inch hard drive with a read buffer from flash memory. The buffer technology corresponds to the laptop SSHD. Above all, the Desktop SHDD offers more storage space and can score with higher performance where the read buffer does not work.

Overview of Seagate Desktop SSHD

The buffering technology of the Seagate Desktop SSHD is basically the same as that of the recently tested laptop SSHD. This means that 8 GB MLC-NAND are used, which serve as a read buffer only and are filled dynamically by the drive with frequently used data, which can then be accessed faster than would be possible on the platters. This applies primarily to starting up the operating system and starting frequently used programs.

Write access is also passed directly to the hard drive on the Desktop SSHD, which, however, offers higher performance and, of course, more storage space than the laptop SSHDs. It is important to note that the largest variant of the desktop SSHD with 4 TB uses a slower HDD that does not work at 7,200 but at 5,900 rpm and accordingly offers somewhat poorer access times. Even the read and write rates of the 1 and 2 TB variants do not quite reach the largest model. Seagate reports read rates of up to 210 MB / s and write rates of up to 156 MB / s for the smaller versions. In the 4 TB version, 180 and 146 MB / s are shown in the data sheet at these points.

On the next page: Synthetic benchmarks