Fantastic value, horrible speed for large sustained transfers. If you're broke, just copying intermittently, or not copying tons of data, go ahead and buy one, if not, read on...



I was under the impression Seagate's newer models had eschewed SMR "archive" drives for higher performance barracuda's, but apparently the new barracuda's are now equally as crippled, and you have to get a "pro" for decent performance. My unit appears to contain a st8000dm004. I spent a couple of days testing to ensure it had no gremlins, then started copying data...



Starts off very briefly at 160MB/s filling it's buffer, after 60 seconds that's halved, by 90 seconds I'm averaging sub 20MB/s speeds. The included screenshot shows copying my scan folder... purely transferring images, which is about the easiest (fastest) thing for a drive to handle. My aging (5 year old?) 3tb seagate external handles the exact same transfer settling in at a stable ~60MB/s average, and the ironwolf I purchased to replace this averages 135MB/s. Adding smaller files to the mix causes speed to plummet further, frequently grinding to a dead halt (yes zero kb/s). And I'm not talking thousands of files, even just adding XMP sidecars for RAW files (each 24MB raw paired with a 7kb file) is a problem. While read speeds were better, they were also well below expectation at 60-80MB/sec for the same folder.



The drive still passes seatools tests and smart data shows zero issues, so I have to assume it is working correctly. If Seagate was upfront about performance I'd happily have moved on, and recommended this to all my friends as a fantastic value for uses where speed isn't a factor, or where only a few GB need copying at a time. Just dumping another HD movie into storage? No problem... doing real work? Think again. As an "expansion" drive rather than a "backup plus" where you advertise a drive specifically to expand storage "without compromising performance" this is not acceptable. I've wasted several days of testing, lost my window of downtime for my project, and feel entirely misled.



Seagate I have nothing against you as a company, and I have purchased an ironwolf to replace this, but you need to get your marketing together and be upfront about this kind of thing. I have never previously rated a working product one star - while I can understand and forgive the occasional DOA drive, I can't forgive deceptive marketing from an industry leader. 1 star for an extremely disappointing experience.