Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Made for 24/7 usage
Uses 1 TB platters
Has a 3 year warranty
No vibration whatsoever
Very quiet, never made a sound while in use. The only time I ever heard them was when the drives spun back up from being off and after the initial spin up they returned to being silent.

Ran excessive benchmarks and tests to try and break in the drives in order to ensure they were not likely to fail early on before configuring them for use in my server. Initially and after my stress tests the drives reported no SMART errors of any kind and all of the values were good and where they should be.

I bought two of the 3 TB models and here are their benchmark results:

Crystal Disk Mark – Drive 1
• Sequential: Read = 147.3 MB/s, Write = 134.9 MB/s
• 512k: Read = 52.34 MB/s, Write = 87.40 MB/s
• 4k: Read = 0.726 MB/s, Write = 1.525 MB/s
• 4k QD32: Read = 1.152 MB/s, Write = 1.546 MB/s

Crystal Disk Mark – Drive 2
• Sequential: Read = 145.3 MB/s, Write = 137.3 MB/s
• 512k: Read = 52.85 MB/s, Write = 89.28 MB/s
• 4k: Read = 0.735 MB/s, Write = 1.503 MB/s
• 4k QD32: Read = 1.158 MB/s, Write = 1.536 MB/s

HD Tune – Drive 1
• Minimum: 73.6 MB/s
• Maximum: 162.5 MB/s
• Average: 130.2 MB/s
• Access Time: 17.7 ms
• Burst Rate: 167.4 MB/s

HD Tune – Drive 2
• Minimum: 67.7 MB/s
• Maximum: 155.7 MB/s
• Average: 124.8 MB/s
• Access Time: 17.8 ms
• Burst Rate: 166.4 MB/s

Temperature (Ran significantly cooler than two Seagate 2 TB ST2000M001 in my home server)
• Drive 1: 82.4 °F
• Drive 2: 80.6 °F

Power Consumption
• Idle Drive Off – 0.95 Watts
• Idle Drive On – 5.15 Watts
• Load Read – 7.45 Watts
• Load Write – 7.75 Watts

I also tested the new drive on a SATA II connection and as I figured the results were within a margin of error as some values were higher and some were lower than when on the SATA III connection. So if you don’t have a SATA III capable motherboard, don’t worry about it.

Cons: These drives spin at 5900 RPM. The performance improvement by switching them to 7200 RPM would be great but I assume Seagate didn’t want to do that in order to help ensure they have little to no vibration which currently they don’t. Also the power consumption would go up and again I’m sure Seagate was aiming for a lower power envelop for these drives.

Overall Review: Overall these are very good drives, they run silent and vibration free and don’t consume a lot of power. I would recommend these drives for anyone with setup where they have a server, a NAS or just a computer they leave on all the time. The performance isn’t where I’d like it to be but is still good enough for my usage as they are still faster than the maximum throughput of a Gigabit Ethernet connection so they are prefect for my home server. Again regarding the performance I bought theses for reliability as they are made for 24/7 use not because they are the fastest mechanical hard drives.

Not related to the drive but Newegg’s new hard drive packaging is fantastic as the drive is held together so tightly I could barely get it out of the box.

*All tests were conducted three times to ensure accuracy and repeatability of results.

Pros: I tested the ST4000VN000 4 TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive. This hard drive can be found on NewEgg under SKU: N82E16822178393. This is the largest of Seagate’s new NAS drive line. First a little history: Last summer Western Digital created a new line of hard drives specifically designed for use in NAS systems, called the red series. A year later we now have Seagate following suit with their three new NAS drives, in capacities of: 2, 3 and 4 TB. Anytime you cram up to five hard drives into a small box, you are going to have heat issues. Both manufacturers try to solve the heat problem by running their NAS drives at a reduced RPM. I believe this drive operates at 5,900 RPM. Seagate does not publish an RPM spec anywhere that I could find on their website. I got this spec from a review on the similar Seagate HDD.15 model desktop drive on Legit Storage Reviews. Seagate can operate this drive at a reduced RPM, because they are only using four platters instead of five like WD does in their Black and Enterprise 4 TB series. Seagate is able to do this, due to the drive’s outstanding areal density specification.

