Review Seagateã‚â® Laptop Thin 500gb 25 Sata Laptop Thin Internal Solid State Drive (St500lm000)

What do the McLaren P1, the Porsche 918, and the Ferrari LaFerrari all have in common? They're express-edition supercars with price tags well out of reach for mere mortals. Also, they're all hybrids. Even in the world of loftier-end exotics, internal combustion engines are being paired with electric motors.

Right now, hybrids seem likely to be the next evolutionary step for automobiles. Their electric motors are both efficient and environmentally friendly, while their fuel-based engines provide the road-trip range people have come to expect. At that place'due south a similar parallel in the PC storage industry.

Modern SSDs are much faster than traditional hard drives, but fifty-fifty with Moore's Police force chipping abroad at NAND prices, they remain relatively expensive if yous want loads of storage. SSDs in the 240-256GB range typically price around $200, and they yet don't requite you a lot of space, specially if your media library is going to share the drive with your OS, applications, games, and other information.

While mechanical difficult drives tin can't keep upwards with the performance of SSDs, their spinning platters tin store a lot more data per dollar. Marrying the ii in a hybrid configuration is a no-brainer, and it'due south incredibly easy to do in desktop systems that can accept multiple drives. Notebooks, withal, are a whole other fauna. Some laptops permit mechanical drives to ride shotgun alongside mini mSATA SSDs, but most are limited to a single bulldoze.

Since mid-2010, Seagate'south solution for single-drive notebooks has been the Momentus XT, a hybrid that combines flash memory and mechanical platters in one 2.5″ chassis. The original model and its 2nd-generation successor have had some appeal, but they've been hampered by read-only flash caches that ignore incoming writes from the host. That limitation has been lifted in Seagate's latest hybrids, which can cache both read and write requests.

The first of this new generation to hit our labs is the Laptop Thin SSHD 500GB. (SSHD stands for solid-land hybrid bulldoze, in instance you're wondering.) Although painfully generic, the model proper name gets the signal across. This is a laptop drive with a sparse grade cistron and 500GB of storage. And information technology's eminently affordable, with a street price hovering around 80 bucks. Naturally, nosotros had to take a closer look.

Thin is in

Most 2.v″ hard drives are 9.5 mm thick, but the Laptop Thin SSHD squeezes its guts inside a 7-mm case. This thinner chassis is a better fit for the growing field of super-slim notebooks spawned by Intel's ultrabook initiative. It likewise represents a kickoff for Seagate'southward hybrids, which take previously been limited to 9.5-mm models.

The ix.5-mm Momentus XT (left) next to its Laptop Thin sibling (correct)

To assist its hybrid diet downward to the smaller form gene, Seagate removed one of the platters. The Sparse Laptop SSHD has a unmarried disc with a 500GB chapters. Bits are packed with an areal density of 705Gb/in², which allows each side of the platter to shop 250GB. That bit density is 30% college than that of the old Momentus XT 750GB, whose dual platters pack 541Gb/in².

An increase in areal density usually leads to better performance for sequential transfers. The more bits per square inch, the more than information passes under the bulldoze head with each revolution of the platter. On the Laptop Thin SSHD, however, there is i rather significant catch. The platter spins at only 5,400 RPM—25% slower than the Momentus XT's 7,200-RPM spindle speed. This slower rotational speed negates much of the advantage of the increased bit density.

Seagate contends that spindle speed is less important for hybrid drives, and the benchmark results after in this review will shed some light on that merits. The firm is certainly confident, considering it's committed to stop making 7,200-RPM notebook drives altogether. 5,400-RPM hybrids will replace high-speed drives in Seagate's notebook lineup, allowing the company to focus development on a unmarried mechanical platform for mobile PCs. That platform will presumably be shared past SSHDs, notebook hard drives, and external storage products.

We tend to recommend 5,400-RPM drives only when they're being paired with SSDs, which is essentially what's happening here. In addition to 500GB of mechanical storage, the Laptop Thin SSHD has 8GB of wink memory. Similar in previous Seagate hybrids, the flash is governed past a caching mechanism dubbed Adaptive Retentiveness. This scheme categorizes data based on ii criteria: how frequently it'southward accessed and whether relocating it to the flash will amend performance. Solid-state storage is orders of magnitude faster than mechanical storage for random accesses, simply the two are more than evenly matched when data is accessed sequentially.

Adaptive Retention can come across precisely how data is organized on the deejay, a level of insight absent from software-based caching mechanisms like Intel'south Smart Response Engineering. Co-ordinate to Seagate, this low-level visibility allows its hybrids to make ameliorate decisions nigh what to put in the flash. Considering the caching magic works entirely within the drive, the Laptop Thin SSHD requires no drivers or software. It'll piece of work with any operating system and hardware platform.

