Seagate tried to take advantage of the 80/20 rule with their SSHD "hybrid drives". Unfortunately, they decided to use only 8GB of flash on all of their SSHDs. T

Seagate tried to take advantage of the 80/20 rule with their SSHD "hybrid drives". Unfortunately, they decided to use only 8GB of flash on all of their SSHDs. That's a far cry from 80/20. The solid-state cache only covers 1.6% of a 500GB hybrid drive, 0.8% of a 1TB drive, and 0.2% of a 4TB drive (yes, Seagate makes 4TB SSHDs). Those Seagate drives don't even have enough flash to hold a recent version of Windows and some commonly used apps, not to mention any games. The laptop version is even worse because the non-flash part only spins at 5400rpm. Somehow they thought this would be okay in a performance-oriented drive. The slow platters make Seagate SSHDs even slower in general than regular 7200rpm laptop drives from WD and Hitachi/HGST. The only improvement is slightly shorter boot time. Since the day the first generation of SSHDs came out, reviewers have said that you need at least 32GB of flash in a hybrid drive to see much real-world benefit. Everyone has also been complaining about the choice of 5400rpm. But three SSHD generations later, Seagate still hasn't listened. Now the SSHD technology is on the way to irrelevance because (1) SSDs have become much cheaper than three years ago, and (2) even if you need a lot of space, the mSATA form factor now allows most laptop users to install an SSD in addition to, not instead of, a 2.5" hard drive. These days, I wouldn't even consider the SSHD as an option. I'd just buy a large hard drive and an mSATA SSD, there's no need for a hybrid anymore. It's a sad tale of corporate boneheadedness killing off an idea that had so much potential.