Amazon.com: Customer reviews: (Old Model) Seagate 2TB Desktop Gaming SSHD(Solid State Hybrid Drive) SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST2000DX001)

Top positive review

FIVE STARS!.. Outstanding cost effective quality product that does "exactly" what is claimed and really "is"....................

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2015

FIVE STARS!.. Outstanding cost effective quality product that does "exactly" what is claimed and really "is" an excellent compromise for those of us who can't afford an expensive SSD.

With apologies to Seagate... This is an edited review from my previous 3 star one which expressed disappointment because I had higher expectations... A Seagate support rep left a comment to that one correctly stating that it would take a few reboots before higher speeds are achieved with this drive via the adaptive memory feature..... They were right and "I stand corrected". Being a fair minded person I find it necessary to "make it right" and try to explain as best as possible my own personal experience so that other people will not make the same initial "assumptions" that I did.

Like many people I leave my desktop PC on all the time so that automatic functions like system backups, virus/malware scans, Windows updates, maintenance functions etc. all can occur as scheduled on a regular basis. I should also note here before I go any further that my computer doesn't normally get rebooted very often unless a software installation or update requires it...... "It does now".

Also like many people I equated this drive with a full dedicated SSD and expected an almost instantaneous increase in speed and performance. But... "it doesn't work that way". Apparently some of us forget (as I did) or fail to notice the "H" in SSHD.

I'm using this on an HP TouchSmart 300-1125 with 64bit Windows 7. After using this drive for not quite 2 months now I am seeing an almost daily increase in speed and performance... Time will tell how fast it will actually get before it finally peaks out. I estimate that my speed increase to date is about 50-60% faster than before as I write this. Not as fast as a dedicated SSD (yet), but "much" faster than my original drive. Or any other regular "non" SSD or SSHD drive currently available for that matter.

First noticecable speed increase was with my "feature loaded" email program since I use it several times a day... I needed to do a software update on a different program that required a reboot and after that I noticed that my email seemed to start up just a bit faster than usual. With each reboot it seemed to get a little faster and faster... It used to take almost 2-3 full minutes to load all the way. Now it loads up in less than 5 seconds. Performance results with all the other programs that I normally use on a daily basis has produced pretty much the same results. Bootup and reboot times are now also less than half as long as they used to be. Needless to say, I now reboot my machine at least once a day "every day" and will continue to do so until I feel that performance has finally peaked.

The adaptive memory feature of this drive is the key to it's success and also (in my case) the cause of some confusion about how it actually works. It takes a few reboots before the drive starts to remember which functions that you do most often on your computer and then it stores that data on the "high speed" side of the drive using the NAND flash memory. Simply stated this drive "learns" which functions that are performed most often and then each time you reboot your PC it updates itself and your most often used programs start to run faster. here's a page that explains it: http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/adaptive-memory-in-sshd-master-ti/

Top critical review

Critical reviews›

Patrik

Fast and quiet hybrid drive for about 1 month then problems started !

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2015

Original review I gave it a 5 Stars
A new lease on life for my iMac late 2009 model. The original internal drive was getting full and as a result my iMac was crawling more and more, I was getting the dreaded little multi-color spinning beach ball every time I would start a new application or pretty much do anything on my computer. I bought this hybrid drive through Amazon and bought a NewerTech miniStack enclosure from Other World Computing to put this drive in and connected it to my iMac using a firewire cable. Now this drive is my main start up drive. I have been using this set up now for about 1 month and it's working great. My iMac is definitely more responsive, shorter boot up/shut down time, faster to launch applications and I haven't seen the dreaded little multi-color spinning beach ball since using this hybrid drive. If you have a computer that support USB 3 then this will speed up even more data transfer then what I'm getting through firewire.

