Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD review: Solid alternative to laptop hard drives

Using Seagate's new Laptop Thin Solid-State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) is a bittersweet experience.

7.7

Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD

$53 at Amazon

$179 at Walmart

The Good

The <b>Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD</b> offers noticeably faster boot time and better overall performance than regular hard drives at a much lower cost than solid-state drives.

The Bad

The Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD's data transfer speed is slow. It comes with just 8GB of flash memory and spins at only 5,400rpm.

The Bottom Line

If you're looking for SSD-like performance at just a fraction of the cost, the Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD offers some gratification.

Sweet because it indeed offers boot time and overall improvement somewhat similar to that of a solid-state drive (SSD) at a fraction of the cost, and bitter because its data transfer speed is slower than most regular hard drives'.

The Laptop Thin SSHD is designed specifically for laptops and supercompact desktops that focus on daily computing needs rather than data-moving-intensive tasks, and for this purpose, at the current cost of just $86 for 500GB, it delivers. You definitely don't want to use it as a secondary drive or in an external storage application, though.

If you're looking to upgrade your computer from a hard drive so the system will boot up faster, but don't want to invest in an SSD just yet, the Laptop Thin SSHD, as well as its predecessor, the 2nd-generation Momentus XT, is about the second best choice. The new drive also proves that SSHDs, for now, are not real alternatives to SSDs, such as these, for those who want uncompromising performance.