Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD 500GB Review

As the name implies, AS SSD is a nifty little program written exclusively for solid-state drives. It can still be run on a mechanical hard drive just for fun, but be warned: what takes a few minutes on an SSD will require the better part of an hour on an HDD! It is freely available for download here.

This handy tool measures sequential reads and writes in addition to the important 4KB random reads and writes, then ranks the results with a final score for quick comparison with other SSDs. In addition to the main test there is a secondary benchmark that simulates the type of data transferred for ISO, Program, and Game files. We selected this program for its precision, ability to generate large file sizes on-the-fly, and because it is written to bypass Windows 7’s automatic caching system.

AS SSD is another test not designed for mechanical drives, and when we say that, we mean it. A single AS SSD run would take seconds on an SSD, but required two full hours on the SSHD due to how the testing is conducted. As such we only did two runs and reported the best result. Curiously, the RAID 0 setup fared even worse in the sequential read test, although we did three runs just to be sure.

The SSHD isn’t able to cache anything in the Copy tests, and delivers results behind those of the 2TB drive. Overall scores are nearly identical between them, however.