Review on Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda 3.5″ 4TB SATA3 256 Mb 5400 rpm ST4000DM004
4 min readNo matter how massively solid-state drives are distributed at the moment, “classic” hard drives will hold on to positions in the field of storing large amounts of information for a long time to come. For the most part (with rare exceptions, but still) today, even the most powerful and productive systems can not do without hard drives. With all its advantages, SSDs will not soon get rid of their main drawback, which HDDs lack – the high cost for 1 GB of volume. Nowadays, a 1 TB hard drive has become commonplace, and its cost is even less than the minimum necessary for a comfortable 120 GB SSD.
And now we’ll talk about the products of the well-known manufacturer Seagate – the Barracuda ST4000DM004 hard drive .
Brief characteristics:
| Appointment | For desktop \ home systems |
| Form factor | 3.5 “ |
| Connection interface | SATA 3 (6Gbps) |
| Spindle speed | 5400 rpm |
| Cache volume | 256 MB |
| Storage capacity | 4 TB |
| Number of Plates \ Magnetic Heads | 2 \ 4 |
This hard drive belongs to the segment of home / desktop solutions and does not stand out with any outstanding features, such as the Barracuda Pro series.
This solution is perfect for use in tasks that do not require high performance and constant data availability. Unlike more advanced models, “simple” Barracuds are not advisable to operate around the clock or close to that mode. Long and serious load can significantly reduce the resource and service life of drives. The manufacturer cites 2400 hours of on-time and a workload of 55 terabytes of recorded data as recommended annual values.
This model with the declared 4 terabytes will provide the user with “only” 3726 gigabytes.
The hard drive comes in the usual antistatic bag.
The upper part carries an information sticker with the manufacturer’s designation, model range and product specifications. It will also be useful to pay attention to the firmware version of the drive and, if possible, update the firmware. Nothing in the world is perfect, including hard drive firmware from such a famous manufacturer. There were cases when, due to imperfection of the software, hard drives running such firmware more often failed and the resource of devices decreased significantly. From the last I recall the problems on CC4C firmware which significantly reduced the resource of hard drives by constant head parking.
On the abdomen, in addition to the usual controller board, nothing is located. There are no soldered components on the outside, so the likelihood of harming the drive is reduced. There are also the usual holes for mounting the disc in the basket / slide on the bolts.
The dimensions of the hard drive are standard, weight in the region of 600 grams. The base has sloppy marks from the ends of the die from the mold after casting. No other cosmetic or other frills have been noted – the build quality is up to par.
The drive is connected via the SATA3 interface operating at 6 Gbps. For hard drives, this bandwidth is enough for many more years, but high-speed SSDs have run into this bottleneck. So, most likely in the near future, the SATA interface will remain exclusively for the hard drives, and the number of SSD drives with this connection option will decrease. It will not completely disappear, since the ability to connect via M2 or U2 on the motherboards began to appear relatively recently.
Under the controller board there are foam spacers, apparently located there to reduce the impact of vibration on the electronic brain of the disk. Although given the fact that only 2 plates are used in the design and the RPM of this hard drive is only 5400 rotations per minute, the vibrations should be at a minimum level. Be that as it may, always pay due attention to fixing the hard drives in the bowels of the computer – a poorly fixed hard drive as a result of exposure to vibration will significantly lose its service life.
And personally, I am very confused by such an “open” placement of a loop going to the spindle motor.
After installing the hard drive, I measured the performance of the well-known utility CrystallDiskMark. In the first two tests, the presence of a larger cache of 256 megabytes is very noticeable. The equally high sequential read speed on files of all sizes is also undoubtedly pleasing.
When using a disk in the form of a system or in operations with small files, performance will be very pleasant to please. When passing the benchmark from AIDA64, the read speed from the buffer pleasantly pleases the eye.
But still, the test for random reading from a set of benchmarks in AIDA64 closest to the real use case shows a good result. The average speed was approximately 140MB per second. Frankly pleased with the fact that for almost 50 minutes of active work, the disc did not warm up above 32 degrees! A definite plus
In any case, I would not have particular hopes for hard drives. In modern realities, the disk subsystem based on hard disks is becoming a bottleneck in almost any system. Even an ordinary office machine is much faster on an SSD.
Browsed HDD is perfect for storing a large array of information and media content due to its capacity. To run games is not the best solution, because it significantly increases the risk of performance degradation due to the not-so-fast disk subsystem.
The article is written on the basis of materials of this site.
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