Solid-state hybrid drives combine conventional platter-based hard drives with new solid-state drive technologies. If you are looking to upgrade your hard drive for a laptop or desktop computer, you may have come across the term SSHD. This is a new marketing term coined by Seagate to label what were previously called hybrid hard drives.

Seagate's tagline for their SSHD series is "SSD performance. HDD capacity. Affordable price." This marketing slogan is an attempt to communicate that these new drives offer the benefits of both technologies without a significant increase in cost.

These drives are conventional platter drives that add a small capacity solid state drive to the drive controller. It acts as an additional cache for frequently used files. It makes those files faster to access because the files are stored on the solid state drive instead of the magnetic hard drive. It's not much different than taking a standard hard drive as the primary storage of a computer system and adding a small solid state drive as a cache via a system like Intel Smart Response Technology.

Because an SSHD is essentially the same as a conventional hard drive, but with additional space inside the drive to hold the solid-state cache, the SSHD offers approximately the same capacity as magnetic hard drives. The laptop and desktop versions of these drives come in the same capacities.