Is it only me, who cannot see why manufacturers use SATA3 while the drive is A, 5200RPM B, it's only a HDD, not SSD, so SATA2 would be more than enough
Because the HDD also has a microcontroller which is an updated design with sata3. I doubt the chip itself is designed inhouse (by Seagate in this case). The industry wants to reuse whatever they can (avoid reinventing the wheel). That's why (if I remember) Samsung SSDs use 3-core ARM chips as controllers. They focus on the SW (firmware to us) and avoid chip design costs.
1. Sometimes even these old, slow spinners get lucky with a cached file or something, and that extra overhead can satisfy a short burst of throughput that would otherwise be lost. http://techreport.com/review/22794/western-digital... 2. There are more benefits to using the newer controller than just throughput. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA 3. It's possible that the SATA3 controllers are cheaper per/100,000 units or something that just makes business sense.
It's not just about burst performance when they have a cache hit; newer versions of the protocol also come with command set enhancements that can provide and occasional boost in performance.
It's likely to do with part 3, but from the manufacturing side. It's cheaper to run production of one type of thing than two types of things. Further, if it's cheaper to produce just SATA3 instead of both SATA2 and SATA3 then it makes the availability of SATA2 go away, so while we may suppose SATA3 is overkill or more expensive it may be that in practice you simply can't buy a SATA2 controller. While SATA2 *should* be cheaper, that presupposes it's a viable option.
Personally I don't trust a 7200RPM drive "locked in a cage."
5400RPM drives are much less prone to thermal runaway when being hammered with a few TB of data over a short period, say, during an initial backup. To combat this, manufactures have introduced very aggressive head parking, which causes wear in other areas of the drive. This data cane be seen on the first page under load/unload count 0000000D (which is 13) for a drive that has only been powered on 5 times and has less than an hour of use. Many of these 2.5" drives are rated at low as 100,000 load/unload cycles but some are rated as high as 1,000,000.
So even though the 5400RPM drive will inevitably last longer due to better thermal performance and less inertia when "banged around" eventually the loading ramp will fail and cause physical wear to the heads or the platter edge.
I recommend always passing an APM 255 command to drives that run 24/7 and an APM 250 command to drives that run more than an hour a day. Read http://xenomorph.net/misc/clicking-hard-drives/
If all you use this drive for is occasional backup AND you unplug it after each use (which is what Seagate marketting suggests) then ALL of this is irrelevant because the drive wont get enough use to park itself to death.
I have a 2-drive DAS on my desk (with moderate-to-heavy usage) that gets worryingly hot to touch even though it incorporates a small fan. I'd like to see these enclosures come with breathing holes, even though that would probably reduce waterproofness and so on.
Personally if I'm trying to back up 4TB I don't trust a 5400RPM drive. Unless I only need to back up once a week - 5400 is WAY too slow. I use toaster bays and drop in a raw 7200 FAST hard drive and I can complete a full backup every night.
I am looking for a similar capacity portable USB hard drive. My primary usage will be storing my raw photographs from my SLR camera. I want a reliable and same time fast drive as you can imagine every time i will be copying almost 64GBs of data from my camera. My budget is USD 170 to 200. Can you recommend me a good one.
I have a 2 TB Seagate external drive in a enclosure with holes. I can tell it's running cool while the computer is on with Seagate dashboard always on start up. I turn off the computer when done using it , maybe leaving it on Sunday for scheduled backups. I used to have a motherboard program showing how many rpms the drives all ran at. That was with another system that I built. So my question is how can I see how many rpms my external drive is without having to search for a third party monitoring program to download and install? I've searched everything I know of on my windows 10 upgrade.
I have some 7200 RPM 3TB Expansion Desktop drives, they ran so hot I had to put a fan on them during extended file operations. The same enclosure 4TB / 5900 RPM run much cooler.
It's just you. Besides the marketing boost for the latest standard, it makes no sense relying on a standard that is superseded and being phased out. As the whole industry rolls forward new parts not only support the latest standard but are also lower power, have bug fixes and other performance improvements built in. Parts for the old standard become harder to find and more expensive over time and even if your product has a normal life cycle it's possible that the older part may no longer be available, which would immediately kill a possibly successful product.
Because most chipsets are now SATA3. Why bother creating a SATA2 chipset, or using an old, likely discontinued SATA2 chipset, when a SATA3 chispet is readily available and cheap?
I'm actually surprised that they still do SATA and add a SATA<->USB bridge. I recently bought a Toshiba drive (actually with the purpose to rip the case apart and use the SATA drive internally as backup) to find out that Toshiba got rid of SATA altogether and packed USB 3.0 directly on the drives mainboard.