Folks familiar with hybrid storage will note than the Laptop Thin SSHD's 8GB wink cache is relatively pocket-size. The NAND footprint hasn't grown since the last Momentus XT, which is a item concern given the new model's power to cache data for writes in addition to reads. Product manager David Burks told us Seagate experimented with different enshroud sizes and found that 8GB was big enough for mass-marketplace workloads. The data access profiles of typical consumer and commercial workloads don't change dramatically, he said.

Seagate hasn't revealed many details on exactly how the write caching machinery works, merely Burks confirmed that information is prioritized in much the same fashion that it is for reads. Whether an incoming write can be candy faster by the flash plays a role in determining whether it volition be cached there. Nosotros oasis't heard dorsum from Seagate on how much of the flash is reserved for incoming writes and whether the distribution is static or dynamic. Burks did, yet, tell the states that the bulldoze has enough onboard capacitance to ensure that the contents of its write cache can be written to the disk in the event of unexpected power loss.

Hybrid NAND, as well

Unlike the concluding two generations of Momentus XT hybrids, which employ SLC NAND for their flash caches, the Laptop Sparse SSHD is equipped with MLC memory—sort of. According to Samsung's decoder ring, the NAND on the drive's circuit board is indeed multi-level cell retention. Notwithstanding, the Laptop Thin employs a new flash subsystem with a special "combo style" that treats function of the wink as SLC and the residue every bit MLC. Seagate hasn't answered our questions about exactly how this combo mode works, merely in that location doesn't appear to be any customization at the flash level. I suspect Seagate has merely elected to write only one fleck per cell for the portion of NAND allocated as SLC retentivity and two bits per jail cell for the rest.

To sympathize the benefits of this approach, it helps to know how bits are actually stored. Writing to wink retentiveness is achieved past causing electrons to migrate into the cell, generating a negative accuse that changes the jail cell'due south threshold voltage. Afterward each write, a control voltage is applied to read the prison cell and verify its contents. If the control voltage is higher than the threshold, electric current flows through the cell. If it's not, the process is repeated with a higher control voltage.

With ane chip per cell, SLC retentiveness only needs to worry about whether the cell's threshold voltage represents a 0 or ane. The extra bit in MLC NAND allows for values of 00, 01, 10, or 11, which ways more control voltages need to be applied to read the data in the jail cell (or to verify a successful write). Cycling through those additional voltages takes time, and SLC flash tends to take faster write performance than MLC as a result. SLC retentiveness also offers meliorate endurance than the MLC stuff. Over time, as flash cells are written, electrons slowly build upwardly in the insulator layer, shrinking the voltage range that can be used for programming. SLC has to differentiate between fewer values within that express range, making it more than tolerant of normal flash habiliment.

Seagate doesn't publish an endurance specification for the Laptop Sparse SSHD'southward wink component, merely the bulldoze is covered by a three-year warranty. Even for worst-instance workloads, Burks says there'southward a "really loftier level of wear-level margin."

Burks likewise told us that the hybrid NAND in the Laptop Thin SSHD is faster than the older SLC retentiveness within the Momentus XT, although he didn't have specific numbers. The Momentus can read data from its flash cache at up to 180MB/s, so the Laptop Thin is faster than that. If 180MB/s seems a trivial sluggish, keep in heed that the SSDs pushing into 500MB/s territory are typically 240-256GB models with as many as 32 individual NAND dies. The Laptop Thin SSHD's 8GB flash component has only two dies, giving it much less parallelism to exploit. (Yous can read about the outcome of SSD chapters on performance in this commodity.)

The write speed of the terminal-gen Momentus XT's wink was quoted as 100MB/s, but that was for transfers coming from the mechanical platters. Interestingly, Seagate claims the Laptop Thin'southward "average data throughput" rate is too 100MB/south. Due to its combination of a higher areal density and a slower 5,400-RPM spindle speed, the new model'south mechanical component may be no faster than the old one's.

The effective size of the NAND inside the Laptop Thin SSHD may be smaller, as well. We're talking about an 8GB MLC flake. If some of the NAND is configured as SLC memory, which has half the information density of MLC NAND, the full capacity of the chip must decrease.

Nosotros don't know how much of the NAND is treated as SLC memory, simply Burks did tell united states of america this portion of the flash is dedicated to two purposes. In improver to hosting the write cache, the SLC slice houses data associated with the Windows boot process. This department of the wink is populated automatically and reserved exclusively for boot data. Adaptive Memory'south other caching activities won't encroach on its territory.

