Seagate Desktop HDD 4TB Review: Big Capacity At 5900 RPM

[littleleo]

vinhn view is how most customers feel; they don't like the 5900 RPM, and once told opt for the 3TB model at 7200 RPM ST3000DM001, the price delta is about $47.

 

[doomtomb]

I have one and it's excellent. I can get speeds up to 130MB/s sequential read. Perfect for media files.

 

[Marcus52]

Yeah the price means it isn't too bad in performance, but frankly I'd spend another 100 bucks and get a 5-year warranty instead of a 2-year one.

 

[howard69]

reliability I the only 1st criteria in a read write store device I know
after that you can hope it's fast enough to keep up with your application
also the issue of operating power and temps comes to mind as in our case
se tend to use an array of drives so PS capacity and cooling
get important pretty early on the operating curve.
wonder if Seagate has a self contained RAID HDD in the plans?
something that has multiple redundancy built in from the factory.
that might be OK as a slower drive as long as the 1st criteria was met.

 

[jowunger]

Wah Seagate!!!

Never buy that crap. Always go with Samsung (usualy -10C then Seagate anyways)

WD is a choice too but still much hotter C.

 

[LAMINI]

#1 its less than 7200rpm
#2 its performance here clearly reflects that.

As I'm a professional that gets paid by the hour, I do not get paid for WAITING customers. Shame businesses are going to the bang for the buck trend.

 

[danwat1234]

7200RPM or 5900/5400RPM only if it has 16GB+ of read/write caching/buffering Flash.
I guess due to availability of 1TB/platter compatible heads, the 4TB drive doesn't have a 7200RPM option.

I too would not buy a hard drive with less than a 3 year warranty and would prefer 5 year.

 

[SirGCal]

I have 8 of these already for a RAID 6 deployment in my server to replace 2TB Samsung drives. They actually perform VERY well and are very cool.

The BIGGEST problem is getting reliable drives from places like NEWEGG. I went through 14 drives to get good ones. And the last 3 (now they're saying 2, it's all !@#$%ed up) they're trying to say I damaged in install. They never were installed. They were run on a test bench and shipping did the work. That's how they were received and that's how my emails continue to show. We'll see how that works out. Very poor shipping practice for open drives. I changed to Retail packaging just for the security of the extra boxes. Still got 2 failures but they were an electrical failure (solder joint). ALWAYS test your drives before use!!!

Anyhow, my new 24TB array should be online at the end of the week. Last drive is literally validating now. But it's just about to pass... 98%. When they fail they tend to do so by 10%...

BUT - For those nay-sayers out there that are too stupid to look at the facts and only numbers (7200 vs 5900/5400/etc), these drives actually DO out perform many higher speed drives. Including the WD Black even on h2benchw tests... http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/R/382419/original/h2benchW_write.png

So it's a 'green' drive with insanely good performance to boot. Runs cool (though needs fans in the array to keep it that way), But they are designed to be storage drives, not speed drives. Get SSDs if speed is paramount or get two and RAID 0/10 them. But I'm all about cooler, performance drives over oven-temperature higher-speed drives every day, especially for my arrays!

 

[logainofhades]

Wah Seagate!!!

Never buy that crap. Always go with Samsung (usualy -10C then Seagate anyways)

WD is a choice too but still much hotter C.

Seagate bought Samsung's HDD division.

 

[InvalidError]

As I'm a professional that gets paid by the hour, I do not get paid for WAITING customers. Shame businesses are going to the bang for the buck trend.

That's why smart people/companies use MULTI-TIER storage systems:
- SSDs and 10k/15k RPM drives for their online storage which holds their active working sets
- slower and cheaper drives for their much larger collection of near-line storage on NAS or other convenient location so they can still fairly quickly access less frequently used data
- offline storage for backups and long-term archiving

Nobody is saying that you must use a 5xxx RPM as your working/boot/etc. drive.

4k-5k RPM drives clearly belong in the near-line and offline storage categories.

 

[spectrewind]

With these large capacity drives, how can you NOT buy at least two of them for at least a RAID-1?

Imagine buying a single drive, filling it up with something useful, then have it fail. Almost makes more sense to spread data across smaller drives in case you lose one.

 

[InvalidError]

Imagine buying a single drive, filling it up with something useful, then have it fail. Almost makes more sense to spread data across smaller drives in case you lose one.

Most data hoarders I know (myself included) simply download stuff and almost never delete anything even though they might never use/watch it again - or even download stuff "just because they can - just in case" and never use it at all either because they never needed it or forgot they already had it or where they put it by the time they actually need it.

I have around 3TB of stuff scattered across a dozen HDDs but there is only about 50GB of it that really is of high enough importance (to me) to be worth making backups of so I make 2-3 copies of that on whichever mix of alternate storage locations seem most appropriate - external HDDs or other PCs on my LAN for large and rarely updated/accessed stuff, USB sticks for frequently updated stuff I need convenient access to, DVD+RW for somewhat periodic backups of stuff I update somewhat regularly and DVD-R for things I do not want to accidentally overwrite/delete.

