Seagate updates laptop solid state hybrid drive, adds desktop version

Seagate disclosed the other day that it was halting production of its 7,200rpm laptop drives later this year and, surely not coincidentally, it has announced that the latest version of its notebook solid state hybrid drives is now available.

Abandoning the Momentus XT name it had used for previous versions of the devices, Seagate is now merely referring to the drives as the Laptop SSHD line. There's also the Laptop Thin SSHD family for ultra-slim notebooks, and a Desktop SSHD series has just been launched.

Seagate claims that the latest generation of Laptop SSHD is up to 40 percent faster than previous iterations, while performing five times as swiftly as a typical 5,400rpm laptop hard drive. It will be available in a 1TB capacity, while the Laptop Thin SSHD will come in a 500GB version for ultrabooks and similar svelte portables.

As with its laptop siblings, the 3.5-inch Desktop SSHD features flash memory combined with a conventional hard drive to provide faster boot-ups with terabyte capacity. In particular, the lineup will have 8GB of NAND flash memory, and either 1TB or 2TB hard drives spinning at 7,200rpm.

According to AnandTech, the Desktop SSHD pricing will be $99 for the 1TB drive and $149 for the 2TB version, while the 1TB Laptop SSHD will cost $99 and the 500GB Laptop Thin SSHD will cost $79. Those price points are about $15 to $20 more than Seagate hard drives without the solid state features, making them a no-brainer upgrade, even if you still want a traditional hard disk instead of a purely solid state storage solution.