We'll test kick functioning in a moment. Commencement, I should take a moment to explain where the Laptop Thin SSHD fits into Seagate's next-generation hybrid lineup. The vii-mm Sparse drive is accompanied by a ix.5-mm model dubbed the Laptop SSHD. This standard-sized mobile unit of measurement has dual 500GB platters, doubling the storage capacity of its skinny counterpart. The spindle speed is the same, and so is the caching component. Performance should be comparable every bit a event.

A mobile SSHD with more than wink is in the works, simply that variant won't come up out until the middle of the twelvemonth. Instead of relying on Adaptive Memory to manage the enshroud, this model will work in conjunction with Intel's Smart Response Technology. An SRT-uniform platform will be required, of course.

Seagate is also prepping SSHDs for desktop systems. The first 3.five″ models will offering 1TB and 2TB of storage, respectively, and they'll sport 8GB flash caches like the mobile drives. Those commencement desktop models volition sport faster vii,200-RPM spindle speeds. A college-capacity desktop hybrid is also on the style, but it will have a slower spindle speed, likely in the 5,400-RPM range.

After several years of honing its hybrid engineering science with the Momentus XT, Seagate is ready to spread SSHDs across multiple platforms. This could exist the beginning of a hybrid revolution.

Lining up the contenders

At the moment, Seagate's SSHDs are without peers outside the firm's own lineup. The fact is that nobody else sells hybrids right now—at least not ones that fit inside the 2.v″ mobile form factor. We have assembled a collection of solid-state and mechanical notebook drives to put the Laptop Thin SSHD'south performance into perspective, though. Seagate wasn't able to provide us with the standard Laptop SSHD for testing, so nosotros'll take to brand do with the Thin model for at present.

Seagate'due south older Momentus XT hybrids are also in the mix, of form. The 500GB model belongs to the first generation, and the 750GB variant is its successor. Keep in mind that both XTs have 7,200-RPM spindle speeds.

	Interface	Cache	Spindle speed	Areal density
Seagate Momentus XT 500GB	3Gbps	32MB	7,200 RPM	394 Gb/in²
Seagate Momentus XT 750GB	6Gbps	32MB	7,200 RPM	541 Gb/in²
Seagate Laptop Sparse SSHD 500GB	6Gbps	64MB	v,400 RPM	705 GB/in²
WD Caviar Black 1TB	6Gbps	64MB	7,200 RPM	400 Gb/in²
WD Scorpio Blackness 750GB	3Gbps	16MB	vii,200 RPM	520 Gb/in²
WD VelociRaptor 1TB	6Gbps	64MB	10,000 RPM	NA

Western Digital'south Scorpio Black 750GB represents the purely mechanical notebook field. This drive is devoid of flash memory, but it has a faster spindle speed than the Laptop Thin. Like the Momentus XTs, it too has a thicker 9.5-mm chassis.

To provide some broader context, we've besides tossed WD's Caviar Black 1TB and VelociRaptor 1TB into the band. The former is a iii.5″ desktop model, while the latter is a 10k-RPM monster.

Naturally, these desktop drives aren't direct competition for the Laptop Thin. 2.five″ solid-state drives are more than appropriate rivals, especially since a scattering of them are similarly skinny vii-mm cases. Hither'southward the collection we've rounded up for comparing:

	Cache	Flash controller	NAND
Corsair Neutron 240GB	256MB	LAMD LM87800	25nm Micron async MLC
Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB	256MB	LAMD LM87800	25nm Intel sync MLC
Crucial m4 256GB	256MB	Marvell 88SS9174	25nm Micron sync MLC
Intel 320 Series 300GB	64MB	Intel PC929AS21BA0	25nm Intel MLC
Intel 335 Series 240GB	NA	SandForce SF-2281	20nm Intel sync MLC
OCZ Agility 4 256GB	512MB	Indilinx Everest ii*	25nm Micron async MLC
OCZ Vector 256GB	512MB	Indilinx Barefoot iii	25nm Intel sync MLC
OCZ Vertex iv 256GB	512MB	Indilinx Everest 2*	25nm Micron sync MLC
Samsung 840 Series 250GB	512MB	Samsung MDX	21nm Samsung Toggle TLC
Samsung 840 Pro 256GB	512MB	Samsung MDX	21nm Samsung Toggle MLC

These ten drives pretty much cover the gamut of popular controller and NAND combinations on the market right now. None of them can match the Laptop Sparse's 500GB capacity, a fact that our value assay volition accept into account.

Our testing methods

If y'all're already familiar with our storage exam system and methods, at present would be a proficient time to skip ahead to the performance results. I'll simply exist offended if yous jump straight to the determination.

