Hard Game

This drive packs in its massive 4tb capacity on only 4 disk platters thanks to increased density of its 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 Seagates 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.

So with a 5,900 rpm how does this drive perform?Well lets look at some benchmarks and find out.

With reads ranging from 78 mb/s to 171 mb/s this drive even with only 5,900 rpm isnt about that funny business.16.8ms is not quick but I wouldnt expect better with the lower spindle speed.A burst rate of 247 mb/s isnt 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 its 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 cant 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 wont 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 isnt a CPU hog.

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.