Seagate’s Desktop SSHD was one of the first 3.5in desktop hybrid drives to launch. Hybrid drives look to alleviate the lack of storage capacity available from SSDs by combining a mechanical hard disk with a smaller amount of NAND flash memory to speed up access times for frequently-used files. Thanks to technologies such as Triple Level ( TLC) cells and vertically stacked chips, SSDs keep getting bigger, but the cost per GB of an SSD is still considerably higher than in mechanical disks and will likely remain so for a long time. Hybrid drives aim to be the best of both worlds in giving you the capacity of a mechanical hard disk combined with some of the speed advantages of an SSD.
To leverage the solid-state portion of the Seagate Laptop 1TB, the hybrid drive uses the company’s Adaptive Memory technology, which is comprised of advanced algorithms to track data user data patterns. As a result, it prioritizes the most frequently used data ( or ‘hot data’) on the solid state part of the drive, so users will see much better overall performance compared to traditional hard disk drives. This is certainly a very attractive option to many media enthusiasts and power users, as it offers the best of both worlds: speed and capacity in a 2.5 inch form factor. Not only does it offer those two perks, the Seagate Laptop SSHD line is also significantly less costly than full SSDs, which can influence a lot of consumers on the cusp who don't have the budget for an upgrade to a traditional SSD-based device.