We used the post-obit system configuration for testing:

Processor	Intel Core i5-2500K iii.3GHz
Motherboard	Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Bios revision	1850
Platform hub	Intel P67 Express
Platform drivers	INF update 9.2.0.1030 RST x.vi.0.1022
Retentiveness size	8GB (2 DIMMs)
Retentivity type	Corsair Vengeance DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
Memory timings	9-9-9-24-1T
Audio	Realtek ALC892 with 2.62 drivers
Graphics	Asus EAH6670/DIS/1GD5 1GB with Catalyst eleven.7 drivers
Difficult drives	Corsair Neutron 240GB with M206 firmware Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB with M206 firmware Crucial m4 256GB with 010G firmware Intel 320 Serial 300GB with 4PC10362 firmware Intel 335 Series 240GB with 335s firmware OCZ Agility four 256GB with 1.5.2 firmware OCZ Vector 256GB with 10200000 firmware OCZ Vertex 4 256GB with one.five firmware Samsung 840 Series 250GB with DXT07B0Q firmware Samsung 840 Pro Series 256GB with DXM04B0Q firmware Seagate Momentus XT 500GB with SD22 firmware Seagate Momentus XT 750GB with SM12 firmware WD Caviar Blackness 1TB with 05.01D05 firmware WD Scorpio Blackness 750GB with 01.01A01 firmware WD VelociRaptor 1TB with 04.06A00 firmware Seagate Laptop Sparse SSHD 500GB with SM11 firmware
Power supply	Corsair Professional Series Golden AX650W
Os	Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Cheers to Asus for providing the systems' motherboards and graphics cards, Intel for the CPUs, Corsair for the memory and PSUs, Thermaltake for the CPU coolers, and Western Digital for the Caviar Blackness 1TB organisation drives.

We used the following versions of our examination applications:

• Intel IOMeter 1.ane.0 RC1
• HD Tune 4.61
• TR DriveBench 1.0
• TR DriveBench 2.0
• TR FileBench 0.2
• Qt SDK 2010.05
• MiniGW GCC 4.four.0
• Knuckles Nukem Forever
• Portal ii

Some farther notes on our exam methods:

• To ensure consistent and repeatable results, the SSDs were secure-erased before almost every component of our exam suite. Some of our tests then put the SSDs into a used state earlier the workload begins, which better exposes each drive's long-term functioning characteristics. In other tests, like DriveBench and FileBench, we induce a used state before testing. In all cases, the SSDs were in the same state before each test, ensuring an even playing field. The performance of mechanical difficult drives is much more than consistent between manufacturing plant fresh and used states, and so we skipped wiping the HDDs before each test—mechanical drives accept forever to secure erase.
• We run all our tests at least three times and study the median of the results. We've found IOMeter functioning can fall off with SSDs after the offset couple of runs, so we use five runs for solid-country drives and throw out the first two.
• Steps have been taken to ensure that Sandy Bridge'south ability-saving features don't taint whatever of our results. All of the CPU's low-power states take been disabled, effectively pegging the 2500K at 3.3GHz. Transitioning in and out of unlike power states can affect the performance of storage benchmarks, peculiarly when dealing with brusque burst transfers.

The test systems' Windows desktop was set up at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Near of the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, striking our forums to talk with us nigh them.

Hd Tune — Transfer rates

Nosotros'll kick off the festivities with HD Tune, which lets united states take a closer look at sequential transfer rates and random admission times. The results in the graphs have been color-coded for piece of cake reading, with the Laptop Thin SSHD appearing in a different shade of green than the other Seagate drives. To continue the bar charts from turning into multi-colored rainbows, nosotros've dressed all the solid-state drives in gray.

The SSDs have too been omitted from the line graphs below. They accept much higher transfer rates than the mechanical drives, which throws off the scale and makes things harder to read.

Our boilerplate read speed results show a stark contrast between mechanical and solid-state storage. The hybrids are in the same league as the mechanical drives, likely considering this exam is entirely sequential in nature. The Laptop Sparse SSHD is really 2MB/s slower than its Momentus XT 750GB predecessor here.

Check out the deviation in transfer rate profiles highlighted by the line graph. Like virtually all of the other drives, the Laptop Thin SSHD exhibits a wearisome decline in transfer rates as the test progresses through the disk. Notwithstanding, there'southward an odd jump in performance at about the 97% mark. A like blip is visible in the write speed results.

If we focus on the average speed across the entire disk, the Laptop Thin SSHD again finds itself well behind the solid-state drives only competitive with the old Momentus XT 750GB. Information technology doesn't await similar the Laptop Thin's write-caching capability is existence exploited past this test.

HD Tune'south burst speed test targets a unlike sort of drive cache: the DRAM memory unremarkably found on mechanical drives, hybrids, and even SSDs. This DRAM cache weighs in at 64MB on the Laptop Sparse SSHD, which is double what you lot get on either Momentus XT.

