Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB Review

Ultrabooks are slowly but surely becoming mainstream and we are always seeing slimmer ones each day. SSDs are the preferred choice of storage drives in Ultrabooks, but they also have the disadvantage of higher cost per GB when compared with a spinning magnetic drive. Not to mention the capacities aren’t that great either. Sure, there are lots of Ultrabooks, which house a hard drive as well, but most of them are standard 2.5-inch form factor with a thickness of 9.5mm or 7mm. Seagate has come out with a laptop hard drive which is just 5mm thick.

Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB drive offers 465.56GB of unformatted space

Features
Yes, the Seagate drive is only 5 millimetres thick which is almost half the size of regular 2.5-inch drives which are 9.5mm thick. It comes in two capacities officially - 320GB and 500GB. Seagate has also included another variant of the 500GB drive which supports automatic encryption.

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The rear side of drive has a blue coloured PCB and it comes with the SATA 6 Gbps interface

We got the regular 500GB drive - ST500LT032 - for testing. The Ultrathin has a single-platter design. The rotational speeds are around 5400 RPM with 16MB of cache memory. Out of the 500GB only 465.56 GB is available to the user. The drive comes with the standard SATA 6 Gbps interface. Not only has Seagate managed to reduce the thickness, but it also weighs just 93 grams.

Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K
Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4
RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX
OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB
Source Drive: Kingston SSDNow, 120GB SSD
PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Performance

Just to give you a perspective of how thin the drive is. The 7mm Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD is below the 5mm Seagate Laptop Ultrathin drive

We started off with the ATTO Benchmark test and got scores such as 109.12 for sequential reads and 108.68 for sequential writes. Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 scores were 108.3 MB/s and 107.6 MB/s for sequential read and write respectively.
For the real-life transfer speeds, we transferred a 10GB single file and an 10GB assorted file from the source drive to the Seagate ultrathin drive. In terms of real-life transfer speeds it gave around 97.62 MB/s and 86.05 MB/s in sequential read and write speeds respectively whereas assorted file transfer was slower at 94.81MB/s and 68.26MB/s for read and writes respectively. These speeds were faster than the Seagate laptop thin drive. Check out the comparison chart below.

Verdict and Price in India
The Seagate Ultrathin 500GB drive costs around Rs 5300 (exclusive of taxes) which comes to around Rs 11.38 per GB. If you look at it purely from an HDD perspective, that is a high price. Although the 5mm thickness is unique, we fail to see how it will immediately benefit end consumers unless they are planning to make a thin housing for the drive. Just replacing your older drive with the ultrathin drive, will not really boost your performance if you are still using a SATA 6 Gbps drive. The ultrathin drive actually makes more sense for the OEMs who can think of incorporating various form factors around this slim drive - slimmer Ultrabooks, slim tablets, slim external drives and so on. For end consumers, we would still vote for the Seagate Laptop thin SSHD which costs Rs 6300 but which at least offers a real value in the form of an SSD cache segment. 

Specifications