Conclusion
The ST1000LX001 TB offers a drastic performance increase over 5400rpm hard drives, due to it’s NAND cache & caching algorithms. Based on Seagate’s internal benchmarks, it also has noticeable performance improvements over it’s ST1000LM014 predecessor with 8GB NAND.
SSHD works best as a OS boot drive. As long as the drive is given a opportunity to cache hot data on it’s NAND cache, application load times can be drastically decreased.
As of 26 April, the 1TB ST1000LX001 goes for 119.80 USD on Amazon, whereas the older 1TB ST1000LM014 with 8gb NAND goes for 75.44 USD. Typical 7200rpm & 5400rpm 1 TB mechanical hard drives cost between 59 USD to 79 USD.
The price premium over the older model ST1000LM014 is currently more than 50% which is a bit steep considering that the paper difference is the extra 24GB of NAND. Both models comes with 5 year warranty, though this coverage may depends on local distributors.
This is a good product with a high pricing at the moment. The ST1000LX001 SSHD price is pretty close to current 480GB or 500GB SSDs. Unless if you really need the extra storage space on your OS drive and/or is limited to just one 2.5 inch drive on your notebook, you can choose between a 1TB SSHD or a 480GB SSD which is priced similarly.