Seagate SkyHawk 1TB Surveillance Hard Drive 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive ST1000VX005

Pros: Sequential performance is good. I measured (sequential Read/Write aka Verify) of: ~190 MB/sec (Outside Diameter – empty), ~155 MB/sec (Middle Diameter – half full), ~85 MB/sec (Inside Diameter – full).

The ST3000VX010 is the 3TB capacity point of this series of Seagate drives. I also own the 1TB version (ST1000VX005).
Capacity points of: 2TB (ST2000VX008), 4TB (ST4000VX007), 6TB (ST6000VX0023), and 8TB (ST8000VX0022) are also available.

The device internally has three Disks and five (or six) Heads. Recording density (max) is: 1740k BPI. Track density (avg) is: 346k tracks/in. Areal density (avg) is: 613 Gb/in^2. Internal data transfer rate (max) is: 1813 Mb/sec.

The device weighs 610g / 1.345 lb, with a height of 26.1mm / 1.028 in.

Load/Unload cycles (25°C, 50% rel. humidity) – 300,000.

Cons: Power-on to ready (in seconds) – 15 (typical) / 17 (max).

Overall Review: The most important aspect of any mechanical Disk Drive is reliability (i.e. can you read your data back off the device years after you wrote it to the device). Obviously I have not been able to test the device for years.

The Areal density suggests the device 3TB does NOT employ Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), however the specification is not explicit.

Also see my 03/25/2017 review of the 1TB ST1000VX005 at https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822179017

I recommend this product.

Pros: Huge capacity
7200 rpm
Giant cache

Cons: Missing two mounting holes

Overall Review: This behemoth hard drive from Seagate specifically targets the video surveillance user. Seagate’s new “Guardian Series” drives feature high MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), RVS (Rotational Vibration Sensors), huge amounts of cache, 7200 rpm spindle speed, and high workload ratings. The SkyHawk in particular also boasts enhanced ImagePerfect™ firmware. The series overall seems aimed at home or small business users who want huge, reliable storage, but aren’t necessarily setting up an enterprise level server.

Pulling this bare drive out of its protective hot dog package, you realize it is something special. It’s got a heavy bulk to it that’s just different from other drives. It’s got your standard SATA and power connectors, along with the 4-pin jumper set that goes unused. Installing the drive was mostly uneventful, save for missing two of the middle-side mount holes usually found on a 3.5” form factor drive. C’mon Seagate, really? You’d think at this level one wouldn’t need to one-screw-wonder the thing.

Seagate makes the claim that the drive is optimized for recording up to 90% of the time and supporting up to 64 HD cameras. With a Workload Rating of 180TB per year, and MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, the SkyHawk should certainly have no problem handling that. Though it’s clear that the drive is marketed at the home or small business user who will likely not even approach those numbers. If you’re a user big enough to have 64 cameras, you’d likely spend the extra 20% it takes to snag Seagate’s Enterprise level drive dubbed “Helium”. The ImagePerfect firmware is a caching mechanism allowing for quick spin up of the drive when it’s needed (e.g. when a camera detects motion and needs to instantly start recording). The RVS helps with interference if you have lots of spinning drives in the system.

This SkyHawk ST10000VX0004 was immediately slapped into an aging but capable i7 920 system with 8GB of RAM which serves DVR/NVR duty. Recording over-the-air TV and several 3MP IP cameras, this drive didn’t miss a beat and obviously provided a massive increase in storage potential (Thanks, DVR, for letting me know a year’s worth of HD video recording is now available). With a 64K allocation size, NTFS formatted, GPT partition, the drive shows 9.09TB available in Windows 7 (that’s 9,957,049,892,864 bytes for you nerds that understand). Multiple real world file copy tests showed this drive averaging around 120 MBps. Pretty reasonable for a spinning drive with 10TB of space.

The SkyHawk’s closest direct competitor would be the Western Digital Purple series, which, while comparatively priced, has half the cache and spins at 5400 rpm.

Overall this new drive from Seagate fills a great need for many home users who are constantly needing more and more fast, localized storage. The only ding is the missing mounting holes and that wasn’t worth losing an entire egg over.