8/20/15 update: only 1 star !
Unfortunately the honeymoon didn't last. After about a month of use I started to run into problems. The drive would suddenly unmount and my iMac would crash, I would get more and more Finder freeze and needed to restart my computer, then it became difficult to restart/boot up from this drive as it would not mount properly. I did a lot of troubleshooting, used various disk utilities, repaired permissions, used different cables to connect the drive to my iMac, switched to different USB ports, ...finally I couldn't even run my daily clone backup which would fail due to disk error and ended up with corrupted and missing files so I sent back the drive to Seagate for a replacement under the warranty but fairly quickly ran into the exact same problems with the new drive. I talked to Seagate tech support that told me that this particular drive is made to only work when directly connected to the mother board of the computer and is not made to run a computer from an external enclosure. So I decided to bite the bullet as this is exactly what I was trying to avoid in the first place when I bought this drive and the enclosure , and get the drive installed in my iMac and got the special adaptor thermal cable kit from Other World Computing for my iMac late 2009 model. I'll spare you the details but even though it should have worked , it didn't. I had issues with the fans going crazy, then the store who installed it had to reopen the iMac about 3 times and reset the connecting cables a few times before the fans would work normally. Unfortunately the iMac still was having trouble, it had difficulty completing the boot up process without crashing in the middle of it, would make a weird sound while trying to start up and if it could complete the start up would only work well for a few minutes before crashing with a loud "plunk" sound ! ... I finally gave up and took the iMac back to the store to reinstall the original drive and I'm back to square one ! My iMac is now working normally with its old drive in.
So for some odd reason my iMac doesn't seem to be compatible with this Seagate hybrid drive at all even though I checked all the specs before getting it, talk to Other World Computing tech support before getting this drive and the enclosure, talked to them again before and after getting the adapter thermal cable kit and it should have been fine !? It doesn't mean that other people with iMac will have the same issue, I've read feedback of people running their iMac without any issues with this drive but if you have a late 2009 model, I would think twice before getting this drive.

9 people found this helpful

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From the United States

Hank

FIVE STARS!.. Outstanding cost effective quality product that does "exactly" what is claimed and really "is"....................

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2015

Capacity: 1TBVerified Purchase

Helpful

Amazon_Customer

A decent HD with an automated flash based read cache (8GB)

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2018

Capacity: 1TBVerified Purchase

Works just fine. No SMR no MTC (the drive doesn't do weird shingled writing, doesn't write cache to other parts of the platters and move it later). I don't know what Seagate is trying to do with other drives they make that are newer than this, but SMR belongs in archive drives (and maybe not even there).

(Normal drive)
Possible read paths:
Direct from the platters
From the platters (cached in flash memory)
From the platters (cached in RAM)

Possible write paths:
Direct to the platters
Cached (and maybe consolidated for a more efficient write) in RAM, then written to the platters

Your data is put on the platter (one time!) and it stays there unless you change it (data loss due to defect is of course possible on any brand hardware). Error rates are about 1 bit per 10^14 (1 in about 11.37 TB).

SMR/MTC drives (Seagate) have a different strategy...

Possible SMR/MTC read paths:
Direct from the platters
From the platters (cached in RAM)
From the platters (cached somewhere else on the platters)
From the platters (cached in flash memory if drive includes flash)

Possible SMR/MTC write paths:
To the platters (but first we need to read* up to ~256MB and write* it somewhere else, then write* it all back with the changes)
Cached (and maybe consolidated for a more efficient write) in RAM, then written to the platters (possibly needing to do the above line)
Cached (and maybe consolidated for a more efficient write) in flash*, then written to the platters (possibly needing to do the first line)
Data sitting on the drive (platters) which you aren't changing AT ALL may be read*, re-written* somewhere else, then re-written* back to where it was.

The non-SMR, non-MTC ST1000DX001 (the drive I bought) takes the data you asked it to write and writes it, once. (subject to the 1 bit per 10^14 read/write error rate -- one time)

Other (Seagate) MTC/SMR drives (not the ST1000DX001) take your data and write/re-read/re-write it possible 1 time, likely 2 times, or possibly 4 (or even more times, see the [*] above). EACH of these reads/writes is subjected to the 1 bit per 10^14 read/write error rate EVERY time. They've effectively made a 5x+ increase in the error rate without doing anything to compensate for it. This also added a lot of complexity overhead (more opportunities for things to go wrong).

