Seagate 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive

With the Seagate 1TB using a self-optimized mode in the drive's firmware for determining what data to move between the traditional rotating hard drive storage and the 8GB of MLC flash storage, there's no special drivers needed for using this Seagate SSHD. However, it's also hard to tell just how well the SSHD is working and if it's being of benefit. In the quick and dirty Linux disk benchmarks done for this article, the Seagate ST1000DX001 was much faster than the old SATA 2.0 HDDs used for comparison but generally much slower than the solid-state drives -- even the aging Vertex 2 Serial ATA 2.0 SSD.

If you wish to compare your own disk drive's performance against the HDD/SSD disk drives and Linux tests used in this article, it's a simple matter of installing the Phoronix Test Suite and running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1311267-SO-SSHDSSDHD06.