Pros: The Seagate Skyhawk 6TB Is meant for DVR Applications, Where the drive will be writing data constantly. It seems to be a well made drive, It has some weight to it, It weighs in at 24.9oz, It has a 256MB Cache, Which is important for those situations where you need to copy data off of your DVR at the same time it has to continue recording.
I first installed this Drive in my desktop pc so i could perform benchmarks on it. And it performed well.
Maximum HD Tune Read speed of 208MB/s & Average 168MB/s
Maximum HD Tune Write speed of 207MB/s & Average 152MB/s
Random Read Access Time 18.6ms & Random Write Access Time 6.65ms

Cons: While using this drive in my desktop pc I noticed it made some odd sounds when not in use. I had a theory on what it was and the Skyhawk Manual i found on the Seagate website confirmed it.
The Seagate Skyhawk Manual Shows the different power management modes. And even during idle, the spindle still rotates, and the heads are still tracking, only during standby and sleep modes do the heads park, and spindle stop.
Therefore, the entire time your computer is powered on, the heads are still moving and tracking across the drive. This is backwards from what typical desktop drives do.
With a traditional desktop drive, the heads park when not in use, once you start reading or writing data the heads move out of park and begin tracking. once the drive is done reading or writing data the heads stop tracking and go back to park. If you happened to use a desktop hard drive in a DVR it could potentially wear out. In a DVR environment a desktop drive would constantly be moving the heads in and out of park, once the DVR has data for the drive to write it will begin tracking, once that data is written the heads will stop tracking, immediately after the DVR has more data to be written so the drive has to begin tracking again. This repetitive start/stop operation can cause the drive to fail prematurely.
Therefore drives intended for DVR use were created like this Skyhawk, This drive is different because the head no longer stops tracking, it constantly stays in the ready position. However when used in a Desktop PC the drive is not constantly writing data, so you hear the sound the drive makes as the head scans back and forth across the disk waiting for data to write. It almost sounds like the dreaded Click of Death, but not quite as loud.

Overall Review: This drive is Not ideal for Desktop PC use Or External Hard Drive use It may actually fail sooner than it should in a Desktop PC because it never stop scanning and the heads are constantly tracking and moving back and fourth. This drive is not designed to be moved around or take shock or vibration that would be expected from external hard drive use. Therefore use this drive for DVR Applications Only.
I brought this Drive up to my work and removed the old 500GB from our Swann DVR and installed this SkyHawk, sofar it has been working without any problems and i no longer hear that clicking sound. It has expanded our recording time from about 5 days to about 45 days.

Pros: That the drive is optimized for 24/7 operation is reassuring.

I have only used the drive a short while, but it is doing duty recording 4 video sources, mixed between mpeg2 and mp4 with no hiccups at all. The 4TB size is a constraint on my current system, so this drive is perfect. (You may have a similar constraint, so check your system before buying larger version)

I’ve noted also, that transferring large files to the drive is snappy — so this drive may be also be a good choice for a system that manages several large daily backups occurring simultaneously, i would think.

This Seagate drive apparently also has rotational vibration sensors, where the competition’s barney colored drive does not. Something to think about if you need up to 16 drives in an array.

Cons: The price premium over other drives and the fact that the drive is designed specifically for surveillance systems means that its confusing if you might be considering this for other purposes. I guess at its most general, the drive is also ideal for lots of writes (and overwrites) such as managing backups for multiple sources.

Overall Review: Seagate (and other brand) optimizing drives for various purposes (desktop, NAS, surveillance, enterprise) is confusing. Especially for hybrid use cases which don’t fit directly into one bucket. I suggest that Seagate give more detailed information to the consumer of what trade-offs are made with each type of drive so those inclined may make informed decisions on which drive is best for them.

For example, this drive may have reduced average seek time and caching that favors read ahead for large files, which make this less desirable as a primary OS drive, and perhaps as a NAS drive serving many users with small files.

As a NAS, its still not a bad choice due to its 24/7 reliability and great write throughput. This might be great for lots of big back ups, DVR or streaming movies workload. So I wouldn’t be afraid to use in a NAS, especially if this is on sale.

If your use case is a surveillance video recording device, this is an absolute slam dunk.

Pros: Comes packaged as a bare drive, I can’t imagine somebody who is buying a surveillance drive, but doesn’t already have a chassis for the drive, or a spare sata cable, so this just means it’s less packaging for me to throw away. +1
Crystal disk mark results were better than I anticipated for a drive that is focused on surveillance 185 MB/s read/write for sequential, and .53 read, and 1.88 write for 4k.
I added this drive to my existing storage pool (windows 10 storage spaces) for media and my surveillance cameras without any issues.
Drive is running cool under my (admittedly light) workload.

