Thinkpads Forum

Does anybody have any experience with the Seagate Hybrid 750GB drives and W520? How is the reliability with these drives?

Anybody?

I've had a couple of Seagate 250 gig hybrid drives since 2010 and they work well. Quiet and responsive. About 80% as fast as a solid state drive. The latest versions are probably even better.

mgo wrote:I've had a couple of Seagate 250 gig hybrid drives since 2010 and they work well. Quiet and responsive. About 80% as fast as a solid state drive. The latest versions are probably even better.

Thank you!

I was planning on using acronis HDD clone software to copy the W520 500GB image to the Seagate hybrid 750GB drive using the Ultrabay HDD adapter. Will this work ok?

Thanks!

I bought this drive to use along with a mSATA boot drive. The reliability has been fine. Once it suddenly disconnected, but I think that was mechanical. (I have the rubber bumpers on, but reseating the drive and rebooting left everything fine.)

I have found it to benchmark (ATTO) slower than other 7200RPM drives, peaking at just under 90MB/sec vs. the 110MB/sec I get from a WDC WD5000BEKT-75KA9T0 (both in the regular HDD bay on my W520). (Not sure if one would expect a 500GB drive to be faster than a 750GB.) A benchmark can not take advantage of the flash cache the way it was designed, of course.

Not at all sure it's worth the money if not being used as a boot drive. Once I'm done with some work for which I needed the extra space, I will probably put it in a family member's computer and see what happens when used as the only drive.

Oh, and I did use Acronis Disk Director 11 to copy the partitions; no problem there.

davidhbrown wrote:I bought this drive to use along with a mSATA boot drive. The reliability has been fine. Once it suddenly disconnected, but I think that was mechanical. (I have the rubber bumpers on, but reseating the drive and rebooting left everything fine.)

I have found it to benchmark (ATTO) slower than other 7200RPM drives, peaking at just under 90MB/sec vs. the 110MB/sec I get from a WDC WD5000BEKT-75KA9T0 (both in the regular HDD bay on my W520). (Not sure if one would expect a 500GB drive to be faster than a 750GB.) A benchmark can not take advantage of the flash cache the way it was designed, of course.

Not at all sure it's worth the money if not being used as a boot drive. Once I'm done with some work for which I needed the extra space, I will probably put it in a family member's computer and see what happens when used as the only drive.

Oh, and I did use Acronis Disk Director 11 to copy the partitions; no problem there.

Thank you!

I got 2 750GB drives, and they are working fine.

I also have a Momentus XT 750 GB in my W520- along with a MyDigitalDiscount 128 GB mSATA SSD. The XT has been rock solid so far but I've only been using it for a month. My benchmark numbers with HDTune 2.55 are a bit faster than the other poster and in actual use the drive seems much faster than the factory Seagate 500 GB 7200 rpm drive it replaced.

My working set of data on that drive is usually under 2 GB (fits in a free Dropbox folder) - these are work in progress Office, image, Adobe CS and other content files so likely they all fit in the XT's NAND cache. The other 520 GB of files on the XT are only rarely accessed (music, photos, code, software) and might not be cached much.

In addition to the stock 500 GB drive I used to have a 128 GB Samsung 830 SSD in a carrier in the Ultrabay to hold the working set of files. It benchmarked 4x faster than the XT but in day to day usage I'm not sure I can tell a difference. Certainly responsiveness of NTFS filesystem and searches is equivalent in Windows Explorer and Directory Opus 10 between the XT and the Samsung 830 SSD. The 830 also benchmarked at roughly 2x the mSATA SSD but other than faster boot time (which isn't a big deal as I cold boot it maybe once a month) I'm not sure there is enough benefit to not using the mSATA slot.

I also keep all of the drives encrypted with TrueCrypt 7.1 using AES 192-bit - not sure if that matters but it makes dealing with drive warranty returns much simpler as I don't have to worry about wiping a nonfunctioning drive before sending it in for replacement.

BTW, I've had a lot of problems with the machine hanging but with some really great help from Douglas and Matt in the MyDigitalDiscount customer service I think I've traced it to using the Microsoft ACHI driver rather than the Intel RST iastor.sys ACHI driver. Under the Intel driver the hang-ups seem to be gone. I still need to update the mSATA SSD's firmware but that process erases the drive so I'm waiting until I have time to deal with a backup/restore cycle.

Hmm... I just had that "drive suddenly disappears" thing happen with this drive. As it wasn't my boot drive I was able to just restart -- didn't try reseating it this time -- and the POST screen wouldn't appear while the disk activity light was solidly on. So I powered off all the way and booted; no problems since (that was Friday; this is Tuesday). I've never seen this happen before, but then I've never had three drives in a notebook on a regular basis before, either. Quite possibly unrelated to the hybrid drive itself. Not to the point where I can replicate.

I'll presume no one else is seeing anything similar and it's just a glitch from some unknown cause.