ST1000DX001, a drive with simple flash based read caching: would buy
MTC/SMR, a drive with complex platter(w/SMR) and flash/platter read/write caching: serious doubts about buying.

Known SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives:

ST5000LM000
ST4000LM024
ST3000LM024

ST2000LX001
ST1000LX015
ST500LX025

ST8000DM004
ST6000DM003
ST4000DM004
ST4000DM005
ST3000DM007
ST2000DM005

ST2000LM015
ST2000LM007
ST1000LM049
ST1000LM048
ST1000LM035
ST500LM030
ST500LM034

ST500LM032
ST2000LM010
ST1000LM038
ST500LM033

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Crash and Burn

Works as advertised, and satisfies my SSD Caching utility

Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2016

Capacity: 1TBVerified Purchase

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?

Helpful

J. Cook

Installing the Seagate 4TB SSHD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST4000DX001) into a 10 year old system

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2015

Capacity: 4TBVerified Purchase

It's Sept 7 2015 and I purchased the Seagate 4TB SSHD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST4000DX001) to upgrade my HP Desktop PC. I'm excited about this drive but I had some problems with the install which I will detail here. I followed the YouTube video at this address: [...] This looks like a great solution for Windows 7 systems that support GPT. But my system doesn't support GPT or UEFI BIOS so that introduced some challenges to the install. I'm upgrading my HP Pavilion Elite m9177c Desktop, BIOS Revision 5.43 09-10-2009, ASUS IPIBL-LB (Benicia) Motherboard, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti, Windows 7 64bit system with a Seagate 4TB SSHD SATA - ST4000DX001. Apparently my HP doesn't support GPT and therefore won't recognize the new drive as single volume. It doesn't support GPT because it's BIOS is a Legacy BIOS instead of the newer UEFI BIOS required to support drive over 2.2TB. The new 4TB SSHD is recognized but has to be divided into 2 partitions under 2.2TB each. The Seagate DiscWizard software then adds a Seagate Driver to support the full 4TB capacity but just has to partition the drive into 2 partitions. In addition, I was having some difficulty getting the 2nd half, that is, remaining unallocated space to be recognized and therefore DiscWizard was not adding the required Seagate Driver. Researching this problem I discovered that if your system uses Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology) it has to be version 10.2 or higher. My system was running RST version 9 series.Therefore I went the the Intel Website and downloaded the latest Intel RST version (14) and installed it on my HP Pavilion. That then allowed the remaining 2TB of the 4TB SSHD to be recognized. So everything was cool but I just had two partitions - I was hoping for 1 large 4TB partition. The reason I bought this drive was to replace my 300GB System Drive C which was getting full. So now that I had the new drive fully recognized I CLONED drive C to the new 2TB partition. I was seeking a BOOT Drive with the full 2TB partition but what got was 2 Partitions. The first partition was the BOOT partition of 288GB. The second partition was the remainder of the 2TB partition. At this point I was puzzled as to how I ended up with this 2 partition clone result on the new drive. The 1st partition was the size of the original drive C 288GB and was full. The 2nd partition contained 8.43GB of data and the remainder was empty. Upon a closer look I realized that my source drive C actually contained 2 Partitions - Drive C and Drive E. So DiscWizard was simply cloning both partitions to the new drive. The 2 partitions of my original source consisted of the Boot partition drive C 288GB and a System Factory Image Drive E on a small 9.71GB partition. So I used Windows Disk Management to delete the System Factory Image - Drive E and then Extended the Boot Partition C to use the full 300GB capacity for drive C. Then I redid the clone using the manual option so I could control and verify the partition configuration. I used the Proportional Clone Option from the manual method which copied Drive to the new 2TB partition. This was exactly what I wanted. So now I have the full 2TB Partition as Drive C. I then shutdown the PC and unplugged the original Drive C and plugged the new drive 4TB drive and rebooted from the new 2TB partition. The system is running great. So it was a lot of work on my 10 year old PC but it was possible. I didn't get to use the full 4TB as Drive C but the 2TB Drive C will work just fine for me.

Helpful

Casey Digital Design Inc.