Solid-country drives don't ever fare well in this test, perhaps because they can use their caches differently than mechanical drives. The Laptop Thin doesn't await so hot either; its burst speeds are faster than those of the showtime-generation Momentus XT but much slower than those of the second-gen model.

Hard disk drive Melody — Random access times

Hard disk Melody lets us exam random access time using dissimilar transfer sizes. We've shown all of the results in a pair of line graphs. To get a ameliorate look at the numbers, we've also busted out separate graphs for a couple of the transfer sizes.

The line graph nicely illustrates the Seagate hybrids flirting with the access times of the solid-state drives, at least with 512-byte and 4KB random reads. Yet, the Laptop Sparse SSHD has a much college access time than both Momentus XTs in the 64KB test. The new hybrid's access times are still lower than those of the mechanical models, at least until we get to the 1MB transfer size.

In the 1MB test, the hybrids announced to be serving read requests entirely from mechanical storage. Their random admission times are essentially higher; in fact, they're comparable to those of the Scorpio Black. Note that the Laptop Thin SSHD is a couple of milliseconds behind the WD notebook drive, which sits a millisecond shy of the Momentus XT 750GB.

Here, we see the starting time do good of the Laptop Sparse SSHD's write caching capability. Unlike the Momentus XTs, whose random write admission times resemble those of mechanical drives, the Laptop Thin hangs much closer to SSD territory. I'm not sure why a few of the drives have unusually high admission times in the 512-byte examination, though. I suspect those results have something to do with 512-byte emulation on drives with native 4KB sectors.

Taking a closer look at the 4KB random write results reveals that the Laptop Thin SSHD is nonetheless an gild of magnitude slower than the solid-country drives. Of course, information technology also beats the fastest Momentus XT by an order of magnitude. The Laptop Thin has an edge over the Momentus drives in the 1MB test, equally well. The advantage there is near vi milliseconds, which works out to a 28% delta.

TR FileBench — Real-world copy speeds

Concocted past resident programmer Bruno "morphine" Ferreira, FileBench runs through a serial of file copy operations using Windows 7's xcopy command. Using xcopy produces nearly identical copy speeds to dragging and dropping files using the Windows GUI, and then our results should be representative of typical real-world functioning. We tested using the following five file sets—notation the differences in average file sizes and their compressibility. We evaluated the compressibility of each file fix by comparison its size before and after being run through 7-Zip's "ultra" compression scheme.

	Number of files	Average file size	Total size	Compressibility
Pic	6	701MB	four.1GB	0.v%
RAW	101	23.6MB	ii.32GB	three.two%
MP3	549	vi.48MB	iii.47GB	0.v%
TR	26,767	64.6KB	1.7GB	53%
Mozilla	22,696	39.4KB	923MB	91%

The names of most of the file sets are self-explanatory. The Mozilla ready is made up of all the files necessary to compile the browser, while the TR set includes years worth of the images, HTML files, and spreadsheets backside my reviews. Those 2 sets incorporate much larger numbers of smaller files than the other 3. They're also the most amenable to compression.

The SSDs were tested in a simulated used state that should be representative of their long-term operation. We didn't simulate a used land with the mechanical drives or hybrids, which tend to offer consequent functioning regardless of whether nosotros've run our used-land torture examination.

These unmarried-threaded copy tests are entirely sequential in nature, so I wouldn't expect the Laptop Sparse SSHD's wink component to accept much bear upon on functioning. Depending on the file set, the Laptop Thin is either a fiddling flake faster or a piddling bit slower than the newest Momentus XT. That's not a bad result, since the Scorpio Blackness is slower across the lath. All the same, the hybrids take a long fashion to go before they tin match the copy speeds of the solid-state drives. The SSDs' performance advantage is peculiarly pronounced with the larger files in the pic, RAW, and MP3 sets.

TR DriveBench ane.0 — Disk-intensive multitasking

TR DriveBench allows us to tape the individual IO requests associated with a Windows session and so play those results back every bit fast equally possible on different drives. We've used this app to create a set of multitasking workloads that combine mutual desktop tasks with disk-intensive background operations like compiling code, copying files, downloading via BitTorrent, transcoding video, and scanning for viruses. The private workloads are explained in more particular here.

Below, yous'll find an overall average followed by scores for each of our individual workloads. The overall score is an average of the hateful functioning score for each multitasking workload.

Uh oh. In our first wave of trace-based tests, the Laptop Thin SSHD scores lower than not only the last Momentus XT hybrid, but also the beginning-generation model from 2010. The Laptop Thin does manage to beat the Scorpio Black, though. Let'due south examine the private test results to run across what we tin larn.

