n November of last year we tested the Seagate Desktop SSHD 2TB. Now, Seagate also has a 4TB model of this 3.5'' hard drive with built-in SSD cache available. We have now also extensively tested this model.

For those who aren't yet familiar with the concept of an SSHD: manufacturers such as Seagate present it as "the best of both worlds", and we find ourselves agreeing with this to a certain degree. Essentially, an SSHD is a conventional hard drive combined with a smaller SSD which serves as a built-in cache. Data is first written to the SSD, and is copied to the conventional disk at a later point in time. At the same time, an SSHD attempts to place as much frequently accessed data as possible on the SSD portion, such that read speeds are also increased by as much as possible. This approach allows an SSHD to, to a certain degree, combine the low price per gigabyte of hard drives with the improved performance of SSDs.