USB 3.0 provides more power to the device. For these portable devices, it isn't just about data transfer speed, it's also about being sure the device has enough power. Of course this is host dependent. So, if the host is USB 2.0, power can still be an issue and a dual Type-A connector may be needed.
Does anyone know the power consumption of this drive? I have a Seagate portable 2.5inch 3TB USB3 drive which did not like my Surface Pro 3. When directly hooked up to the Surface Pro 3, the harddisk made scratching noises and could not boot properly. When I hooked up the Seagate 3TB drive to an external USB-based docking station, everything was fine. Other than power draw, I have no idea what else could have caused this issue. I suppose power draw on the 4TB to be similar or worse than on the 3TB drive.
Jurgen, I do not know the power availability specific to a Surface Pro 3 for USB. However, portable hosts, like the SP3, do vary the power state for various devices, including USB ports. The max specified by the USB 3.0 standard is 900 mA, while the minimum is 150 mA.
The speeds reported are low! I have a 1tb USB 3 Transcend drive that reports 200MB seq read/write. Is it possible speed is diminished by capacity somehow?
To reach 200 MB/s with an HDD it must be a 3.5" 7.2k rpm model with 1 TB platters, being measured at the beginning of the drive (fastest section). This is a 2.5" drive (slower) at 5.4k rpm (slower).
this. a portable 2.5" 1tb drive won't reach anywhere near 200MB/s. half of that if you're lucky. higher values might be due to the cache or some measuring artefacts like you often see in windows.
I own this drive, it is very fast if you want to write big files, a big of 1 gb can be transferred in 4 or 5 seconds which isn't bad for a 2.5 inch drive. With tiny files it's a nightmare. For the warranty, I had to send an email to Seagate because it was written "2 years of warranty" in french and "3 years of warranty" in english on the box. It turned out that this drive would be under warranty for 3.5 years. So far I am satisfied with this drive, I hope this unit won't fail in the next couple of years.
Ganesh, can you disassemble the drive case and take a photo for us?
Also, can you take another CDI screen shot after a few hours of use. I'm curious where the load/unload cycle count (APM) value sits with this drive. My guess is its at 64, but I can do some math from the SMART values to determine how aggressive the power saving is set...helping determine the drives lifespan.
Yes, they are all standard SATA connectors. I have 1 x 1TB, 2x2TB (which are going into my little home-brew NAS), and today, 1x4TB, which I immediately ripped open and fitted inside my Alienware 18.
All the others were standard SATA z-depth, this 4TB surprised me with its shear size & weight, it was easily 15mm depth. It took a simple 15 minute modification to my HDD cage to fit it alongside my 850 Pro 512GB, and it went in with ease. (but this is a monstrous laptop - don't go thinking you can do the same at home, you could be lucky, but I very much doubt it).
I'm seeing max R/W speeds of +130Mb/s, give or take, on ATTO, which bests the 1TB at ~110Mb/s,and the 2TBs I forget, but I think they are less than this new one.
So now I've got 2x SSD 512/500, and 4TB mechanical storage in my 'laptop'.
Has anyone used one of these with Time Machine on a Mac? My current Time Machine drive is behaving strangely, and, consequently, this review comes at a timely time.
I haven't, but I'm sure it'd be fine. I've helped friends set up countless external USB / firewire drives as Time Machines. Just make sure you reformat it GPT / Mac OS Extended (Journaled) prior to using it.
Instead of Mac users installing NTFS drivers for write compatibility, I'd just reformat the drive ExFAT, which is fully read / write compatible on any Mac OS 10.6.5+.
exFAT - no journalling, only a single file allocation table and single free space map, higher chance of data loss or failure when disconnected while writing. Probably not optimal for most people though it does work that way.
I'd post a link but the comment thing seems to think my comment is spam then.
I first heard of that a few years back; kinda makes me wonder if things like this are using HDDs originally intended for PCs that then got repackaged because they didn't sell, or if this is still too expensive a price/capacity tier to sell enough to justify a second design.
I've heard bad things about PS4s with >2 TB of storage (Rest Mode stops working, sometimes they randomly won't start up). Maybe things would be better with a 2.5" drive, but I'm planning on sticking with my 2 TB for now!
Not going to trust a single hard drive for anything anymore. For backing up to spinning platters, I prefer a system with redundancy like drobo. Why? I have had 2 external drives, Seagate and WD, both failed in less than 6 months. In fact, I had always have failed hard drive once a year (be it in desktop, external, laptop, even inside my drobo), regardless of brand and age. Always.
