Seagate launched their 600 Series SSD drives mid-last year and they really kicked up a lot of dust in the SSD community. We had briefly touched on them, as well as a few others at the time. Recently however, they were kind enough to send one our way to test out so that we can dig a little deeper and bring you a solid state review.
Our first impression when holding it was “wow, this drive is really thin”. The drive we tested was the 5mm (thickness) model, designed for smaller devices such as tablet and small notebooks that focus on thin designs, such as the Macbook Air. The links we will provide later will direct to the 7mm model, only because the average consumer is still seeking this for the typical size notebooks and devices (your average-size 2.5″ drive).
We found that 480GB was the perfect amount of space as it provides for any given situation, regardless if you are the multi-drive/partition type or cram everything onto your “C” drive and call it a day.
The speed of the drive was more impressive than some of the Sandisk drives we have tested in the past (given, we haven’t gotten our hands on anything new within the last 6 months or so). We tested it with both the Windows 7 and Windows 8 OS environments, and both systems booted much quicker than any normal 5400 or 7200 spinning drive (the average times was about 10-13 seconds with all startup apps loaded). Operating system performance will be heavily seen while using these drives, both during boot and the response of calling up apps (keep in mind, once the app is open, the rest depends on the rest of your resources, such as CPU).
File transfer resulted in speeds that were lightning fast and provided no reason to ever want to use a regular drive again in a notebook PC. Our average read speeds ranged from 450-550mbps depending on file size, and the average write speeds ranged from 370-450mbps (once again, depending on file size).
Under various system benchmarks, we were unable to cause the system to melt down due to drive performance or issues. At one time we were able get Windows to crash and reboot due to the video drivers (unrelated), but that was all (Windows 7 system).
We didn’t find any problems with heat, compared to the non-SSD drives that were originally in the system (one notebook used to heat up so badly it would be uncomfortable on your lap). There was some heat to the drives but minimal in such comparison.
Power usage was similar in our tests to the non-SSD drives. The Seagate came in slightly lower in consumption but not by much, showing these drives lean more towards power users than they do users looking to gain battery performance. You may still gain some life our of your battery, but it won’t be too noticeable.
Our Conclusion
We have been running this drive between the two systems for a week now, under various benchmarks, and have concluded that these drives are rock solid and deliver wonderful speeds. Enough to say that we have all been lured completely into the SSD boot community, and have no hesitation towards choosing an SSD over a regular spinning drive when it comes to your main OS drive. For every other drive attached to your system (for storage), it is best to stick with a regular non-SSD only due to the price difference. So use it only where it counts the most, and you will be happy with the results. We decided to give the drive a 9/10. We would have given it a 10/10 if it also delivered big savings in power usage but beggars can’t always be choosers. It has also won our Editors’ Choice this month.
Updates:
03/2018: It has been a perfect 4 years since we originally tested this drive. We left the drive in one of our systems that run 24/7 with a 99.2% uptime, as we do anything we want to truly test for lifetime measurements. It has been a fantastic experience until this week, where it has dropped to 90% health in one drive monitoring app (Acronis Drive Monitor), and “bad” due to “Read Error Rate” via another (CrystalDiskInfo). Both of which lead to the recommendations of backing up and planning for new drive. That being said, the drive is still running without issue outside of Windows 10 acting odd, but this mostly seems to be trouble caused by Windows Update stuck in a 99% loop on the latest release that won’t install (which of course, is for another story, another day.
Video:
Specifications:
(click for image)
Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.