A fast, reasonably priced SSD-HD SATA drive that's a "Bottleneck Breaker"!

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2016

Capacity: 4TBVerified Purchase

I was starting to wonder why things slowed down on my fast machine with an SSD boot drive and 32GB of RAM? Was it my external Firewire800 and USB 3 drives? People had said they were supposed to be very fast, especially the new USB 3 standard with all the right cabling, etc. Were they not really as fast as advertised? I though the way to really see is invest in a new, guaranteed fast hard drive, so I ordered this SSD-HD SATA combo drive from Amazon. It was the recommendation of a good friend, who is the head of a university computer science IT department. He said he preferred them over SSD or HD solutions, since they are fast and can also be large capacity drives and I have always had a good experience with Seagate products.

I followed his advice and my whole system is running along smoother and measurably quicker. Faster overall drive response time with a setup with an internal SSD boot and application drive and this drive as the primary scratch/cache media drive has my system humming along again. In my experience, beware of giant low priced multiple TB external drives that claim to be fast since they use USB3. What's the drive rotation speed, access time, what's needed for USB 3.0 to work at full speed in your system.

I found that If anything from cables, to the choice of USB hub to system software isn't just right, the speed will drop down to USB 2.0 speed. Even if that doesn't happen, SSD and HDSSD drives leave Firewire and USB 3.0 in the dust. I'm glad I listened to advice and paid a little more for this drive. My slower drives were creating delays and data bottlenecks in a powerful system!

This drive was a good investment, it's very quick, although not as fast as an SSD drive, but still very quick compared to my USB 3.0 and Firewire 800 drives. I would buy another one just like it if finances allowed. :-) Maybe another one just like this one, to create a RAID striped array built with SSD-HD SATA drives for mixing video in Adobe After Effects, rendering 3D or just bulk video format conversions! If you are a media artist or heavy media user you'll be happy with this drive.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Brian

The HDDs disappear from Windows shortly after booting and when accessing them (4k sector issue on an older motheboard: SOLVED)

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2013

Capacity: 2TBVerified Purchase

I received 2 drives on 9/25. The very first thing I did was use Seagate Disk Tools to clone the disk. After the restart and during the copy process it only made it to phase 2. Then I started seeing errors about not being able to write to the new disk. I booted back into Windows 7 64-bit and started to troubleshoot. When trying to use Microsoft's Disk Manager or Seagate's SeaTools, the disk would disappear from the chain otherwise it would "display". I could not complete formatting the drive as I was getting an I/O error. Using soft restarts I could not see the new HDD during POST. If I powered off the machine and did a cold restart then the drive would appear in POST.

On the same late morning I used the 2nd disk. This time I went straight to formatting the disk then trying to clone it. I again couldn't format the disk. So then I tried cloning the disk. That didn't work. The drive would show up in Microsoft's Disk Manager until I tried to start accessing it. Then I stuck the drive into a 2nd computer and tried to install Windows 7 64-bit from DVD. It looks like it copied the data just fine but after the restart BIOS couldn't find any bootable devices and once again the drive disappeared from POST list.

Contacted Seagate's Tech Support. There are no firmware updates for these drives. There are no support pages at all for these drives on SeaGate's web site. Tech Support said that all the steps I took were the correct ones for troubleshooting. They have not heard of any problems or defects with any specific batches of ST2000DX001s. They didn't even have their own stock to replace the HDDs since they are so new.

At this point I gave up. Contacted Amazon to get 2 new replacements. So far I'm not happy with Amazon as I've clearly stated that I want replacement drives but I've just recently saw an e-mail about a refund. Amazon said they tested them and they were fine but they were not clear HOW they tested them even after asking them to explain what they've done.

I know Seagate's HDDs will work eventually and I think I just got a bad batch of 2. I'd update the post and stars if Amazon replaces my 2 drives and I can get them to work.

Update 2013/10/01
Amazon Customer Service apologized for the refund glitch. They offered to honor the original price I paid since the HDDs now cost more plus they offered free 1-day shipping. All I needed to do was place a new order and contact Customer Service with my two order numbers. I placed my order and I'm a little happier. Still need to look at my credit card statements for refunds. I just really want working HDDs.

