Seagate 600 Series SSD 480 GB ST480HM000 Review 5

Seagate 600 Series SSD 480 GB ST480HM000 Review

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Value and Conclusion

  • The Seagate 600 Series SSD is available online for $400.
  • Good price/performance
  • 7.5 mm thin--Ultrabook compatible
  • Good steady state performance
  • Supports TRIM
  • 3-year warranty
  • Not as fast as other high-end drives (which are more expensive, though)
  • Low MySQL Enterprise performance
Seagate is a newcomer to the consumer SSD market, but they have a ton of experience with regular HDDs, which, in my opinion, will have them produce SSDs with a higher reliability than most other SSD manufacturers, as others either do no or only very little testing of their own. While Seagate does not publicize how they qualify SSDs (or HDDs), I'm quite sure they have extensive testing procedures on a large number of hardware platforms to avoid any issues.
Performance of the 600 Series SSD is good and roughly matches that of the (aging) SandForce-based drives. It cannot compete with the latest and greatest, like the Toshiba THNSNH, Samsung 840 Pro, or OCZ Vector, but it's significantly cheaper than those drives. The only test where the Seagate 600 is seriously falling behind is our MySQL enterprise test in which it is the slowest drive of the test group. This is a, in my opinion, non-issue because the Seagate 600 is meant for consumer workloads. Steady state performance is quite good, which means you don't have to worry as much about keeping some free space on the drive to maximize performance.
When looking at price/performance and GB per Dollar, the drive clearly establishes itself as a balanced alternative to other more expensive drives. We recently reviewed the Crucial M500 that does slightly better here, but given pricing is in a constant state of flux, this could change quickly if Seagate were to, for example, reduce their pricing by $10.
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Feb 25th, 2025 11:59 EST change timezone

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