17.4.2017

SIZE-----This is the 3.5” - for desktops. You can get a 2.5” for laptops (by all means check it will actually fit first regardless of standards) but you can get a 2.5” for a laptop and an adapter and make it fit in to a desktop - but a 3.5” is very unlikely to fit in to a modern laptop.ABOUT DRIVES------------------SSHD - Solid State Hybrid Drive.SSD - Solid State Drive.No moving parts - typically expected to be harder to break, lasts longer.Faster read/write speeds.Less power to run - reads 3-5x faster than HDD’s.More expensive.Take for example the MacBook Pro, which has a 512GB SDD. It’s why they’ve managed to get the thing so thin, and why it’s relatively silent when in use.But big SSD’s remain expensive if you need TB’s of space, for things like programs, games, or anything BIG and requiring a lot of processing power.HDD - Hard Disk Drive.Like a vinyl record, has a disk inside it, with a pin that reads it.Cheaper for bigger capacities, but don’t tend to have fast read/write speeds - booting up can be slow.Which is why HDD’s are normally the go-to…but they can be slow. So a combination of a HDD and SDD (= SSHD) is trying to combine space and speed, for the best of both worlds.SSHDs, or Hybrid Drives, have a HDD providing the storage space, but also a SSD which ‘learns’ what you and your computer does the most, and puts things on that to improve speed and access. (Very dumbed down description, but basically.)BENEFITS——————I put this in an old 2010 Mac Pro desktop - replacing 250GB HDD with this 2TB SSDD. Apart from there obviously being more space now, it does boot and save my files a bit quicker.To add a bit of context, I mostly am focusing on using NLE’s like Premiere Pro and Graders DaVinci Resolve for video editing, which are ‘heavy’ programs that require a lot of processing power. On this old Mac Pro, after clicking export, I can normally be expecting to wait 10 minutes for a fully finished export of a 30 second video. Now it’s down to 5-6.Similarly, the actual booting of the Adobe softwares seem quicker; a minute or so quicker, when they’d normally take 2.So in experience, this hard drive seems to have given an improvement, however it is down to the other elements of hardware inside your computer. My Mac has 8GB of RAM which I updated personally; it was born with 4GB. If it had 4GB now, Premiere might struggle to perform as it does now even with the hard drive upgrade. It’s thinking about all the elements and what you want to do, and why. This will determine whether you will get out of your new hard drive what you want to get out of it.NAS USAGE--------------Installing Hybrid drives in a NAS - not ideal.A NAS is a Network Attached Storage, which in laymans terms is like a personal server, or cloud, in your home. It’s like having an external drive, except it’s plugged in to your internet instead, and anyone can access it.Why not use a SSHD on a NAS? Well you can, but it’s just a bit of a waste of it’s capabilities, and therefore a waste of your money, because you could buy something cheaper that will do the same thing. A bit like only wanting a car that will go from A to B in a 40 mph zone - a Corsa will do the job as expected, a Lamborghini also would, but would be overkill and you wouldn’t get to use it for it’s full potential.SSHD in a NAS might improve the write speed (how quickly you can put something on your drive) but is unlikely to improve the read speed (how quickly you can view/use something on your drive). So in terms of why you even might have a NAS - either for long-term storage of important but small documents or shared access of videos and photos, the SSDD’s ability to have a faster read speed than a HDD would be uselessly used. So logically you might as well just get a HDD for a NAS for a fair bit cheaper.OVERALL-----------It comes with a 5 year warranty, but Seagate though, I am still wary. I’ve had 2 drives from them in the past that have lasted a year for one and two for the other, but failed miserably eventually, and have also heard stories from friends that own their external drives that have straight up failed on them with no warning. This review is accurate from the sense that i’ve been using it for a month, I guess all i’m saying is don’t trust everything that’s important to it right away - it functions well, it works - but see how it goes, and always have a backup.