NAS is an abbreviation for Network Attached Storage. NAS systems are small computers that attach to your LAN network and typically hold from 1-5 HDD, for SOHO work environments. Most NAS units only require an AC power and a network connection. My custom-built unit sits on a shelf in my basement. They are useful for backing up your home and small business computers and for storing large amounts of data. In the home they can be used to store: digital pictures, videos, MP3 tunes, Etc. NAS units do not need fast hard drives. The reason for this is the LAN network is typically the bandwidth (speed) bottleneck, not the hard drive. So installing an ultra-fast 7,200, or 10K RPM drive into a NAS box, would simply be a waste of money. Because this is a NAS specific hard drive, I did not run any desktop benchmarks on it.

Most NAS units support RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks), a specification that is important to RAID systems, involves error recovery control (ERC), or as WD refers to it, time-limited error recovery (TLER). All hard drives occasionally have to take themselves offline for several seconds, or even minutes to perform read/write error recovery. These maintenance sessions are used to move data from weak sectors to good sectors. The entire process can take upwards of 30 seconds, or longer to complete. Most RAID controllers will mark a drive as dirty (malfunctioning), if it goes offline for more than 7 seconds. This can result in the RAID controller taking the entire array offline for hours, as it attempts to rebuild the data on the unresponsive drive. Seagate has set the ERC on this drive to less than 7 seconds. This is the number one reason most desktop hard drives make lousy RAID drives.

Unlike desktop drives, these NAS specific hard drives from Seagate are designed to operate 24 x 7.

Cons: None so far. The new drive has performed flawlessly in the two weeks I have been testing it. I will to add to this review later, if anything changes. I think that Seagate has done an excellent job of balancing the needs of this new NAS model series to their specific application as NAS system drives.

Overall Review: I installed this drive into a custom-built NAS system that I built for my home-based computer consulting business in December of 2012. Most of the parts were purchased from NewEgg. It consists of a Cooler Master Elite 343 mid-tower micro-ATX case, with an AMD Athlon X2-270 (3.4 GHz) 64-bit processor, an Asus model M5A78L-M LX PLUS motherboard w/Bios: 1201, dated 08/20/2012, a Cooler Master GX-450 Bronze power supply, it runs the NAS4Free – BSD Unix operating system. This NAS system replaced an older NAS unit I built that ran NASLite Linux. After many years of dependable use, it suffered a motherboard failure due to bulging capacitors. The NAS4Free impressed me with its modern web-based administrator’s interface.

The NAS4Free OS boots off of an 8 GB Micro SD Flashcard, installed in a Rosewill USB 2.0 model RCR-IC001 card reader. The system has 4 GB of G. Skill DDR3 RAM memory installed. Currently it has three hard drives. In addition to this Seagate drive, it has a WDC WD5003ABYX-01WERA1 500 GB Enterprise drive and a WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 green series 2.0 TB drive. No RAID is in use at this time. NAS4Free supports SMART monitoring of hard drives, so it’s interesting to note that the Seagate ST4000VN000, is the coolest drive of the group at 23°C. The hottest drive is the WD Enterprise drive, which operates at 28°C. The reason it runs hotter is that its the only drive that is spinning at 7200 RPM. My WD green drive, which BTW also operates at a reduced RPM, runs at a modest 25°C.

I highly recommend NAS4Free, if you are interested in building your own NAS system like I did. Like its name implies the cost is free. Although the developers would appreciate a donation for their efforts. It’s based on BSD Unix, which is also used by Apple for their MAC OS 10.x. The NAS4Free operating system has been extremely stable. I have never had to reboot it, except for routine maintenance. Once the initial OS installation setup is completed, all other configuration settings are handled via a modern web interface, using your favorite web browser. I would not recommend NAS4Free for newbies. I had to get help from a friend who is a Unix programmer, on setting up the drive mount points and the SAMBA protocol share settings. SAMBA is important, because it enables Windows computers to access the Unix formatted hard drives. The hard drives were all formatted with the standard BSD Unix UFS file system. The 64-bit NAS4Free had no problems formatting this 4.0 TB hard drive. The formatted drive provided 3.5 TB of usable disk storage space. One other advantage of using BSD Unix, is that it is unaffected by most Windows viruses.

