Seagate ST500LM000 500GB 5400 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5″ Laptop Thin SSHD Bare Drive

Pros: Uses an 8GB SSD built in partition as a cache drive for a 500GB standard HDD.

7mm Height to fit in the laptops that accept the smallest 2.5″ drives.

Absolutely zero extra work for the consumer. Treat it like a regular hdd.

A good price for what you get, which is, ssd like boot up times, and a faster initial launch of your programs. Everything isnt faster, but a lot is.

I have been on the SSD bandwagon for the past 3 years and have upgraded for myself and my customers many times. I love SSDs because everything just loads, and fast.
With this drive, my boot times are roughly what I get with an ssd, and my post windows load experience is much better than a standard hard drive as well.

Compatibility #1. As long as you have AHCI capabilities (which im almost positive ive never seen a sata computer not have AHCI) then this will work.

A perfect upgrade for old laptops where SSDs are questionable or problematic.

Cons: Its just not as fast as I want it to be, but I have real high expectations. To non-ssd people, this thing will fly.

only an 8GB SSD cache block.

I would really like to see one of these with a 64GB cache block. With 8GB, for a heavy user, it varies a lot what loads fast as there is simply not enough space to hold all the vital bits of several large programs to get that insta speed you expect from an ssd.

500GB is pretty small for someone who is buying a drive for its capacity. tho at 7mm, this is semi-understandable, this year.

Overall Review: After testing this drive out, I decided to change my main rig up a little. I ditched the 256GB SSD I had in there and put in a 64GB SSD and used intels cache thing to use it as a 64GB SSD cache block for a 2TB drive.

Voila, after I run everything once,, all acts like an SSD.

My point is.. I would easily pay $200 for a laptop hard drive that had a 64GB block with a 1TB or better HDD. or $150 for a 500GB. I know they have the ability to currently make this,, physical size and everything, and seems like a no brainer. I personally dont think ill ever buy an ssd over 64GB again unless money is no issue and instead keep it somewhat like i have now.

8GB is just too small for anyone who is really looking for real speed, but this is perfect for a light user.

This drive is real good,, but,, it just makes me want more.

Pros: Updating eggxpert review from 4-15-13.

Cons: After about 7 months, this drive has failed. About a month ago the drive was noticeably louder and today the drive has completely failed.

Overall Review: Sad to see such a failure with HDD warranties getting shorter these days…

Pros: Fast program loading
Quiet during high use

Cons: No change in OS boot time

Overall Review: This laptop drive replaced my failing primary drive in my desktop. My computer is primarily used as a Windows Media Center server. Below are some basic info about my computer using this drive:

Windows 7 x64
AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2ghz
6GB Memory

After installing this drive I installed a new copy of Windows on the drive then imported my user data using Windows Easy Transfer utility.

With this drive I clocked the boot time in POST to be at 19.8 seconds then 60.2 seconds to load Windows. Boot speed is not an issue for me since my computer is always on or sleeping.

The formatted space with NTFS is 931.51GB and when running random 1GB tests on the drive I averaged 79.3MB/s read and 84.5MB/s write. Windows scored the drive at 5.9.

When using the new drive in my computer day to day Windows Media Center and Recorded TV in WMC loaded instantly. The previous drive for my computer took about 20-30 seconds to load WMC and Recorded TV.

This is the second Seagate Solid State Drive I have owned and I have not noticed any increase in speed for boot but for my most used programs I have noticed considerable increase in load times.

Pros: – Drastically Improved boot times over HDD

– Improved load times of frequently used programs

– Runs cool

– Quiet

– Huge amount of storage capacity

– 3 year warranty

– Solid Read and Write speeds for a 5400 RPM drive

– Large cache

– Well packaged

– Vastly improved reliability over first gen hybrid drives

Cons: – Slower file transfer speeds than a good 7200rpm drive. When testing I saw avg Read times of 101.2MB/s and avg Write times of 99.9 MB/s. Not bad at all but not great

– Very slow access times for non cached Reads (17.6ns) and Writes (21.3ns)

Overall Review: Overall I was very pleased with seagates new creation. Windows was very snappy when installed on this hybrid drive. Boot times were improved by a good margin but it still doesn’t compare to a solid state drive.

