[quotemsg=20651239,0,2302410]What about noise please? That is basically my only parameter, along with size.
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I agree, do some sound readings. Of course, the amount of noise a 10TB drive makes is not likely to be representative of the noise produced by the capacities people actually use. Why is a 10TB drive being tested anyway? Sure, a small minority of people use these ultra-high capacity drives for things like bulk video storage, but it's not really representative of what most people use. Even most of the higher-end gaming builds you see listed at this site only include a 1TB hard drive, despite the 2TB capacities only costing a little more. Most people don't feel they need that much storage. Reviewing high capacity drives is fine, but such reviews won't necessarily be all that relevant to the people putting lower capacity drives in their systems. Reviews for drives with capacities in the 1TB to 4TB range would undoubtedly be more relevant. For the most part, outside of some server applications, these high capacity drives are mainly just used for bulk-storage and backups, so their performance isn't as important anyway.
Also, how many platters are these drives? The number of platters tends to impact reliability and noise, along with performance if the density varies between models, so it can be relevant information to know. Checking around, it appears to be a 7-platter drive, but how about the lower capacities? Is the 2TB a 2-platter and the 4TB a 3-platter design? If so, will that affect their performance?
Seagate gained a bad reputation for disk failures over the last few years, but the failures weren't entirely Seagate's fault. For many years large retailers shipped drives in substandard packaging. It was common to wrap a drive with bubble wrap and toss it into an oversized box. A large and vocal web hosting company also removed commodity desktop drives from external enclosures and used them in poorly-designed servers. The company also subjected the drives to workloads they weren't designed for and published failure rate data. Seagate has addressed many of those issues and is working on a full image makeover.
Sure, the treatment of the drives during shipping can potentially affect reliability, and a web hosting company using consumer drives might not be entirely representative of their reliability in a home system, but ultimately that should affect drives from all manufacturers, not just Seagate. If Seagate has more failures than the competition under the same conditions, then that's still arguably their fault.