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Performance

Caching is King: Assessing Top PC Storage Options for Tomorrow
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Many Tom’s Hardware readers will be interested in knowing how hybrid technology stacks up against competing storage options. With Seagate having just released its third-generation SSHD, we don’t yet have internal testing results. However, we were able to obtain a fair cross-section of data from Seagate.

The following four slides show two conventional laptop HDDs compared to the two most recent Seagate SSHD generations as well as Intel’s recent SSD 320 Series. (These tests did not examine mSATA options.)

There are a few interesting points here. First, PCMark is a widely used synthetic benchmarking suite that focuses on several common, consumer-centric storage tasks, especially in regard to media file handling. SysMark has a similar suite, but it focuses more on complete system testing with more demanding apps, so variances specifically in the storage subsystem will be minimized. Notice that the relative ranking of drives remains consistent between these two tests; only the degree of difference between them changes due to the nature of the workloads.

The remaining two tests focus on one of the average user’s chief concerns: that is, Howlong is it going to take this thing to load? In the Time to Ready test, we can see how some of the firmware and algorithm improvements in the latest Seagate generation make a substantial difference. Overall, SSHDs perform in the zone between HDDs and SSDs, clearly leaning much closer to the latter.

The story is much the same with the Seagate Desktop SSHD.

Seagate also provided us with data that did incorporate testing with a 32GB mSATA device in a flash cache-plus-hard drive configuration using Intel SRT. These tests were conducted on an Ultrabook running a Core i5 processor with 4GB of RAM on Windows 7. Note the improvements resulting from firmware tweaks between the second- and third-generation Seagate hybrid models.

The obvious takeaway here is that NAND caching provides a massive performance gain over a standard 7200-RPM hard drive. The difference between flash cache and SSHD in this scenario is not very significant. There is some gain to be had from going to a full SSD, but this must also be weighed against cost and capacity liabilities.

With boot time testing, the story remains the same. Going 100% magnetic yields a 200% gain in time spent waiting for the system to load. The two-second variance from fastest (SSD) to slowest (the Momentus XT—Laptop HDD) in the flash-enabled options is almost insignificant.

Once more, our flash-based app launch and file loading tests look almost flat down the line. The SSD essentially offers no performance advantage here for the offset in cost and loss of storage capacity.

Finally, we again see the latest Seagate hybrid design pulling impressively close to full-blown SSD levels in video editing tasks. Note how the new SSHD performs much closer to the SSD than to the mSATA drive behind it.