Chosen Solution
I retired this drive from my Latitude a long time ago due to performance issues that were concerning since I had a WD Black 7200k RPM drive that would work and it was faster right away, confirming my theory the drive was giving me a problem. I’m seeing if this can be done since the SATA II drive Apple used in my Mac is so slow at times. HOWEVER, what I removed was an SSHD, which has NAND flash on the board (ST500LM000) so I do not know if it was the NAND flash failing that did it and caused it to default to being a very slow hard drive. I’m suspecting bad NAND based on the fact it has good SMART data (the raw read error is reportedly high with Seagates in general and isn’t an issue:
Is there a way I can test the NAND flash to see if the issue is whole drive degradation or it’s just an issue with the NAND flash?
Sadly, I don’t know of any way you could test the drive in a way that you could isolate out which area was at fault. Even if you did isolate it, what would you do to fix it? The SSD is not available as a spare, The patters and heads are likewise not available.