Update 2013/10/09
A lot has gone on since my last post...
Drives 3 & 4 arrived. They behave the same as drives 1 & 2 but a little bit better but still unusable.

I've been in contact with Seagate Support again for drives 3 & 4. (Their support rocks. If you have any problems with your drives contact them and explain your situation. They want to help.) I got an advanced replacement disk from them today. That is disk #5 (drives 1 & 2 were returned to Amazon, disks 3 & 4 I still have). Disk #5 passed the SeaTools for Windows tests (the 1st disk to do so) but I still was unable to format the disk or use Seagate's DiskWizard to 'clone' or 'add a new disc' to my system. Then I took the 5th drive to a 2nd computer and tried to install windows 7 64-bit from DVD and the installer couldn't use the disk. I'm returning the advanced replacement drive to Seagate after fighting with it for 4 hours. One thing to note is that DiskWizard does mention that the 2 TB disk is 'Unsupported' on one of the wizard pages going through the clone process.

All I can really say is that there are either some incompatibilities with the 2 systems I have OR there might be a defect. I'm working with Seagate Customer Care to get to the bottom of this. They want to collect the drives I've been having problems with to see if there are any defects. I'm hoping that it is a firmware defect that can quickly be resolved so I can start using these disks. Seagate is a really good company that does stand behind its products. I've used them for 15 years and will continue to purchase them.

All of the disks I've used were model: ST2000DX001
All of the disks I've used had Firmware: CC43
Disk #3's PN: 1CM164 - 300
Disk #3's FW (firmware): CC43
Disk #3's Date: 14092
Disk #3's Site: TK
Disk #4's PN: 1CM164 - 300
Disk #4's FW (firmware): CC43
Disk #4's Date: 14092
Disk #4's Site: TK
Disk #5's PN: 1CM164 - 300
Disk #5's FW (firmware): CC43
Disk #5's Date: 14102
Disk #5's Site: TK

[LAST UPDATE] 2013/12/02 (I was very late adding this last comment - sorry)
The problem with my scenario was that my machine/motherboard (ESC G31T-M Rev 1.0) was too old to understand the 4K disk. While the disk would show up as soon as it was accessed it would disappear. There are a couple of workarounds IF you want to keep a drive like this in an old machine. You could try getting a new SATA card instead of using the on-board ports. You could try a RAID card.

Also with my scenario Seagate Tech Support went above and beyond to help me. They dug into it as much as they could and came up with an answer. Love them for it. Customer Support has drastically waned over the years. But not at Seagate. They were the definition of 'Customer Support'/'Customer Care'. I will stick with them because of this experience. They should be a standard for a lot of other companies. Kudos guys (I know you are reading this).

Since this posting I've ordered an 4 additional ST2000DX001 HDDs.

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Matthew Williams

Great SSHD for the price

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2016

Capacity: 4TBVerified Purchase

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.

One person found this helpful

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Patrik

Fast and quiet hybrid drive for about 1 month then problems started !

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2015

Capacity: 2TBVerified Purchase

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Tom Holt

For value and performance the drive deserves 5 stars, Seagate Support let it down a bit.

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2014

Capacity: 1TBVerified Purchase

My system is a five-year old desktop, running Windows 7, that was a budget high-flyer when I got it. The Gigabyte motherboard doesn't even mention AHCI, for example. I thought my experience of installing might help others.