The Laptop Thin SSHD actually performs improve than its predecessor in our multitasking-infused compiling workload, just it crunches fewer IOps with the file copy workload and is perilously close to terminal place with the virus-scanning workload. Autonomously from those 2 hiccups, the Laptop Sparse at least outperforms the Scorpio Black.

As one might expect with real-world workloads laced with random I/O, the SSDs boss the field. None of the mechanical drives or hybrids comes close.

TR DriveBench 2.0 — More than disk-intensive multitasking

Equally much equally nosotros like DriveBench ane.0's individual workloads, the traces encompass only slices of disk activity. Because we burn the recorded I/Os at the disks as fast as possible, solid-country drives also take no downtime during which to engage groundwork garbage collection or other optimization algorithms. DriveBench 2.0 addresses both of those issues with a much larger trace that spans two weeks of typical desktop activity peppered with multitasking loads similar to those in DriveBench 1.0. We've also adapted our testing methods to requite solid-land drives enough idle time to tidy up after themselves. More details on DriveBench 2.0 are available on this page of our last major SSD round-up.

Instead of looking at a raw IOps charge per unit, we're going to switch gears and explore service times—the amount of fourth dimension information technology takes drives to consummate an I/O request. We'll starting time with an overall mean service fourth dimension before slicing and dicing the results.

Well, that's not a practiced sign. The Laptop Thin SSHD's hateful service fourth dimension is most 70% slower than that of the Momentus XT 750GB. That puts the new model in the same ballpark equally Seagate's first-generation hybrid and the purely mechanical Scorpio Blackness notebook bulldoze.

Nosotros tin learn a little more near what's going on in DriveBench by splitting the mean service time between read and write requests, which should yield interesting results given the Laptop Sparse's power to cache both.

So, yeah, that'southward interesting—but non in a good manner. Despite its ability to cache host writes, the Laptop Sparse has a college mean write service fourth dimension than any of the drives we've tested, including the mechanical models. The Momentus XT'southward mean write service fourth dimension is simply over half that of the Laptop Thin.

Surprisingly, the new hybrid is more competitive when we look at read service times, where information technology'south a little more responsive than the Scorpio Black and the first-gen Momentus.

There are millions of I/O requests in this trace, so nosotros can't easily graph service times to wait at the variance. However, our assay tools do report the standard deviation, which can give the states a sense of how much service times vary from the mean.

While the Laptop Thin SSHD'southward response-time variance isn't high enough with reads to ready off warning bells, writes are another thing. The drive's standard departure for write service times is more than than double that of the Momentus XT 750GB. Higher degrees of variance aren't necessarily a trouble if response times are sufficiently low, but that's clearly not the example for the Laptop Thin.

We can likewise sort DriveBench two.0 service times to get a meliorate sense of how they're distributed. The graphs below plot the percent of service times that fall beneath diverse thresholds. You can click the buttons below the graphs to run into how the Laptop Thin SSHD compares to various competitors.

Versus its Momentus XT predecessor, the Laptop Thin SSHD has a lower pct of read service times at each threshold on our scale. The tables plough when we consider write service times, which show an advantage for the Laptop Thin across much of the range. That reward doesn't exist when we compare to the WD Scorpio Blackness, though.

As you tin can meet, the majority of service times for all the drives autumn below 1 millisecond. That threshold is much lower than the Laptop Thin SSHD's mean service times for both reads and writes. It looks similar the Laptop Thin'due south average is existence pulled up by longer service times, some of which are tracked by our "across 100 ms" graphs below. These charts quantify the percentage of requests that have longer than 100 milliseconds to process.

The Laptop Thin SSHD doesn't look so bad in the read department. Writes are another story, however. Nearly 1.1% of DriveBench 2.0 write requests took 100 milliseconds or longer on the Laptop Sparse, which is well-nigh four times as many equally the next-closest drive.

IOMeter

Our IOMeter workloads feature a ramping number of concurrent I/O requests. Most desktop systems will only have a few requests in flying at whatsoever given fourth dimension (87% of DriveBench 2.0 requests accept a queue depth of four or less). We've extended our scaling up to 32 concurrent requests to reach the depth of the Native Control Queuing pipeline associated with the Serial ATA specification. Ramping up the number of requests also gives us a sense of how the drives might perform in more than enervating enterprise environments.

The SSDs are so much faster than the difficult drives and hybrids in these tests that nosotros've had to get out them off the graphs entirely. Scaling the Y axis to bargain with tens of thousands of IOps makes the mechanical results impossible to read. Yous can meet how the solid-country drives compare on this page of our Samsung 840 Pro Series review.

