Seagate Desktop SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 Consumer Hybrid HD Review

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

The Seagate 4TB SSHD provides a warehouse of storage space with the extra little kick of having a 8GB SSD built-in and as you saw on the PCMark 8 tests the drive learns what you are using on an ongoing basis and moves those files to the SSD. With each pass of PCMark 8 the drive got faster as more pertinent data was stored on the SSD portion of the drive. That’s exactly what the drive is designed to do, move the files you use most onto the fastest part of the drive and it does that job well.

While SSD’s provide higher speeds they provide a much higher expense. We’d all love to have 4TB of SSD running at 550MB/s but most of us are in the 240 -480GB capacity price range when it comes to SSD’s. Many times when you are building a system moneys tight at first and you just get the components you need to start with so popping $200 for a limited storage SSD might be out of the budget. Enter the $149.99 Seagate 4TB SSHD and you have a ton of storage with some SSD kick thrown in.

Later after your bank account has recovered and the cabinet is full of Ramen again you can always spring for a SSD and add it in as the OS drive and store a few games on it then you have a SSD backed by a SSHD which is a better setup than what we’ve been seeing with a SSD up front and a run of the mill HD behind it for volume storage.

It’s smart to have some SSD capabilities but honestly we ran the Seagate 4TB SSHD as the OS drive for a week and it was easy to forget we didn’t have an SSD up front. Boot times were a little longer and large file transfers (copying movies and game ISO’s) was a little slower but hands down we would choose the Seagate 4TB SSHD over living with a small expensive SSD.

Being PC people we run across a lot of machines in the old “Hey my buddy the PC guy” repairs and such and we can honestly tell you the vast majority of what we see are single drive systems and those single drives are all platters. We very seldom see a machine just running SSD’s unless it’s a well-heeled enthusiast that doesn’t mind springing a couple of thousand dollars on SSD storage and we’ve seen that a total of once.

Platter still dominate the landscape of computing and if you have any doubts walk into a Department store electronics department or a technology store and look at the pre-built systems and what you find are POS computers with a platter drive installed. With out a doubt in every case the drive installed is an inexpensive platter drive and by inexpensive we mean 500GB to 1TB with 16MB cache and if your lucky a 7200 RPM model.

Seagate could seriously cut into the SSD market if volume manufacturers would see the light and install high technology SSHD’s, the systems would boot faster and the everyday programs used most often would load faster and seriously curve the cravings for SSD’s. Having a dozen or so SSD’s around the lab even now every single test rig still has a platter drive in it as well. Platters aren’t going away anytime soon and you would be hard pressed to find a better platter drive than the Seagate 4TB SSHD. Take our word for it when the time comes spring that extra $10 bucks and get the SSHD it’s just not that much more expensive than a non SSHD and for that small price increase you get a drive much more suited to todays needs than a simple non SSHD platter drive.