At the current cost on NewEgg of $190.00 for the 4.0 TB hard drive model I reviewed, these Seagate NAS drives are priced very competitive. They also come with a 3-year manufacturers warranty. You could probably sneak one of these into a desktop computer for use as a data drive, mated with an SSD boot drive, without any issues. Highly recommended!

Pros: In short, this drive is very quiet, has low power consumption, runs cool, and transfers data much faster than I expected from a 5900 RPM drive. It supports TLER (time-limited error recovery) which is highly recommended for a RAID environment. (See Wikipedia’s entry on “Error recovery control” for more information regarding TLER.)

I happen to also own a Seagate ST2000DM001, which is the comparable Barracuda model (2TB 7200 RPM 64MB cache) to this NAS drive. Comparing the specifications of these two:
Warranty: 3 years (NAS), 2 years (Barracuda).
Power, operating: 4.3W (NAS), 6.7W (Barracuda).
Load/unload cycles: 600K (NAS), 300K (Barracuda).
TLER: Yes (NAS), No (Barracuda).
Noise, operating: 2.1 bels (NAS), 2.7 bels (Barracuda).
In practice, both disks are much quieter than my CPU cooler and power supply fans.

Comparing this drive with the comparable Barracuda using Linux’s “Disk Utility” (palimpsest):
Measured read, minimum: 75.5 MB/s (NAS), 94.3 MB (Barracuda).
Measured read, maximum: 215.7 MB/s (NAS), 223.9 MB (Barracuda).
Measured read, average: 145.0 MB/s (NAS), 164.9 MB (Barracuda).
Measured access time: 16.8 ms (NAS), 15.0 ms (Barracuda).

This drive is much faster than I expected. While slower than the 7200 RPM Barracuda, it is 40% faster than my 4 year old 7200 RPM Hitachi 7K1000.B 1TB and 50% faster than my 5 year old 7200 RPM Western Digital WD6400AAKS. Spindle speed isn’t everything!

During testing, the NAS drive temperature remained cool. In a desktop with good airflow it idled at 33 degrees C and increased to 35 degrees C under constant use.

As expected, a read-write test across the entire drive showed no bad sectors (linux: “mke2fs -c -c -j -t ext4 /dev/sdc1; dumpe2fs -b /dev/sdc1”).

Overall I was very impressed with this drive for its speed, low power, and low temperature.

Cons: My review unit was made in China. If you read the reviews for the Barracuda model, you’ll see a high number of failures for Seagate’s Chinese-made drives verses the drives from their Thailand factory. I experienced no problems with this unit in my one week of testing, but long-term reliability remains to be seen.

Overall Review: Unless you are building a RAID array or you have very strict noise, power, and/or thermal requirements that this drive meets, you should be considering the comparable Barracuda model instead of this NAS drive. This drive is currently 30% more expensive than the 2TB Barracuda. The Barracuda is significantly faster, albeit with higher power consumption and slightly higher noise.

You should be considering this drive for a RAID array because it supports TLER. (TLER is not useful when the drive is used outside of a RAID environment, and in fact should be disabled for standalone use.) In the last year or two both Seagate and Western Digital have disabled TLER support in their standard (non-enterprise) disks in order to steer more people toward higher-priced disks like these. I have to frown upon that, but the bottom line is that if you need TLER, you now need to look specifically for a drive that supports it.

Using linux, you can confirm TLER support with “smartctl -l scterc /dev/sdX” where sdX is your disk device (typically sda, sdb, …).

Pay attention to alignment when partitioning this disk. The logical sector size is 512 bytes, and the disk’s physical sector size is 4096 bytes. For best performance, the partition’s beginning and end should be aligned to the physical sector boundaries, which means you may need to adjust the logical sector number of the partition’s beginning and end. I first partitioned it with the Linux “Disk Utility” (palimpsest) and later received a warning that the partition was misaligned by 512 bytes. Using fdisk I saw that the partition started at logical sector 63. I deleted the partition and re-created it starting on logical sector 64, and the warning vanished.