I installed the drive without a hitch, although I had to get a 4-pin to SATA power adapter (3 bucks) to connect it. The existing drive, a Seagate 7200 500 GByte drive was still going strong with no errors, so I kept that for backup. I cloned the current drive using Seagate's free DiskWizard and transferred the operating system and all installed software to the new drive. Worked like a dream! In Bios, I set the system to boot from the new drive and restarted. Again, no problems, Windows 7 even automatically renamed the new boot drive to C for me. Three or four programs were slightly hardwired to the old disk and wouldn't run immediately. One required using the install disk to repair the installation, the others just wanted me to manually edit the shortcut parameters - no problem. However, the drive seemed less spry than another hybrid I have on my laptop - booting took about half the time it did on the old drive, but things like coming out of Sleep seemed about the same as before. I read around and it seems I could try setting the SATA mode to ahci by editing the Registry. However, my motherboard hasn't heard of ahci, but it does have SATA enhanced setting that looked promising. Time to ask Seagate for their view. They were decidedly unhelpful - anything to do with the motherboard was not their province and they ignored my query about editing the registry. In the end by trial and error, lots of speed tests, and not a few Blue Screens of Death, I came upon the following procedure for Windows 7 - please, if you don't understand what I'm saying don't do it!

1) using regedit change the registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStorV\Start - set to 0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci\Start - set to 0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\pciide\Start - set to 3

2) restart the PC and enter BIOS to find the entry controlling SATA mode
It may be set to IDE, if so set it to AHCI
If your motherboard doesn't mention AHCI, set the mode to the most advanced looking option, note down what it is currently set to so that if anything goes wrong you can make it work again. On my Gigabyte motherboard, I set the SATA mode to ENHANCED.

3) Save BIOS and let it carry on booting.

This makes my hybrid drive race along! It might take a couple of seconds longer to boot (my system loads an extra drive controller), but coming out of Sleep, for example, is now instant. Another thing I should mention is that my chipset is quite old and allegedly doesn't support ahci - but it works! So, Seagate's claim that all you have to do is install the drive is not quite true. You can tweak an old system to perform like a new one!

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

H.P. Hilton

No longer under review

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2013

Capacity: 2TBVerified Purchase

9/30/2013 (increased from 2 Stars to 4) What ever was wrong with these drives has been corrected or updated. I received my second drive, installed it, and it booted with no issues. I am running a dual boot system for Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Windows 7 performance on this drive is quite an increase from my WD black. No surprise there really. It boots twice as fast, and the programs are ready to use much quicker. I have noticed the biggest change in Photoshop though as before my system would halt for 2 seconds (complete lock up) before Photoshop would begin to become active. Now I select it and it loads nearly instantly without a hiccup.

Games that load from your disk operate much more smoothly. I use Origin and Steam for most of my gaming, having a much faster hard drive decreases load times and makes the games feel more stable (to me anyway).

Windows 8 - This is where the performance increase is truly amazing. My system boots into 8 before my monitor has time to come out of sleep and display. This can be an issue if you want to get into bios or safe mode as you really have to be mashing the button prior to turning the system on.

Thoughts: As another reviewer stated this drive isn't as fast as a SSD (especially on Windows 7). The OCZ Vector I have on another PC is still faster. BUT again the Vector or any other SSD isn't an option for a standalone drive for most people. This Seagate is very fast for a Hybrid drive, it is very fast for having 2tb of storage and for being under $150.

For anyone who wants a performance increase over their standard drive, needs a lot of space, and doesn't want to spend much this drive is for you.

For anyone who wants to game, run Creative Suite, and have optimal performance from your PC but doesn't want to drop a lot of cash my suggestion is to get this drive and a 120 - 180gb SSD (Samsung 840 Evo, Samsung 840 Pro, or OCZ Vector) for your OS. You would pay about the same as a 250gb SSD but have a lot more space.

9/24/2013 Came DOA which can happen with any electronic device. However when I tried to get a replacement Amazon is no longer selling them because they are under review. This leads me to believe there is a major fault with this drive. I am going to hold out and pick up another one once they get this sorted I was really excited about this drive. I will update after I receive another.

5 people found this helpful

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(Old Model) Seagate 2TB Desktop Gaming SSHD(Solid State Hybrid Drive) SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST2000DX001)

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(Old Model) Seagate 2TB Desktop Gaming SSHD(Solid State Hybrid Drive)... › Customer reviews

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(Old Model) Seagate 2TB Desktop Gaming SSHD(Solid State Hybrid Drive) SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST2000DX001)

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(Old Model) Seagate 2TB Desktop Gaming SSHD(Solid State Hybrid Drive)...

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