I see I missed the question about the size of the magnets in the HD... Of course they vary slightly but I'll try to describe most of what I've seen generally. Most if not all are nedymium, so they are really strong. Typically there are two slightly curved ones, sometimes these are split making 4. They are probably about the thickness of a CD up to around 1/8" give or take a bit. The narrow width is under an inch, the length is up to about 3" but they are curved, so the inside of the curve is probably under 2". There are a lot of videos on how to get these out and it would give you a much better idea of their size and shape than my crappy attempt to describe them.
I think the cost of smaller round magnets you can find on Amazon and about anywhere else... would make trying to resize and use HD magnets not so worthwhile. I could see a lot of other more useful uses for this size magnet. Perhaps glue one to your workbench or peg board to have a spot to quickly place or grab a tool you are using as just one ( perhaps idiotic ) idea.
Ok... let's have some ( geeky ) fun with this one and go on a marketing rant for the heck of it on what they say a SSHD will give you.
A typical install of Windows XP ( Pro or Home, doesn't matter they take up the same amount of space ) would initially take up under 1 Gb of space... I can't remember what space a fully updated version took up ATM but it was a lot more. I'm thinking it was up to 10Gb but it's not a reliable memory so big grain of salt on that number since it probably includes a few additional programs also. The minimum recommended space for a Windows 10 ( again Pro or Home doesn't matter ) is now 32Gb ( includes extra space so updates can install ). My media PC is on a 64Gb SSD, Windows and a small handful of programs take up just under 27 Gb when I clear on the trash and temp files out. Besides Windows 10, I have a couple of utils types and Kodi ( the media, ie movies, music and photos are on a separate 1 Tb drive ), 7-Zip, Anydesk ( remote access util ), Chrome and few minor other bits and things ( ie drivers, runtime utils etc ).
While the SATA interface can transfer up to 6Gbps ( usually about 550Mbps read if you remove other overhead that is involved also ), typical SATA hard drives usually gets about 100-133Mbps in data transfer performance. Most of the decent SATA HD's I've tested came up between the 120-130 Mbps and for their read performance and this is to be expected when considering overhead and everything.
Ok... marketing hype for Seagates SSHD.... up to 5x faster load times... improves overall performance by 20% or more ... LOLOLOL... ( sorry the BS factor was just to high to not laugh )...
The numbers they claim to actually get... Average overall transfer rate of 146Mbps to 158Mbps ... hmm... only 10-15% depending on which size drive you select there based on my math. Nand ( ie SSD portion of the drive ) performance of up to 190Mbps which would be around a 30% increase over a standard decent hard drive.
Ok... the only amount of SSD drive included in these ( and has never increased ) is 8Gb ... on each of the 1, 2 or 4Tb models. The majority of the data that is loaded in the SSD portion will be Windows itself if it's XP and all Windows stuff if it's Win10. So the only decrease in load times you are likely to see is in the boot times. The majority of program load times will not be affected since they will likely be on the standard HD side of the drive. There is actually no way you would ever see that 5x load time decrease even if they are only counting the Windows load times... and it's very unlikely you'd see the other 20% performance across the board either since the majority of the programs and data is likely to be on just the hard drive portion itself.
Going back to the decent SATA SSD I mentioned... Read speeds are up to 550Mbps .... which is about a 75% increase or a 4x increase in read performance over a standard HD. This ( the SSD ) is still 2.8x faster than the SSHD or said the other way... about a 34% increase over the SSHD.
A fairly decent ( not the absolute best ) 500Gb SATA 2.5" drive will cost around $50 or less. A NVME M.2 type of SSD should start around $60 and will have a read speed of about 1700Mbps ( almost 3x faster than the SSD I've been using as an example, so way faster than an HD ). A 4Tb 7200rpm drive is going to be around or just over about $100. I feel anyone trying to sell a SSHD to anyone... is doing them a big disservice for such a small difference you'd see in overall system price.