I really wish the drive was a 7200rpm hybrid. I’m sure this would have increased costs but then there really wouldn’t have been any downside to this Hybrid HDD. The 5400 RPM really killed access times. Access times are what tend to make the computer feel snappy. The cached info works great but infrequently used programs may load a big sluggishly.

The drive works great for firing up my laptop on short notice and I find myself using it much more frequently for note taking because of this. Personally I prefer the speed of a solid state drive still, but this is a great alternative for someone who needs to have a large amount of data with them.

All of the issues of the original 500GB hybrid drives seem to have been resolved. I have not experienced any stuttering or file corruption even after heavy usage. It’s nice to see the drive backed by a one year warranty when many drives have been reduced to 1yr.

This Seagate drive would be great for someone who needs a large amount of storage in their laptop or a media center. I would have no problem installing this drive in a future build. I think Seagate has a great product on their hands and with a few improvements could have a real game changer.

Pros: I was a bit cautious going into using a solid state hybrid drive; I’d never used one before, but I’ve used plenty of SSDs and platter drives. This drive performed exceptionally well for what I was expecting, averaging decent read and write speeds on the platters. The maximum write speeds over USB 3.0 and SATA III were around 110 MB/s in both read and write, with an average speed of 89 MB/s.

Being a hybrid drive, some aspects of benchmarking were much more difficult to track. The sustained and burst rate speeds were on par with other 5400 RPM drives, but in some cases the drive would cache certain files and speeds would increase. The first few boots of Windows and Fedora had average load times, but subsequent boots saw reduction in load time by 2-3 seconds at boot. Both operating systems were installed from template, so software updates and configuration were not a factor in measuring boot time.

Cons: This drive is advertised as “Boots and performs like an SSD” and “Faster than traditional HDD”, however most speeds were on par with other 2.5″ platter drives, even when loaded from the NAND portion of the drive. The platter of the drive peaks at around 110 MB/s read and write at the inner portions of the disk, and the NAND peaks at 111 MB/s. When compared to an actual SSD (Crucial C300), which reads at an average 228 MB/s, the sustained read/write speeds no longer seem impressive. The only benefit I had noticed from the NAND memory is a lower access time than the rest of the drive.

Don’t get me wrong though, this drive is still good for the price, but having a hybrid drive with a small 8GB NAND onboard didn’t appear to improve the speeds enough to make a noticeable difference beyond 2-3 seconds shorter boot time. During sustained reads and writes, a solid 7200 RPM will actually be a better choice, since the overall average read/write speeds will generally be 20-30 MB/s faster.

Pros: Testing a hybrid drive is tricky, because the speed benefits come only when data is already present in the SSD portion of the drive. As a demonstration, the following data shows that in pure theoretical speed tests, the drive offers little over a typical hard drive:

Crystal Disk Mark (average of 4 runs) (SATA 6Gbps)
Sequential (MB/s): 103.575 (read); 114.05 (write)
512K (MB/s): 41.59 (read); 63.77 (write)
4K (MB/s): .70725 (read); 1.0385 (write)

The 4K numbers in particular are orders of magnitude slower than an SSD, and that’s what makes a hard drive feel so much slower than an SSD. The results generally line up with other mid-range hard drives I’ve tested, such as Seagate’s own 7200rpm thin laptop drive:

Sequential (MB/s): 116.625 (read); 115.686 (write)
512K (MB/s): 41.665 (read); 49.484 (write)
4K (MB/s): 0.544 (read); 0.797 (write)

But, when I tested the launch times of a data-hungry application, this drive came alive. I used the graphics card benchmark Unigine Heaven 3.0, which loads a large amount of data prior to running the actual graphics tests. This data load proved that the Seagate SSHD technology actually works for a very specific purpose – speeding up launch of often-used applications:

First run: 24.5s
Second run: 13.46s
Third run: 12.5s
Fourth run after other apps loaded: 18.54s
Fifth run: 12.72s

Note that the launch time was cut in half by the third run, but that general use of the drive ate away at that benefit as the SSD portion of the drive filled with other data. It quickly returned to its fastest speed, but clearly, it won’t stay there forever.

