Tuesday 4 November 2014

Seagate 1TB Laptop SSHD (ST1000LM014)

Well, this was a oppoturnity after a nightmare of DOGS CHEWING FUCKING LAPTOP CHARGERS. Which really enraged me, especially since it was on a Friday and although i had a chance to get a temporary charger for the weekend, i was still fuming.

So after searching around, i finally found one. But i also wanted to try a SSHD since the laptop has been feeling slower and slower and i noticed its in relation to the HDD speed. Since i'm a seagate partner (Well i signed work up as a partner and info is in my name) and i already have good experience (i've heard otherwise but barracudas haven't been too bad. They were a next port of call.

Now i was tempted to go for a 500GB option but due to the fact that i was almost less than the formatted size of a 500GB drive left (465GB) on there, it would be best to get the ST1000LM014.
After pricing around, or more so looking for one supplier for both items. LambadaTek was my choice. The invoice i paid is below:

The invoice i paid from them. 

  • The charger (Part number: AA-PA1N90W/UK) was £50.11. One of my works suppliers is selling that for £70 :O
  • The SSHD was £64,81. Dabs have reduced it to under £60 by £0.02. But if you want to be safe with amazon, your free to click below


Then after 2 couriers i know of, they turned up and then both items, arrived.
The items i ordered that arrived. 

Also if you want to see the Segate specs, the PDF they provide is embedded below:



The SSHD before the fitting

Both products arrived, i was testing android the night before and it has to be the luck of getting windows to boot again. But once that was done, i opened the box and started to review. If you want to watch the video, check below:




Now the packaging wasn't in a retail box, which can give me a scare to wonder if its an OEM product, which if it is, that fucks the warranty completely :(, But it wasn't as far as the labels go, so i'm fine for the moment.
The only marking on the box, with the seagate part number and the size aswell as seagate

The top of the box
Then i opened the box and the SSHD. In a nice anti static bag, it was the standard you usually get. With all the part number, serial numbers on the label.

The front of the SSHD

The back of the SSHD

Fitting it was not a problem, it was the same size as the old HDD, which i thought was 7mm, but it must of been 9.5mm since the SSHD is 9.5mm from the seagate spec. Either way, it was nice to have no "OH SHIT TEH DRIVE IS TOO BIG FOR ME LAPPY" issue.

After fitting, it was time to boot it up and get the drive cloned.

The tales of a slow discwizard. 

If you want DiscWizard, click HERE. ]
The basic features are free, acronis sell more features for ££/$$$.

Now this was the more troublesome part, Cloning the drive, i must admit, it was a nervy process but with the old drive being slot to initate the cloning, i ended up installing it on my desktop, then make a usb version (it does let you do this) then i ran the cloning from there, It took about 2 hours and then it was all done, all cloned and bootable. 

The best advice i can say here is create the bootable media and then do the clone that way. it would of saved me at least 30 minutes or made it quicker within that time. 

The testing after the clone


It felt the same speed for the first few boots, but by the 4th or 5th boot, it was much smoother, i mean the fact the boot time was UNDER 2 MINUTES, compared to it being between 4 and 7 minutes is a nice improvement to say the least. 

There was even a problem with chrome not rendering the pages properly when the HDD was in full use. But once the SSHD was running, i've had none of that problem, thats a definate sign of goodness. I can also log on quickly. 

With the NP550P7C, there is a thing with the 2 SATA ports. The main port (the one i didn't put the SSHD in the video) is actually the SATA III port. Which i didn't realise, but it does help to speed it up and since the drive is SATA III, it makes it smoother even further. 

There is also less sign on the HDD indicator which makes it better again.
Speccy was reporting it fine and even 27C, which its interesting since the other drive never went below 30, even in the colder (SATA II) port. 
The details of the drive in Speccy. (Serial number is hidden for obvious reasons)

The conclusion:

After more booting and some software testing, i found it was making the laptop much better, faster and easier to work with. Sure the value is reasonable but you have to look around to find that £5 off or in my case deal with a hyper puppy eating wires on halloween which makes you have an excuse to purchase it.

omracer's Rating: 8/10

The good points

  • a clear sign of faster improvement in terms of booting and application loading. 
  • 1TB which is plenty.
  • as seagate said, no extra effort needed other than to replace a hard drive like normal.
  • potential for this under £70

The bad points

  • 8GB NAND isn't that much even though corporate testing say its perfect or a nice amount
  • The speed is noticeable but not with a click of a finger style speed like a proper SSD.

so, this has made my life a little quicker for a while and if your feeling like you need a SSD but need a bit of storage internally, this is your best bet and doesn't break the bank.

More reviews soon
omracer