Pros: Is very cool to the touch even when run in a USB 3.0 Xigmatek docking station. Formated completely to look for bad sectors. It likely took several hours as I let it format overnight. None found. Set it up as GPT single partition. Switched from i7-3930k to Z68 i3 and ran some benchmarks.
Reads are roughly 150MB/s all the way to about 1TB when speeds start dropping. At the 1.5tb mark we are seeing about 135MB/s, 116MB/s at 2tb, and drop below 100MB/sec at about 2.5TB full. It keeps dropping to about 72MB/s at 3TB (full). This is a pretty impressive smooth slope, very linear. This is more than enough data to saturate most consumer level switches. My switch maxes out at about 115MB/s over Cat6 shielded cable. I plan to install this into a sever case when it arrives in a few days along with an additional 10 drives ranging from 2 to 4TB in size. In order to take full advantage of this drive I will also be adding a dual port Intel server NIC and team the ports to the switch for more throughput. Burst rates on this drive are 175MB/s. Wow. CPU usage through the Intel Z68 chipset was a low 2.6% during tests on the i3-2120 w/8GB RAM on Win7 x64.

Cons: These drives come in a static bag, wrapped in bubble wrap and surrounded by packing peanuts. I am not sure if this is normal for a NAS drive or not.

Seek times are not as fast but the high data density makes for very fast transfers.

Overall Review: I think this would be a wonderful drive in a home server setting where ventilation may not be top notch in a NAS case. Only time will tell about the reliability. I will update once the server rack case comes in and I load it up with bluray movies.

I have 2 media servers, a primary and a backup. No sane person would trust multiple terabytes of data to a single spindle without a backup. For every drive there is an equal size drive in the backup server. Any adds or deletes are replicated to the backup server during the night, only the changes. Both servers are on UPS batteries. Odds are greater than 1 in 10 I will get a bad drive new out of the box. They usually show up in the first 90 days and get swapped out with new ones. I never put refurbished drives in my servers. They are flat out junk. Every refurb I have received has failed within a few months. It should be illegal to send refurbished drives back to consumers when a warranty is claimed. I have about 40 drives in various machines around the house. I use the refurb in the media center PC’s that change very little from day to day. All boot drives get automatically imaged to a central drive once a month. It’s more important to backup up these drives than for me to worry about which one transfers 5MB/s faster than another one.

Pros: Quick and silent with low power consumption

Cons: A bit slow, but it’s a 5900rpm NAS drive and is plenty fast for serving up your media.

Overall Review: Since I was only sent one it didn’t make much sense to tear apart my NAS and put in one drive since I couldn’t test its performance in RAID anyway. Instead I put it in my media computer (which still is accessed quite a bit to play back DVR files) right along side my 2TB WD Caviar Green. Prior to the WD Red and these Seagate NAS drives, the WD Green was part of my RAID in my NAS box.

So, how does one of these drives stack up to a Caviar Green? According to SiSoft Sandra’s hard drive tests the Caviar Green’s drive score is 92.24MB/s with 13.18MS random access time with the scores ranging from a minimum of 58.640MB/s to a maximum of 122.492.

The Seagate NAS ST2000 came in with an overall drive score of 133.3MB/s and 13.58ms random access time. Minimum score was 85.479 going to a maximum score of 179.950MB/s.

I then started transferring some large videos from FRAPS to compare the drives. The Green ran right around 109-110MB/s as the files were read from it and put onto my SSD and a steady 140MB/s as they were written.

This drive fared much better. A read speed hovering around 160MB/s with a max of about 190 (from a 5900rpm drive!) and a write speed around 185MB/s average that started out at a smidge over 200!

Pros: Massive amount of storage space for personal use. Even for business use, 3TBs is plenty of space. I set up this HDD at work as a storage solution for shared files. The 5900 RPM speed is not noticeable at all, for now. May notice a bit of a slow down as the drive fills, but that is yet to be seen and may take a while since the drive is large.
Also, vibration is low as well as access noise. I didn’t really notice any, but that’s in the server room in my place of business. Not a loud room, but I couldn’t hear the drive at any distance, which is good.
I got practically the same read/write speeds as everyone else, so I’ll post for reference:

50MB filesize
SEQ: 141.3 MB/s read, 119.6 MB/s write
512K: 53.56 MB/s read, 86.25 MB/s write
4K: 1.160 MB/s read, 1.622 MB/s write
4K QD32: 1.380 MB/s read, 1.709 MB/s write

4GB filesize
SEQ: 134.6 MB/s read, 130.0 MB/s write
512K: 49.76 MB/s read, 69.98 MB/s write
4K: 0.621 MB/s read, 1.312 MB/s write
4K QD32: 1.121 MB/s read, 1.369 MB/s write

So for those wanting to know what these numbers mean, this HDD performs almost as good as 7200RPM drives, yet it has a huge amount of storage space.

