Seagate has announced a new line of hybrid drives, melding solid state technology with traditional hard drive platters, in a variety of sizes and shapes – making them applicable for both laptops as well as desktop PCs for those that don't want to take the jump to a single SSD just yet.

Known simply as the SSHD lineup, these drives will come in two flavours. The smaller 500GB and 1TB offerings will be designed for laptops and will come in a 2.5″ form factor – though the larger of the two will be 2.5mm wider and will include a second platter. Pricing wise, they're going to be $79 (£52) and $99 (£65). The hard drive portion of their storage will spin up at 5,400 RPM, while the solid state portion will be made up of 8GB NAND flash memory.

The larger desktop versions, will come in the 3.5″ form factor again again feature one or two platters depending on whether you pick the smaller or larger variants – which come in 1TB and 2TB respectively. While they will be a little more expensive at $99 (£65) and $149 (£99) they will spin up at 7,200 RPM a piece. They'll also include the same 8GB NAND as the smaller laptop versions.

Without much in the way of NAND storage space, the performance increase from something like this compared to a traditional hard drive may not be huge, but some reads will be able to occur at least. According to Anandtech, the big seller for these is the price, as they're competitive with traditional hard drive options, thereby helping people make the jump from the older tech to this bridging one.

KitGuru Says: Nice to see Solid State options becoming more affordable, even if it is part of a more traditional hard drive platter system.

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