Cons: I haven’t found any so far

Overall Review: I’m very happy with it and will buy more in the future if I need to expand my existing storage pool

Pros: I’m using in a stand-alone system with four 3-megapixel IP cameras recording at 1080p at 30fps. No motion detection so it’s guzzling a lot of HD footage at once.

I used to have only a single 1TB hard drive in it and would hold only about a week of footage (at most). Now this 8TB drive has been installed for 2 weeks and it’s ~30% full.

Giant, fat, 8TB drive optimized for DVR. Should work well in things like TiVo in addition to standard surveillance systems.

Plays back fast. I can seek, fast-foward, slow-mo, whatever through four 1080p 30fps video files like a breeze.

Cons: It’s not silent. My drive sounds like a floppy disk drive when going. Not quite as loud, but the same “whee, whaa. whee, whaa”. It doesn’t do that during playback or idling, just recording. “Whee, whaa” Non-stop.

Maybe I got a faulty unit, but I have waited two weeks and it’s still doing it. I figure it’s the read/write head moving around… I have no idea… It’s not something the 1TB drive did or any other hard drive I’ve ever owned.

Overall Review: At least it’s not clicking or ticking. The thing works just fine so far, but I waited over two weeks to write this review because I figured it would fail on me from the sounds it makes, but not yet. The 3 year warranty is assuring, and I very likely will need it.

Lost a egg for the funky floppy drive noises. Price seems fair. Warranty is good. Drive performs it’s duty.

Pros: What I noticed immediately about this hard drive is that I heard nothing. It is absolutely the quietest hard drive I’ve owned.

In the 20+ days in service, I’ve experienced no issues. That is typical of Seagate drives that I’ve used over the years, with my only failures occurring out of the box, or around the 3-year mark. My failures have all been with desktop models, not server/nas or surveillance models.

With any given build, the intellectual capital available should never be spent fiddling with hard drives – if there is anything that should be dialed in to one or two quick decisions and then set and forgotten, it is hard drives. This model passes the test. Once formatted and deployed, I made no adjustments and only reviewed the stats from smartctl to verify that it is indeed working properly.

Cons: No cons on this one.

Overall Review: For testing this drive, I chose to use zoneminder on fedora, because it can be moved to raspberry pi if I ever want to go ultra-low power. Because I have a test box with a P45/Q9550/8GB, I can safely use my 3 dlink cameras running at 720p in 24-bit color. The formula I found in the zm faq gives a formula to calculate memory requirements:

– Min Memory = 1.2 * ((image-width*image-height*image buffer size*target color space*number of cameras/8/1024/1024 )

I want the default of 50 frames as buffer, so I need about 500MB dedicated to zoneminder, and that makes me feel comfortable that I could move to the raspberry pi. The drive itself is a very low-power draw, cool-running device, so I would choose this model for that purpose with no misgivings.

With the recordings, I can review any point in time and see enough info to know what is happening and who is doing it, which is normal, and I want normal, each time and every time. So all is good.

When I go to production deployment, I’ll want raid1 instead of a single drive, so that may affect frame drops or video quality some, and I will update this review with those results. I am looking at the current price , and it is a no-brainer IMO to go with another of these.

Pros: – This Skyhawk is probably one of the quietest drives I have ever used.
– While they will work just fine in desktop computers, they are optimized for high-performance continuous write operations vs. reads.
– With some testing this drive has sustained throughput of 239MB/s write and 240MB/s read for me.
– The drive was extremely cool while running in the PC, so it confirmed to me that it does use NAS ball bearings and motors.
– I tried this out in my pc, in my macbook pro, in a dvr, & in a surveillance box and did not run into ANY issues. This was VERY surprising to me. The read/write speed was consistently fast with no hiccups that I noticed.

Cons: – I seriously wish I could think of a legitimate technical one, so I will just say the design of the logo is meh. [Not really an issue though.]

Overall Review: – I admit I was a little skeptical at first, and spent quite awhile testing this to ensure that it got an honest & objective review, this is the first seagate drive that I’ve obtained that didn’t give me any problems. Already recommend to a couple of friends who were looking to setup security systems in their houses.