Cons: Product was packaged in bubble wrap and peanuts. No real box. Just a sticker labeled “NewEgg Xpert Review Item” which I won’t take an egg away for, but I firmly believe we EggXperts should receive the same exact product in the same packaging that any potential purchaser would receive.

Overall Review: May require you to install 3rd party software in order to install drives larger than 2TB.

Pros: -Plenty of space
-Designed to run 24/7
-Better data error recovery
-5900rpm
-Designed for a NAS

Cons: -Cost. At $170 is still a bit pricey
Hopefully price will drop down soon
-5900rpm

Overall Review: ———————————————————————–
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo

———————————————————————–
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 151.353 MB/s
Sequential Write : 145.172 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 47.202 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 82.336 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.534 MB/s [ 130.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.366 MB/s [ 333.4 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.203 MB/s [ 293.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.253 MB/s [ 306.0 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [G: 1.3% (36.0/2794.4 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2013/06/15 13:07:57
OS : Windows 8 Professional [6.2 Build 9200] (x64)

Those are pretty good benchmark numbers for 5900rpm drives. Real world test for sequential data of a 4.7GB single file I achieved a 125-130MB/s read speed and 120-127MB/s write speed. Multiple smaller files I get around 90MB/s avg write speed and about 120MB/s read speed which is still quite decent. I couldnt really do any kind of RAID array tests since I have the one drive so I’m unable to provide any numbers for that, but I probably will purchase a couple more and finish my NAS if the price does go down.
I put that the drive being 5900rpm is both a pro and con because in a NAS unit the lower speed would equal to lower power consumption and longer life which is what NAS drives are designed for, but if you have it running in a PC the extra speed with 7200rpm would be a plus.

NASworks on paper sounds very good but that would be a long term test and also the better reliability factor is also a long term test. If this drives fails at either I will update my review accordingly, but Seagate has put a bit more faith in me with their hard drives as of late. I run Seagates and WD drives and Seagate has been just as reliable as my WD drives.

Pros: Raid certified 24/7 operation. Whisper quiet with low temperatures. Very good transfer speeds and lots of storage space.

Cons: Access time and burst rate. Price is a little high for a slower RPM drive.

Overall Review: Windows 7 sees this drive as being 2.72TB.

Now for the benchmarks (SATA 6.0)

—–

Using Crystal Disk Mark:

50MB filesize
SEQ: 130.9 MB/s read, 121.9 MB/s write
512K: 51.56 MB/s read, 89.75 MB/s write
4K: 1.173 MB/s read, 1.751 MB/s write
4K QD32: 1.380 MB/s read, 1.709 MB/s write

4GB filesize
SEQ: 132.9 MB/s read, 132.0 MB/s write
512K: 47.12 MB/s read, 71.59 MB/s write
4K: 0.533 MB/s read, 1.415 MB/s write
4K QD32: 1.277 MB/s read, 1.418 MB/s write

—–

HD Tune pro:

4KB block size read test
MIN: 64.6 MB/sec
MAX: 67.8 MB/sec
AVG: 67.1 MB/sec
Access time: 17.7 ms
Burst rate: 164.4 MB

128KB block size read test
MIN: 71.4 MB/sec
MAX: 145.6 MB/sec
AVG: 121.4 MB/sec
Access time: 17.6 ms
Burst rate: 165.1 MB/sec

Note: These 128KB values were consistent with a block size of 64KB to 8MB.

—–

Currently run a pair of 500MB Western Digital RE4’s (7200 rpm) in a RAID1. This Seagate drive beat the WDs as far as transfer speed goes but lost heavily when it came to access time (12.5 ms) and burst rate (4519.7 MB/s).

Seagate lives up to its advertising with this drive. All in all I would recommend this for those who store their data in raid system (and having a higher quality raid certified drive is important for this), however I wouldn’t use it as your main/OS drive.