The web server access pattern is comprised exclusively of read requests, and the Laptop Sparse SSHD struggles with it. Seagate'south new hybrid hotness has lower IOps rates than not only the Momentus XT 750GB, but also the Scorpio Black. At to the lowest degree its functioning doesn't flat-line equally the number of concurrent I/O requests increases, though. That behavior is unique to the first-gen Momentus XT.

Our other IOMeter workloads combine read and write requests. Withal, the Laptop Sparse SSHD'south write-friendly cache appears to be of no aid. The Laptop Sparse once more finds itself between the terminal ii generations of Momentus XT hybrids and behind the Scorpio Blackness.

Boot duration

Before timing a couple of real-world applications, we starting time take to load the Bone. We can measure how long that takes past checking the Windows 7 boot duration using the operating arrangement's performance-monitoring tools. This is really the commencement test in which we're booting Windows off each drive; upwardly until this point, our testing has been hosted by an Os housed on a carve up system bulldoze.

Our timing tests are run at to the lowest degree three times, and performance is consistent from one run to the adjacent on both mechanical drives and SSDs. Hybrids tend to speed up through the first few runs, so we have our median upshot from v runs rather than three.

The Laptop Thin SSHD proves its mettle in our Windows boot examination, where information technology manages to crush the Momentus XT 750GB by half a second. As expected, the drive'south kick time decreased over the first three runs and stabilized after that; the Laptop Sparse took virtually 17 seconds to load the OS on its first effort.

Note that the Laptop Thin isn't much slower than the solid-land drives in this test. Its kicking fourth dimension is less than 2 seconds shy of the fastest SSD and just 0.3 seconds behind the closest competition. The purely mechanical drives are much slower. The Scorpio Black takes nearly twice as long to boot the Bone, and fifty-fifty the 10k-RPM VelociRaptor is a couple of seconds backside the fastest hybrids.

Level load times

Score two more victories for the Laptop Thin. If you ignore the VelociRaptor, the Laptop Thin SSHD loads our game levels faster than anything short of a full-on SSD. The hybrid has nearly a one-second edge over the Momentus XT 750GB in Duke Nukem Forever and a wider three-second gap over its predecessor in Portal two. The SSDs are only a few seconds faster, and the Scorpio Blackness is substantially slower.

Again, the Laptop Thin took a few runs to get up to full speed. Loading our Duke Nukem salve took 18 seconds on the first try, and Portal 2 took 22 seconds. Exercise the math, and you're looking at caching-related gains in the thirty-45% range.

Noise levels

Nosotros're a little OCD here at TR, so we've constructed a Box 'o Silence to test the noise emitted past mechanical hard drives. This xviii″ x 20″ anechoic chamber is lined with acoustic foam, and we suspend hard drives inside information technology, exactly iv″ away from the tip of our TES-52 digital audio level meter. You lot can read more about the setup here.

To ensure the lowest possible ambient noise levels, we swapped the test arrangement's graphics menu for a passively-cooled Gigabyte model and unplugged 1 of the Frio CPU cooler's dual fans. Noise levels were measured after one minute of idling at the Windows desktop and during an HD Tune seek test.

Although the Laptop Thin SSHD's 5,400-RPM rotational speed is less than ideal for performance, it's groovy for racket levels. The Laptop Thin is several decibels quieter than any other drive nosotros've tested. Single-platter models tend to be quieter than their multi-disc counterparts, and so I'chiliad curious to come across how the dual-platter Laptop SSHD fares in the Box 'o Silence. I suspect information technology would too be quieter than the terminal Momentus XT.

Power consumption

We tested ability consumption nether load with IOMeter's workstation access pattern chewing through 32 concurrent I/O requests. Idle power consumption was probed one minute after processing Windows 7's idle tasks on an empty desktop.

Surprisingly, the Laptop Thin SSHD consumes more power at idle than its Momentus XT kin, which take more platters and higher spindle speeds. Perhaps Seagate has inverse how quickly the drive slips into a depression-power country. Later on all, the Laptop Sparse does take lower power describe than the other hybrids in our load exam.

The value perspective

Welcome to another one of our famous value analyses, in which we add capacity and pricing to the performance data nosotros've explored over the preceding pages. With the exception of Laptop Thin SSHD, which is much cheaper (and closer to Seagate's suggested retail price) at Amazon, nosotros used Newegg prices for all the SSDs. We didn't take postal service-in rebates into account when performing our calculations.

First, we'll wait at the all-of import price per gigabyte, which we've obtained using the amount of storage capacity accessible to users in Windows.

Take that, SSDs. Flash memory may be more than affordable than always, but solid-land drives are still pretty pricey per gigabyte, at least versus their mechanical and hybrid competition. The Laptop Sparse SSHD is slightly cheaper per gig than the other hybrids, but it'southward non quite as affordable every bit the Scorpio Black.

