Recently and quietly Seagate has refreshed and re-branded their 3.5 inch Barracuda hard drive series.The ever popular Barracuda's are now know simply as the Desktop hard drives.Storage capacities range from 250gb to 4 terabytes.All the drives up to 3tb capacity are Barracuda drives with all the same features and specs as we have known just with a new name.However the top capacity 4tb offering is something entirely new and not entirely the same as it's smaller brethren.This particular model is the retail boxed STBD4000400 version for sale only at BestBuy.com right now.I couldn't help myself and snatched a couple while they were on sale.
This drive packs in it's massive 4tb capacity on only 4 disk platters thanks to increased density of it's data tracks.There are 340,000 tracks per inch to be exact.This drive also features Advanced Format 4k physical sectors with 512 byte emulation,64mb of ddr2 cache, and Seagate's OptiCache and AcuTrac technologies are also present.All the same as the popular 3tb barracuda.However unlike the Barracuda drives this particular model is a 5,900 rpm drive.Yes a 5,900 rpm spindle speed disk drive.I was surprised myself as Seagate makes no note of the spindle speed on their packaging or on their website data that this drive is a 5,900 rpm drive.Checking Crystal Disk Info utility displayed the spindle rate accurately.Which I confirmed with Seagate support.I also asked Seagate support whether ERC or error recovery control was present and enabled on this drive and they said yes.That should give piece of mind to those wanting to use this drive in a NAS or any RAID configuration which Seagate suggests as a viable usage for these new Desktop drives.
Performance Testing
So with a 5,900 rpm how does this drive perform?Well lets look at some benchmarks and find out.
HD Tune Pro 4.61
With reads ranging from 78 mb/s to 171 mb/s this drive even with only 5,900 rpm isn't about that funny business.16.8ms is not quick but I wouldn't expect better with the lower spindle speed.A burst rate of 247 mb/s isn't as explosive as the 3tb barracuda and only will be felt with small files.CPU usage is low at 3.8%.I like my drives not to hog up resources.
With writes from 73 mb/s to 172 mb/s the big Seagate continues to go about it's business quickly.All sequential numbers are better than my trusted 7,200 rpm Western Digital 2tb Black.Access time is something that the big Seagate can't beat my trusty Black drive in.At 17 ms is getting a bit slow and shows the fault of having a lower rpm.Burst rate came out slower but won't be a problem in real world usage.Cpu usage went up a bit during write operations but considering the size and performance of the drive it really isn't a CPU hog.
Crystal Diskmark 3.0.2
Again the big Seagate shows solid performance with Sequential data and larger random 512k blocks.With sequential reads at 148 mb/s and sequential writes at 146 mb/s it is faster in a straight line than my Black drive.4K and 4KQD32 performance is respectable for a hard drive but those fields are pathetic compared to solid state drives.
This drive handles all but the smallest transfer sizes like a champ.Read and writes peak at 155 mb/s and 154 mb/s respectively.
Conclusion
I'm very impressed with Seagate.I surprise myself with those words considering I'm a Western Digital man and thought lowly of Seagate until I tested a 3tb Barracuda last year.This drive with a lower rpm performs equally to the 7,200 rpm4tb Black drives that I recently had.Both of which failed surprisingly.The 4 terabyte Seagate Desktop offers solid performance,with power savings and cooler operation thanks to the slower rpm.Also the drive is as quiet as a mouse.Very much like Western Digital's Red drives.Also if this drive does indeed have ERC truly enabled then it will no doubt be a serious competitor to that drive in the NAS market as it should be.I initially purchased this drive fortesting and evaluation but considering my bad experience with the 4tb Western Digital Black and it's significant cost I may very well keep these big Seagate hard drives.They are more than adequate for my needs.I highly recommend the drive for anyone looking for mass storage of non-critical data.This drive should excel as a secondary drive for data only purposes where a solid state drive is the main operating system drive or as foundation of a multimedia NASsystem.
Pros
4 terabyte capacity
Solid performance
Low cost
Quiet operation
Low operating temperatures
Cons
Wish it was a monstrous 10,000rpm drive!
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