It's amazing how much faith we put in this completely unreliable media. Having such high density storage makes things worse as you are tempted to put more data, and more will be lost when the drive breaks.
People are criticising the price of SSD, but considering the cost of replacing drives at least once a year and the stress they gave me when they fail, I think the price of SSD is not that bad.
That sounds really nice to help people keep enough hard drive free space and also keep a good performance. But, in daily use, also remember to clean drive up regularly in case of some low disk space error issues. Of course, drive data backups are also supposed to be prepared well all the time. http://www.icare-recovery.com/howto/seagate-backup...
For some reason Seagate don't include any rubber feet on their Portable 2.5" drives anymore. So they just slip and slide around if moved. I added some feet but honestly, it should be on the product itself. Otherwise 4TB in a 2.5" USB powered portable is very nice.
Amazon U.S. currently sells the 4TB Backup Plus for $119.99, a good deal in and of itself. I wonder though, what is the difference between the " STDR4000901" model Amazon sells and the product reviewed here. ST4000LM016. Lack of UASP support? Some other issue?
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bolyki - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Is it only me, who cannot see why manufacturers use SATA3 while the drive is A, 5200RPM B, it's only a HDD, not SSD, so SATA2 would be more than enoughGigaplex - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
It's a marketing tick box.mathew7 - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Because the HDD also has a microcontroller which is an updated design with sata3. I doubt the chip itself is designed inhouse (by Seagate in this case). The industry wants to reuse whatever they can (avoid reinventing the wheel). That's why (if I remember) Samsung SSDs use 3-core ARM chips as controllers. They focus on the SW (firmware to us) and avoid chip design costs.nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
1. Sometimes even these old, slow spinners get lucky with a cached file or something, and that extra overhead can satisfy a short burst of throughput that would otherwise be lost.http://techreport.com/review/22794/western-digital...
2. There are more benefits to using the newer controller than just throughput.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
3. It's possible that the SATA3 controllers are cheaper per/100,000 units or something that just makes business sense.
DanNeely - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
It's not just about burst performance when they have a cache hit; newer versions of the protocol also come with command set enhancements that can provide and occasional boost in performance.joex4444 - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
It's likely to do with part 3, but from the manufacturing side. It's cheaper to run production of one type of thing than two types of things. Further, if it's cheaper to produce just SATA3 instead of both SATA2 and SATA3 then it makes the availability of SATA2 go away, so while we may suppose SATA3 is overkill or more expensive it may be that in practice you simply can't buy a SATA2 controller. While SATA2 *should* be cheaper, that presupposes it's a viable option.Samus - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Personally I don't trust a 7200RPM drive "locked in a cage."5400RPM drives are much less prone to thermal runaway when being hammered with a few TB of data over a short period, say, during an initial backup. To combat this, manufactures have introduced very aggressive head parking, which causes wear in other areas of the drive. This data cane be seen on the first page under load/unload count 0000000D (which is 13) for a drive that has only been powered on 5 times and has less than an hour of use. Many of these 2.5" drives are rated at low as 100,000 load/unload cycles but some are rated as high as 1,000,000.
So even though the 5400RPM drive will inevitably last longer due to better thermal performance and less inertia when "banged around" eventually the loading ramp will fail and cause physical wear to the heads or the platter edge.
I recommend always passing an APM 255 command to drives that run 24/7 and an APM 250 command to drives that run more than an hour a day. Read http://xenomorph.net/misc/clicking-hard-drives/
If all you use this drive for is occasional backup AND you unplug it after each use (which is what Seagate marketting suggests) then ALL of this is irrelevant because the drive wont get enough use to park itself to death.