Our remaining value calculation uses a single performance score that we've derived by comparing how each bulldoze stacks up against a common baseline provided by the Momentus 5400.4, a 2.5″ notebook drive with a painfully slow five,400-RPM spindle speed. This index uses a subset of our performance data described on this page of our last SSD circular-up.

Ouch. Due to its poor performance in a number of tests, the Laptop Sparse SSHD lands at the lesser of our overall performance rankings. According to this metric, the drive is barely faster than the ancient 5,400-RPM model we use for reference. The Momentus XT hybrids practise much better, then the Laptop Thin's depression score isn't an artifact of its hybrid nature alone.

Now for the real magic. We tin plot this overall score on ane axis and each bulldoze's cost per gigabyte on the other to create a scatter plot of performance per dollar per gigabyte. The all-time place on the plot is the upper left corner, which combines loftier performance with a low price.

None of the drives occupy the ideal region of the plot. With higher operation and prices to match, SSDs dominate the upper right corner. The mechanical drives and hybrids are clustered in the lower-left corner, where their lower performance is matched by lower prices. Peradventure more any other, this chart makes it clear that we're dealing with two very different classes of storage.

Even if you ignore the solid-country drives, the Laptop Thin SSHD doesn't expect particularly attractive overall. The Scorpio Black has a college overall performance score and a lower toll per gigabyte. The Momentus XTs cost more than per gig, but they offer higher overall functioning.

Conclusions

From a purely technological standpoint, the Laptop Sparse SSHD is an impressive achievement. Seagate has stuffed 500GB of mechanical storage and 8GB of wink retention into a 7-mm notebook bulldoze that'due south slim enough to make a supermodel jealous. The NAND is capable of caching both reads and writes, a outset for Seagate'south hybrids, and its funky SLC/MLC configuration is different anything we've seen before.

Oh, and the bulldoze's caching mechanism is completely independent of the host organization. The SSHD volition play nicely with any platform and operating system without the demand for special software or drivers. Pretty slick.

Even on paper, though, the Laptop Thin SSHD is a step down from Seagate'due south previous hybrids. Its 5,400-RPM spindle speed is much slower than the vii,200 RPM of older Momentus XT drives. Seagate says rotational speed matters less for hybrids, and that'south true to some degree. According to our test results, the Laptop Thin offers faster Bone and awarding load times than latest Momentus XT. However, its sequential transfer rates are slower than the previous model's.

To be honest, we didn't look the Laptop Sparse SSHD to eclipse the sequential throughput of its predecessor. Seagate has always been upwardly-front end nearly the fact that Adaptive Memory'due south caching algorithms prioritize random admission patterns over sequential streams, and nosotros knew the slower spindle speed would nullify most of the benefits of moving to a higher-density bulldoze platter. Simply we did await the Laptop Thin to have an advantage over the one-time Momentus in our trace-based DriveBench tests, which hammer the drives with real-world I/O patterns that should be ripe for write caching. So much for that theory. In just about every DriveBench metric, the Laptop Thin lags behind its predecessor. The Momentus XT 750GB actually scores quite highly in our DriveBench tests, suggesting that the trouble is specific to the Laptop Sparse and non to hybrids in general.

At least the new SSHDs are affordable. The Laptop Thin model's $84 asking price yields a much lower cost per gigabyte than SSDs, and the fatter terabyte version tin be nabbed for just $120.

Even at those prices, it's tough to give the Laptop Thin SSHD a potent endorsement for utilize in single-drive notebooks. Its load times are wicked-fast, and the random admission times indicate that the write cache works, but there are as well many red flags elsewhere in our results.

The 9.five-mm Laptop SSHD variant may offer meliorate performance than the Thin model overall, but with the same caching scheme and spindle speed, I wouldn't anticipate a big departure between the ii. Until I see what the standard-sized Laptop SSHD can do, I'm inclined to keep recommending the Momentus XT 750GB to folks with unmarried-drive notebooks who demand more than storage than they can afford to buy in an SSD. At $124 online, the Momentus XT 750GB is a expert value when you consider its accommodating performance and the importance of fast load times.

With Seagate ruling out new seven,200-RPM hybrids for notebooks, the outlook for mobile SSHDs is a tad gloomy. I am, nevertheless, quite intrigued by the potential of the upcoming desktop variants, which volition combine flash caches with 7,200-RPM mechanical components. Those SSHDs could be a boon to low-end systems that need lots of storage but don't have the budget for defended SSDs.

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Source: https://techreport.com/review/24561/seagates-laptop-thin-sshd-500gb-hybrid-drive-reviewed/

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