I also tested the launch times of Adobe Lightroom 4.0, which is a much smaller application. I found that the times improved much less dramatically:

First run: 8.59s
Second run: 6.88s
Third run: 6.08s

Assuming that your operating system will be the most commonly-run application, this could work wonders. But I could see issues for users who don’t reboot often and run a number of other programs in the meantime – Seagate’s algorithm would need to be pretty smart to keep the OS components in the SSD cache.

Cons: For data storage, this drive doesn’t offer many benefits. In a test of copying 180MB of data from an SSD to this drive, in each of three runs, it took 3.8 seconds, amounting to a write time of 47.4MB/s, which is clearly in hard drive range, not SSD range.

When I performed a data read of 180MB, the files copied instantly, so fast in fact that I couldn’t time them. These files, of course, had just been written to the drive and were obviously still in the cache. But data reads of larger directories were much less impressive:

261MB directory read:
2.84s (91.9MB/s)

868MB directory read:
25.39s (34.18MB/s)

Also, I found that the drive made a loud chirping noise, noted by others, at certain times when it was idle. I believe this may be related to the energy-reduction measures used at idle. The moment I engaged the drive, the noise stopped, making it quieter at load than at idle. I never found a reduction in performance, despite the fact that it sounded like it could have been a drive head rubbing up against the platter. Also, I only noticed this when the drive was connected via USB 3.0; when I tested it on a SATA 6Gbps connection, the noise did not occur.

Overall Review: This drive is a good solution for a laptop needing both fast boot and app launching times for a few commonly-used apps, as well as a large capacity. With a 1W idle, it uses only slightly more power than an SSD, so it’s a good fit for a laptop in that regard too.

But a word of warning: you will likely see reviews that show huge speed improvements with repeated runs of the same software. This doesn’t provide a true representation of the drive’s performance, as most users do not repeatedly boot the same software over and over. The 8GB of SSD cache is small enough that with many different applications running, boot times will not stay very low. Your best hope is that at the minimum, the most significant OS components stay in the cache, so that reboot times after actual hours-long use of the system are still impressive.

Ultimately, I gave this product 4 out of 5 stars based on not only its performance, but its price. It definitely has the potential to out-perform hard drives costing just $20-$25 less, so if you only have the option of using a single 2.5″ drive, this one is worth the investment.

Pros: Faster boot time over standard HDD (to fully usable state)
Much cheaper per GB than an SSD
Fits in laptops or desktops (although you may need an adapter for your desktop, this is a bare drive).

Cons: Whether of not there are cons depends on what you’re comparing it against:
5400 HDD – No cons, you come out ahead in read/write times
7200 HDD – Pretty much break even in read/write times
SSD – Much slower, no contest

Overall Review: I cloned this and three other drives with the same image, then compared boot times and read/write performance (using AS SSD). My test bed was limited to SATA 3.0Gb/s but only the SSD was held back by this limitation. This is what I came up with using my very unscientific methods:
Seagate Hybrid:
Boot = 45 seconds. Read = 86. Write = 115
Hitachi 5400 HDD:
Boot = 75 seconds. Read = 49. Write = 48
Hitachi 7200 HDD:
Boot = 55 seconds. Read = 104. Write = 113.
Plextor SSD:
Boot = 30 seconds. Read = 229. Write = 192.

The way I see it, if you’re swapping with a 5400 HDD in your laptop or netbook you’ll get a measurable performance boost and lots of storage, a very worthwhile trade and worth five stars. If you already have a comparably sized 7200 the cost will be harder to justify. And SSDs are all about speed at the expense of storage, so you’ll have to decide which is more important to you.

Pros: Very fast read/write speeds, sustained write above 120MBps – great for network backups as a hot swap disc – would also be great in a laptop as a data drive/game drive.

Cons: Not a 7200 RPM disc. Would definitely increase the read speeds with a faster HDD. Seek times of non-cached data are that of a 5400 RPM 2.5″ drive, keep that in mind.

Overall Review: We’re using these drives as hot-swap backup drives for servers in a datacenter. Cheaper than SAS and SSD, faster than SATA plus good capacity for their size. Not yet sure on lifetime failure rates, but if it’s in line with other HDD’s, should be a longterm winner.