stephenbrooks - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
I have a 2-drive DAS on my desk (with moderate-to-heavy usage) that gets worryingly hot to touch even though it incorporates a small fan. I'd like to see these enclosures come with breathing holes, even though that would probably reduce waterproofness and so on.boe - Sunday, August 9, 2015 - link
Personally if I'm trying to back up 4TB I don't trust a 5400RPM drive. Unless I only need to back up once a week - 5400 is WAY too slow. I use toaster bays and drop in a raw 7200 FAST hard drive and I can complete a full backup every night.sarinsoman - Sunday, May 29, 2016 - link
I am looking for a similar capacity portable USB hard drive. My primary usage will be storing my raw photographs from my SLR camera. I want a reliable and same time fast drive as you can imagine every time i will be copying almost 64GBs of data from my camera. My budget is USD 170 to 200. Can you recommend me a good one.fjcamry - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
I have a 2 TB Seagate external drive in a enclosure with holes. I can tell it's running cool while the computer is on with Seagate dashboard always on start up. I turn off the computer when done using it , maybe leaving it on Sunday for scheduled backups. I used to have a motherboard program showing how many rpms the drives all ran at. That was with another system that I built. So my question is how can I see how many rpms my external drive is without having to search for a third party monitoring program to download and install? I've searched everything I know of on my windows 10 upgrade.darkfalz - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link
I have some 7200 RPM 3TB Expansion Desktop drives, they ran so hot I had to put a fan on them during extended file operations. The same enclosure 4TB / 5900 RPM run much cooler.prisonerX - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
It's just you. Besides the marketing boost for the latest standard, it makes no sense relying on a standard that is superseded and being phased out. As the whole industry rolls forward new parts not only support the latest standard but are also lower power, have bug fixes and other performance improvements built in. Parts for the old standard become harder to find and more expensive over time and even if your product has a normal life cycle it's possible that the older part may no longer be available, which would immediately kill a possibly successful product.ddriver - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
It might still be beneficial when transferring data that would fit in the HDD cacheCharonPDX - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Because most chipsets are now SATA3. Why bother creating a SATA2 chipset, or using an old, likely discontinued SATA2 chipset, when a SATA3 chispet is readily available and cheap?Daniel Egger - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I'm actually surprised that they still do SATA and add a SATA<->USB bridge. I recently bought a Toshiba drive (actually with the purpose to rip the case apart and use the SATA drive internally as backup) to find out that Toshiba got rid of SATA altogether and packed USB 3.0 directly on the drives mainboard.darkfalz - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link
I'm sure the few cents they save on the bridge chip would be lost having two separate PCB manufacturing runs.Cptn_Slo - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I think since USB 3 came out well after the wide adoption of SATA 3 no one has bothered to design a sata 2 to usb 3.0 interface.since there is a noticeable difference between usb 2 and 3 everyone just stuck with sata 3.
also sata 3 is probably cheaper on the drive side.
to do a sata 2 drive is a lot of work on the manufacturing side with 0 benefits.
hlmcompany - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
USB 3.0 provides more power to the device. For these portable devices, it isn't just about data transfer speed, it's also about being sure the device has enough power. Of course this is host dependent. So, if the host is USB 2.0, power can still be an issue and a dual Type-A connector may be needed.Guspaz - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
How can you not tear that sucker open? We must see the drive inside!Jurgen_modeling - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Does anyone know the power consumption of this drive?I have a Seagate portable 2.5inch 3TB USB3 drive which did not like my Surface Pro 3. When directly hooked up to the Surface Pro 3, the harddisk made scratching noises and could not boot properly. When I hooked up the Seagate 3TB drive to an external USB-based docking station, everything was fine. Other than power draw, I have no idea what else could have caused this issue. I suppose power draw on the 4TB to be similar or worse than on the 3TB drive.
hlmcompany - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Jurgen, I do not know the power availability specific to a Surface Pro 3 for USB. However, portable hosts, like the SP3, do vary the power state for various devices, including USB ports. The max specified by the USB 3.0 standard is 900 mA, while the minimum is 150 mA.aoshiryaev - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
The speeds reported are low! I have a 1tb USB 3 Transcend drive that reports 200MB seq read/write. Is it possible speed is diminished by capacity somehow?MrSpadge - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
To reach 200 MB/s with an HDD it must be a 3.5" 7.2k rpm model with 1 TB platters, being measured at the beginning of the drive (fastest section). This is a 2.5" drive (slower) at 5.4k rpm (slower).fokka - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
this. a portable 2.5" 1tb drive won't reach anywhere near 200MB/s. half of that if you're lucky. higher values might be due to the cache or some measuring artefacts like you often see in windows.Notmyusualid - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
No, its possible you got your numbers wrong my friend.stevenrix - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I own this drive, it is very fast if you want to write big files, a big of 1 gb can be transferred in 4 or 5 seconds which isn't bad for a 2.5 inch drive. With tiny files it's a nightmare.For the warranty, I had to send an email to Seagate because it was written "2 years of warranty" in french and "3 years of warranty" in english on the box. It turned out that this drive would be under warranty for 3.5 years.
So far I am satisfied with this drive, I hope this unit won't fail in the next couple of years.
Samus - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Ganesh, can you disassemble the drive case and take a photo for us?Also, can you take another CDI screen shot after a few hours of use. I'm curious where the load/unload cycle count (APM) value sits with this drive. My guess is its at 64, but I can do some math from the SMART values to determine how aggressive the power saving is set...helping determine the drives lifespan.
ummduh - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Have to second this. Does the internal drive use a standard SATA connector?Sort of shocked no one took the case off for a look-see.