2.6.2017

I think the most effective way of reviewing this Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) is through a series of pictures, which have been attached below. But first, just in case anyone doesn't know what a SSHD is, it is effectively a normal hard drive (in this case, 2GB), with a very small solid state drive (8GB) for processing the most commonly used files. The idea is that files used in loading the operating system and other commonly used files will be loaded from the solid state drive (and thus processed very quickly) whilst other less commonly used files will be loaded from the normal hard drive. In theory, this should provide a faster operating speed overall,without the huge cost of buying a solid state drive with the same capacity.As mentioned above, I have primarily reviewed this drive by comparing it to both a hard disk drive and a solid state drive. All of these drives, including this SSHD were installed in the same computer, at the same time and so the results below should be purely due to difference in the drives themselves. The speed test results attached below are for a hard disk drive (HDD), solid state drive (SSD) and this SSHD respectively.In terms of read speeds, the HDD and the SSHD are very similar (which wasn't overly surprising, given that the use of the solid state component is described as a learning exercise i.e. the software recognises which files are used most and transfers them to the solid state component automatically). However, I was somewhat surprised by the huge difference in write speeds and in particular, that the write speeds on the SSHD are much faster than the read speeds. I guess this must be because files are initially written to the solid state buffer (which should be very quick) before being transferred to the hard drive.The key message is though that the SSHD is nowhere near as fast as a full SSD and this is noticeable in the overall performance i.e. my computer takes much longer to boot with the SSHD than with the SSD. However, the performance is better than a conventional HDD and so should genuinely be considered as a compromise between a HDD and a SSD.For the majority of people, such a compromise won't be necessary, as a 256GB SSD can be purchased for less than this 2GB SSHD, with 256GB being more than sufficient in the majority of cases. However, where a significant amount of additional space is required, the price of an SSD would be astronomical and so this would probably be the next best reasonably priced alternative (with the only other option being to have two separate drives i.e. a small SSD on which the operating system is manually installed and another HDD for data storage).

7.5.2017

Well it came time to upgrade my aging PC hard drive and I was originally going to get an SSD but after a lot of research I decided to opt for an SSHD instead....but why?The reason is that in theory at least the SSHD provides the sweet spot in cost versus speed versus volume.The right solution for you will depend on how you use your PC.I am primarily a gamer with a large library who tends to play a few games for a long time and this means that all I really need is a large drive capable of loading a few programs quickly and this is exactly what this SSHD provides.The relatively small amount (8GB) of NAND memory is enough to store and quickly load my Windows 8.1 OS and my favorite games.The SSHD

20.4.2017

My favourite HD's were Samsung Spinright, I used them for years and I was very disappointed when Samsung stopped production, what I didn't know at the time was Samsung had sold their Hard drive division to Seagate for $1.4 Billion or so, and they had agreed a deal whereby Samsung continued to supply Seagate with NAND chips and Seagate provided Samsung with Hard Drives - All very well then, With the deal came Samsung's Hybrid HDD's and this produced the Hybrid 'Firecuda' which is what this review is supposed to be about!Hybrid drives - as the name implies, combine two technologies, SSD (Solid State Drives) with conventional HD's (Hard Drives) and it does this with NAND flash memory chips built into the drive as a cache.

17.3.2017

So I bought this as my iMac 2010 HD crashed. Initially, I considered doing the SSD upgrade but it was crazily expensive so I decided to go a level up from basic and bought this Hybrid drive. I watched tonnes of youtube how to videos as I decided to do the repair myself, I was all set to purchase just the hard drive, suction cup and screwdrivers when I came across a blog warning "fixers" of the issue they may face. iMac has an additional cable linking the hard drive to the mother board which checks the temperature of the hard drive and regulates the fan appropriately, the problem is most hard drives do not come with the extra port for the temperature sensor to plug in to.

8.12.2017

I installed the Seagate 2TB FireCuda (ST2000LX001 ) HD into my laptop this morning (8 Dec 2017) and so far everything is working as it should. I bought this HD for storage and as it has a 5-year warranty it seemed like the better deal when compared to the Barracuda. I will update this review once I have had more time to work with the HD and let you know how it is. Until then, here are my initial impressions:Packaging: The HD arrived the next business day as promised, however I was very surprised (and disappointed) to see that the HD comes in a sealed bag which has been put in a simple brown card Amazon envelope. No padding, bubble wrap or anything. Considering it costs just under £100,

1.5.2017

UPDATE:One week on and I just wanted to add an update to my original review.This is a fast SSHD much faster than the original 750Gb standard 5400 spin HD in my Dell Laptop, which has now been rejuvenated. It now even boots up a few seconds faster than my 8 core Android tablet which was the go to device when I needed info on the net quickly. The fan still runs for very long periods for no apparent reason before stopping for a rest, then off it goes again, but so far everything else about this SSHD appears to be as claimed by the makers. Its is also very quiet in operation. Were it not for the minor issue with the fan, I would have given 5 stars and as no one else has mentioned the problem,

17.4.2017

SSHDD’s have been around for some time. They came about while ssd’s were still prohibitively expensive and lacking in capacity. Both of which have started to be addressed now.The concept is a traditional mechanical hard drive thus benefiting cheap storage capacity with a small amount of flash memory, in this case 8gb, designed to effectively cache your most common used files and speed things up.Do they work? Well yes and no. The drive will learn which files you access regularly and essentially store them in that 8gb of space. That way the things you do often should be faster than a regular drive, which they are. However 8gb is not enough to make a difference across the whole system.

