Desktop SSHD

After my HDD drive on my laptop at work failed, I got one of these to replace it. Boot times improved, and massive program load times improved tremendously, especially if I hadn't done much in between program loads.I got another one for my new computer build. I already have a 1 TB Caviar Blue for my Win 7 disk, and it works fine, so I didn't replace it. I have an Asus P9 X79 Pro Motherboard based computer. I know its old technology, but its already a lot faster than my i7-920 HP Pavilion. I put a SanDisk SSD Cache in the Pavilion, and that sped things up, a lot, so one of the reasons I got this MB was so I could use native SSD caching. Asus made it sound so simple.I thought at first, the cache was part of the board. Then, I thought the SSD plugged into the MB directly. Turns out, I have to use the Marvel controller, and I not only need a SSD, but also a HDD to do my SSD disk caching. I chose this drive for its capacity, and price. As it is a cache drive, none of the data on it is irreplaceable. The 8 GB of SSD is gravy, for the most part. The SSD I'm using is a Crucial 240 GB SSD, so I expect as my SSD fills up, the excess will spill over to the HDD, and the least often used files will end up on this drive. The most often used of the overflow files will live in the 8GB cache, so that will help, as will the 7200 RPM.As the drive is hidden in the disk caching setup, I can't tell what its transfer speed is. Windows seems to boot faster than ever before, and my multi-tabbed IE seems to start up a lot faster than before.The drive has a 3 year warranty, but I expect it to last a lot longer, because it will be off most of the time. That's because the SSD will be doing most of the caching.This was a bare drive, and came in a box in a box. It was in a sealed anti-static bag, and had two plastic supports, one on each end, to keep it from rattling around. There were no cables, nor screws included, as expected. I have a modular power supply, so I found a spare power cable for it, and used that for power, and bought an 18" SATA III 6Gb/s cable to run between it, and the Marvel controller. My computer case has tool-less HDD drive bays, so I didn't need any screws to install the drive.The drive was recognized immediately, and the SSD Caching software works flawlessly with it installed. What's not to like?

For anyone considering this as an upgrade or addition to your gaming PC then I have to say go ahead and order it! Many people may say that Seagate hard drives aren't as good in comparison to brands such as Western Digital, Samsung, etc, but I have owned 5 different Seagate hard drives from 2.5" laptop drives to this one and they are all still working today. My oldest is a 750GB SSHD in my laptop and it's been about 4 years since installation and it still works perfectly. I just installed this 3.5" hard drive yesterday inside my PC case mainly for my media(games, movies, tv shows, etc) and it is performing well. The only thing I can say is that the ssd portion of the drive isn't really necessary. In the grand scheme of the 4TB hard drive you are not going to notice a huge performance boost for most things, however it is always nice to have and does benefit the drive and still justify the price point in my opinion. That being said, this is still a great drive and I believe the majority of the drive is rated at 5900RPM. Now obviously this is not a 7200RPM drive but I can say that I have transferred my Steam library to this drive and it performs perfectly with no stutter. Load times remain close to what they were before the upgrade. I personally have had good experiences with Seagate in the past and continue to do so with this drive. The 4TB capacity is excellent and ensures that you won't need to upgrade or add an additional drive for quite a while.If you're looking for an upgrade or additional drive then I strongly suggest you purchase this drive for the price point as it can't really be beat and Seagate has always been an excellent brand of hard drives for me.

In a nutshell:I am booting the latest OSX from this hard drive using a "Plugable USB 3.0/2.0 SATA Hard Drive Docking Station (ASMedia Chipset; UASP and 3TB+ Support)." Installation was very simple, and I used "Carbon Copy Cloner" to clone my original hard drive. I ran a few speed tests, and I have been consistently getting 200mb/s read and write (which is at least twice as fast as a non hybrid. As far as functionality goes, my iMac seems to boot and perform much quicker and everything boots and wakes up with no issues. I found this to be the best way to upgrade my new iMac without having to pay more than I should have to directly from AppleShipment:Even with two late delivery trucks, UPS managed to get this hard drive to me in two days, which is hard to do. I was excited to get it, nonetheless! It was packed very well, and you know the damage during shipment just isn't going to happen.Good job!This looks like your typical internal hard drive, users who are going to use it in a dock (like me), may want to buy a cheap protective case off of amazon for ~$10 to protect it from drops and static shortages (there IS exposed circuitry).Performance:As stated, this is a hybrid hard drive, meaning there is an ultra fast SSD that can give the slower hard drive a "head start" by reading and writing along with it. The hard drive will mitigate the most used files to the SSD portion of the drive, and the rest will be stored on the hard drive, resulting in the perfect blend of speed and space. Through a USB 3.0 dock, I get about 200mb/s readings on Mac OS X 10.9.4 and on Windows 8. When testing an older 5400rpm drive through the same dock, my readings are about 80-90mb/s. The bump in speed results in faster boot time and overall zippier performance. I don't need to wait a few minutes for my iMac to finish booting, it finished over twice as quickly.