Per Hansson - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
Me to, I would really like to know if it's using a SATA connector or if it's USB direct.Notmyusualid - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
Yes, they are all standard SATA connectors. I have 1 x 1TB, 2x2TB (which are going into my little home-brew NAS), and today, 1x4TB, which I immediately ripped open and fitted inside my Alienware 18.All the others were standard SATA z-depth, this 4TB surprised me with its shear size & weight, it was easily 15mm depth. It took a simple 15 minute modification to my HDD cage to fit it alongside my 850 Pro 512GB, and it went in with ease. (but this is a monstrous laptop - don't go thinking you can do the same at home, you could be lucky, but I very much doubt it).
I'm seeing max R/W speeds of +130Mb/s, give or take, on ATTO, which bests the 1TB at ~110Mb/s,and the 2TBs I forget, but I think they are less than this new one.
So now I've got 2x SSD 512/500, and 4TB mechanical storage in my 'laptop'.
Quite satisfied.
shadowjk - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
What are noise levels like on this thing?Miller1331 - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Probably pretty loud like the majority of Seagate's other productsNotmyusualid - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
I'm transferring 1.2TB to it now, and I don't hear it... I literally have to put my ear flat on the machine to hear it at all. Colour me impressed.jseliger2 - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Has anyone used one of these with Time Machine on a Mac? My current Time Machine drive is behaving strangely, and, consequently, this review comes at a timely time.farhadd - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I haven't, but I'm sure it'd be fine. I've helped friends set up countless external USB / firewire drives as Time Machines. Just make sure you reformat it GPT / Mac OS Extended (Journaled) prior to using it.farhadd - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Instead of Mac users installing NTFS drivers for write compatibility, I'd just reformat the drive ExFAT, which is fully read / write compatible on any Mac OS 10.6.5+.mikato - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
exFAT - no journalling, only a single file allocation table and single free space map, higher chance of data loss or failure when disconnected while writing. Probably not optimal for most people though it does work that way.I'd post a link but the comment thing seems to think my comment is spam then.
DanNeely - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I first heard of that a few years back; kinda makes me wonder if things like this are using HDDs originally intended for PCs that then got repackaged because they didn't sell, or if this is still too expensive a price/capacity tier to sell enough to justify a second design.knightspawn1138 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Am I the only one that sees this and thinks of dremel-ing out the HDD cage in my PS4 to make room for this bad boy?ATimson - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
I've heard bad things about PS4s with >2 TB of storage (Rest Mode stops working, sometimes they randomly won't start up). Maybe things would be better with a 2.5" drive, but I'm planning on sticking with my 2 TB for now!pika2000 - Sunday, August 9, 2015 - link
Not going to trust a single hard drive for anything anymore. For backing up to spinning platters, I prefer a system with redundancy like drobo. Why? I have had 2 external drives, Seagate and WD, both failed in less than 6 months. In fact, I had always have failed hard drive once a year (be it in desktop, external, laptop, even inside my drobo), regardless of brand and age. Always.It's amazing how much faith we put in this completely unreliable media. Having such high density storage makes things worse as you are tempted to put more data, and more will be lost when the drive breaks.
People are criticising the price of SSD, but considering the cost of replacing drives at least once a year and the stress they gave me when they fail, I think the price of SSD is not that bad.
Notmyusualid - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
At the moment I'm seeing more issues with SSDs, than mechanical storage.I now keep no irreplacable data on SSDs anymore.
I don't trust 'em. And oh yes, recently been burnt by Samsumg and their TLC sh1te.
RossMeryy0 - Sunday, August 16, 2015 - link
That sounds really nice to help people keep enough hard drive free space and also keep a good performance. But, in daily use, also remember to clean drive up regularly in case of some low disk space error issues. Of course, drive data backups are also supposed to be prepared well all the time.http://www.icare-recovery.com/howto/seagate-backup...
darkfalz - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link
For some reason Seagate don't include any rubber feet on their Portable 2.5" drives anymore. So they just slip and slide around if moved. I added some feet but honestly, it should be on the product itself. Otherwise 4TB in a 2.5" USB powered portable is very nice.Miller1331 - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
After having 2 die on me within the last year I would be weary about buying any more Seagate productstokyojerry - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Amazon U.S. currently sells the 4TB Backup Plus for $119.99, a good deal in and of itself. I wonder though, what is the difference between the " STDR4000901" model Amazon sells and the product reviewed here. ST4000LM016. Lack of UASP support? Some other issue?