[section_title title=”Closer Look”]Closer Look
Both my drives arrived in very basic packaging, literally just anti-static bags but when purchased from a retailer, they will be well packaged with a box and/or plenty of bubble wrap.
Starting off with the Desktop SSHD, as you can see it looks like any regular hard drive. It is silver in colour and has all the regular characteristics you would associate with a desktop hard drive; 3.5” form factor and pretty weighty.
Here is a closer look at the front label which contains information regarding the serial number, model number, manufacturer and where the product was produced; Thailand. It also states that if any of the label is removed it void your warranty so don’t be tempted to pull it off!
The Seagate Desktop SSHD 2TB drive features a platter speed of 7200RPM which is pretty standard but the main difference between a regular HDD and the SSHD is that there is NAND flash memory helping the platter along, decreasing response time and of course making it effectively faster at booting into Windows etc. The interface is SATA 6GB/s, no mechanical hard drive is capable of maxing out the interface of SATA3; but the NAND certainly helps.
On the rear we have the green PCB which is standard on most mechanical hard drives.
Moving onto the clearly smaller Seagate Laptop 1TB SSHD, we have pretty much the same design as the Desktop version, just smaller and thinner. The Laptop SSHD is 2.5” and has a platter speed of 5400RPM; slower than the 7200RPM desktop drive but we shall see how much difference that makes in the testing.
Like the desktop version, the Laptop SSHD features the same SATA 6GB/s interface which the majority of new mechanical drives. This particular drive is 7mm thick which means it is very thin; it is also available in 5mm for tablets/notebooks and 9.5mm for older laptops and all-in-one PC’s.
The PCB on the Laptop SSHD has a blue/green tinge as opposed to the full green on the desktop version. It does however feature the exact same NAND flash technology to increase seek times and of course that ever important boot speed time.