That may seem like a lot of hassle but I wouldn't trust my most important data to any single storage format. Even RAID5 is not enough: one of my friends had to restore a RAID5 array from the previous night's backups because the RAID controller barfed and trashed the whole array. Backups on independent storage are much less likely to get wiped, stolen or otherwise become unusable or inaccessible simultaneously.

 

[ramon zarat]

The context is a lot different now that SSD have reached an affordable price point. Most users now rely on the super fast SSD when needed (OS, big apps, latest 5-6 games etc...) and put everything else on a big mechanical hard drive. The other factor is hard drive plater density have increased a lot in the last couple of years. Current 5800 are as fast as not so much older 7200.

For the vast majority of the content put on a mechanical hard drive, 5800RPM VS 7200RPM won't be noticeable. What will is less noise and improved long term reliability. The last thing you want is to loose 4GB on data for stuff that load or copy a couple of seconds faster.

To be quite honest, I don't even mind the time difference when I'm accessing stuff on my NAS over a GB connection with an average 65MB/s transfer rate. That's fast enough for 85% of my storage need. The 10% that need to be accessed faster (100-120MB/s) in on local mechanical 5800RPM hard drive (currently a 2GB WD Green) and the last 5% that really make or break my PC experience is on my SSD stripped RAID array (2 X M4 128GB @ 908MB/s sequential read). All this is padded with a 5GB RAM disk (temp, cache etc...) hitting 8800MB/s sequential read with my 16GB @ 1866Mhz setup.

 

[mozisaid]

I only care about the price,which isn't so resonable.

http://www.ccchinachic.com/products/china-discovery/c-216/

 

[littleleo]

I have 8 of these already for a RAID 6 deployment in my server to replace 2TB Samsung drives. They actually perform VERY well and are very cool.

The BIGGEST problem is getting reliable drives from places like NEWEGG. I went through 14 drives to get good ones. And the last 3 (now they're saying 2, it's all !@#$%ed up) they're trying to say I damaged in install. They never were installed. They were run on a test bench and shipping did the work. That's how they were received and that's how my emails continue to show. We'll see how that works out. Very poor shipping practice for open drives. I changed to Retail packaging just for the security of the extra boxes. Still got 2 failures but they were an electrical failure (solder joint). ALWAYS test your drives before use!!!

Anyhow, my new 24TB array should be online at the end of the week. Last drive is literally validating now. But it's just about to pass... 98%. When they fail they tend to do so by 10%...

BUT - For those nay-sayers out there that are too stupid to look at the facts and only numbers (7200 vs 5900/5400/etc), these drives actually DO out perform many higher speed drives. Including the WD Black even on h2benchw tests... http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/R/382419/original/h2benchW_write.png

So it's a 'green' drive with insanely good performance to boot. Runs cool (though needs fans in the array to keep it that way), But they are designed to be storage drives, not speed drives. Get SSDs if speed is paramount or get two and RAID 0/10 them. But I'm all about cooler, performance drives over oven-temperature higher-speed drives every day, especially for my arrays!

Buy them from a Distributor instead of an Etailor, If one is close by you can even will call it and if its bad you can exchange it for a new one right away under their DOA policy.

 

[RobAC]

I picked one of these just last week as a backup drive for my laptop.

I have it sitting in an external USB3.0 dock right next to another 2TB Seagate 7200rpm HD in a slooww USB2.0 external dock.

I get an average 80 to 100MB/s for the 4TB and it is very quiet and cool. If I put it in a desktop I should get faster speeds according the charts in this article- but it's fast enough for what I want it to do.

(Oh yah, the 2TB in the USB2.0 external dock is only giving me a measly 29MB/s average.)

 

[utomo]

I hope somebody creating 10TB or more by creating 5 1/4 harddisk. it is the easiest way to increase the capacity. and most desktop have the 5 1/4 slot, so it is not problems. it will make the production cheaper because no need special technology to create big capacity harddisk

 

[InvalidError]

I hope somebody creating 10TB or more by creating 5 1/4 harddisk. it is the easiest way to increase the capacity

There actually are a many problems with that:
1- slower access time due to heavier actuator arm and longer mean travel distance
2- slower access time due to longer rotational latency and longer position settling time
3- lower data density due to larger positioning errors
4- longer actuator arm and wider platters will have less overall stiffness so are more likely to vibrate / wobble which compounds #2 and #3
5- more likely to exhibit vibrations due to minute platter balancing errors

I'm sure there are many more reasons why 5.25" HDDs are extinct. Under nearly all circumstances, we are likely better off that way.

 

[NunyaBiznass]

antiglobal is spot-on.

With drives of this capacity, I/O performance is really a secondary consideration to reliability. I'd like to see more in-depth analysis of this area WRT mechanical storage from Tom's in the future.

 

[logainofhades]

Yea performance means little to me for what I would want these for.

 

[jowunger]

Wah Seagate!!!

Never buy that crap. Always go with Samsung (usualy -10C then Seagate anyways)

WD is a choice too but still much hotter C.

Seagate bought Samsung's HDD division.

Didn't know that, but still: Samsung HDD are around 10Celsius cooler then seagates.

 

[logainofhades]

You have to watch out though. There are Samsung drives out there with Seagate style part numbers.