27.12.2017

Yes this is 1/3rd more expensive than the equivalent Barracuda from Seagate's own range but on the whole you are probably getting that extra 30% performance over the standard hard drive.The case for these I suppose is where you really needed a big SSD but can't afford it. So these are the compromise and they deliver the middle ground as you would expect in everyday use (I haven't benchmarked it). I already have a 250GB Sandisk SSD as my main system drive and I previously had a two 500GB Hitachi drives in Raid 0 for data and games but I used a PCI sata card for that and it became unreliable in my old system.

16.4.2017

The following review has been written by my son who is currently using this hard drive in his gaming PC.As a PC gamer I always try to make the most out of my hardware. I have recently installed a new cooling fan and graphics card, but storage was my main problem. I was still running an old 700GB hard drive that I received with my PC many years ago and felt that an upgrade was needed.This 2TB Seagate FireCuda was exactly what I needed for installing all the larger games in my library, such as World of Warcraft and Black Desert Online. It's currently used as my default drive for Steam and EA Origin games.Installation was a breeze as I was able to switch out one hard drive for another and use the Windows 10 Disk Management tool to detect the device.

16.7.2018

Just bought this to replace an ageing (but not useless and still working 2012 Barracuda 7200 rpm drive) on my Alienware X51 machine.Is it faster? Duh it is, but only on certain tasks. Take for instance, if I restarted my computer and timed it from the point the PC gets past it's Manufacturer boot screen and actually shows the windows loading Icon and circular timer thing...it takes 62 seconds to reach my desktop (I have auto sign in)...however if I do this from a shut down, and completely off, it would take only 18 seconds.I guess it hasn't learned yet to put restart files into it's SSD cache, to do the same when restarting. After the customary updates from fresh boot, the HDD needs to learn again,

9.5.2017

im in love with this product, games loads faster than in previous seagate 7200 rpm drive, i bought this product throught amazon.de (germany) be carefull with this: seagate have 2 ( or more) factorys and the cases are different, you are right about the number of platters, the best hard drives are the ones with less platters, so this is a thing to remember, seagate have been selling the same product with different number of plates and with different performance. The clue for knowing if you got a seagate hard drive with 1 or two plates is the notch in the top right corner, if this notch is 1/2 cm deep you are lucky because its a 1 plate hard drive, if the notch in top right corner is near to be flat,

16.1.2017

First of all, this was packaged well, so don't worry about that if you purchase from amazon (see attached image).This is an SSHD, or Hybrid, drive which uses the traditional hard drive with a small but very fast cache to blend the performance of an SSD with the capacity of a hard drive. It will not be as fast as an SSD, but will load your most frequently used files much quicker than a standard hard drive because these are the ones it will copy to the small ssd-style cache.Where you will get the most out of this drive is if using it as the main boot drive in a computer. Because I am only using it as a storage drive (so won't access any files more frequently than others),

19.6.2017

Yes I know we'd all like huge 2TB solid state drives and we will one day , when the price gets cheaper. but for the moment this gives me the huge storage needed for photos and video, but the SSD component has made a drastic improvement on boot and wake up times. My PC was really getting sluggish with the choked up 500GB Barracuda. So this really has breathed new life into my pc. for a very small price outlay.As a side note, I have always been a big fan of Seagate due to the long warranty they offer. All the drives I've ever bought have been Seagate and I have never had a single problem with any of them. As long as one of your drives is a Seagate you can use the free DiscWizard and Seatools utilities from Seagate to clone your hard drive over to your new SSHD.

23.4.2017

This hard drive, is a very good drive. It's an SSHD (A hybrid Solid State and mechanical hard Drive); things installed onto it run faster and start up faster. Hybrid drives provide the best of both worlds - having SSD speed of access and large volume storage in one drive. They are excellent value for money in this respect. An excellent example of this, are two games which originally, installed onto my standard mechanical SATA hard drive, took forever to start up, Garry's mod, and GTA 5.Now, I don't think this has improved my framerate in those two games, but It has definitely made it load up faster, and the frame-rate more stable.Things from a solid state drive can load from the drive to the actual computer faster,

Seagate FireCuda 2TB (ST2000LX001) - Reviews

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