Seagate EC v4 6TB – Introduction
Introduction
In many ways it is a great time to be a PC enthusiast. The cost of building an amazing quad core system is at an all-time low. Video cards are getting so fast even ‘entry level’ cards “PNY GTX 750 Ti OC 2GB” offer enough performance potential that you no longer have to sell a kidney to have the eye candy turned up and get playable frame rates. As for games, they have never looked so good; and with so many to choose from finding your next 1,000 hour time-sink is as simple as opening up Steam – and your wallet.
Unfortunately one thing that has not kept up with the rest of the industry is storage. Sure you can find 1TB mega-sized solid state drives, but even if you can afford the arm, leg, and first born child asking price…that’s really only a couple games worth of space. For us 1TB is about 1/24th of what we would need to download our Steam library, and like most self-professed ‘gamers’ that library is growing awfully damn fast.
While we are fortunate enough to have a 24TB RAID array setup for our personal library, most consumers do not have this luxury. In fact nearly all groups of consumers are now feeling the storage crunch. Oddly enough the two groups hardest hit by the Hard Disk Drive industry being so slow are radically different and represent both ends of the spectrum. On the one end of the marketplace are enterprise consumers who run cloud storage servers. These people make our piddly 24TB array seem like small change, and having to add extra server racks just so as to keep up with storage demands is a major financial burden. On the other end of the spectrum is Small Form Factor enthusiasts who not only create kick ass PC gaming systems but also systems which are (usually) limited to two HDDs and a SSD for the OS.
Right now Seagate actually does have a consumer drive that comes in 6TB capacities. They also offer rather fast Solid State Hybrid drives in capacities of up to 4TB. The 6TB drive is a 7200rpm model, and the SSHD may be 4TB of space but that’s only 3.5’ish Terabytes of real world space! This means neither are perfect for that LAN party SFF build you want to put together. After all, having to wait for a map load is a horrible feeling at a game event, and that feeling is only surpassed by not having room for all the games on your hard drive. As for Enterprise consumers both of these models are simply non-starters.
Thankfully the old saying about when you have one problem you really have a problem, but when you have two problems they sometimes solve themselves is actually true. Or at least it is true in that Seagate is taking one of them very, very seriously – and the other gets a free ride on the performance train. Because the cloud storage marketplace relies upon slow 7200rpm hard drives that need to be both as fast and as power efficient as possible, companies like Seagate are doing their best to keep up with demand, and it just so happens a 7200rpm, ultra large, ultra efficient drive is exactly what the doctor ordered for SFF builders. This is why our first Seagate drive to be reviewed is not going to be one of their excellent SSHDs, or any of their consumer grade gear. Rather its going to be one of their best of the best hard drive models. The recently Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB is precisely that. It is massive, it is fast, is rather power efficient, and while it may be expensive it is also built like a tank. Better still it was designed with RAID in mind.
We are of the opinion that if one is good, two must always be better and that is why we are not doing a review on just one of these magnificent drives, but rather two of them. While we will at some point be swapping out our existing 8 drive array for six of them, two drives is just about perfect for most people. As we said SFF builds usually are limited to two drives and having 12TB (more like 11 and change) of space should satisfy most consumers needs.
While we have very little doubts on the performance side of the equation, we do have doubts about the value of these drives. After all with a combined asking price of nearly $1300 these two drives are bloody expensive. This is why in order to impress us they will need to not only be large and fast, but also prove beyond a shadow of a doubt why they are worth their high price tags.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Specifications and Features
Specifications and Features
Seagate EC v4 6TB – A Closer Look
A Closer Look
You could never guess by just looking at the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB that this drive was anything special. As with all SATA 3.5″ form-factored hard drives, the EC 3.5″ v4 uses a robust and durable silver and black chassis with a small Printed Circuit Board attached to it. Even picking it up, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB does not seem all that different and while it is slightly heavier than the previous v3 (780 grams vs 700 grams) it is still within tolerances and it is not like the differences are all that big.
The only real hint at the fact that this drive is indeed special is when you take a closer look at the underside. If you pay close attention you can see that the base of the chassis is almost flat and lacking any of the ridges usually seen. This is because Seagate engineers needed a way to fit not four, not five, but six platters inside the same footprint, and had to make sure that the ensuing design was stable and sturdy enough to handle the stress that only the Enterprise market can place upon a drive. On the surface one extra platter may not sound all that big an engineering feat however, it really is when you consider that only Seagate has been able to do it without resorting to exotic gasses to reduce the density of the atmosphere inside the chassis. Hitachi’s Helium based units may sound like a great idea, but the fact of the matter is Helium is lighter than air and as such if there is a leak it will be pushed out by the denser surrounding air. When that happens all that fancy engineering means squat and the platters will either slam into each other or the spindle motor will overheat and die. By being able to use a standard air based design long term durability concerns associated with exotic gas have been nicely side-stepped.
So how did Seagate do what was considered impractical bordering on impossible? They did it the old fashioned way, with great engineering. As any engineer will tell you one ‘silver bullet’ solution may sound and even look impressive, but multiple smaller refinements that may not look as impressive are actually the better design. The first thing Seagate did was -as previously mentioned – make the thickness of the chassis thinner and flatter. This allowed a sixth platter to fit inside without stacking them dangerously close together. The next thing they did was include an additional internal inertia actuator and a turbulence reducing top disk separator plate. This in conjunction with a newly designed sealed top plate mounted spindle motor allows this drive to be just as durable, just as robust, and just as unlikely to have a catastrophic mechanical failure as any other Enterprise grade SATA drive on the market. In fact, it is rated for an impressive 1.4 million MTBF, a whopping 550TB of writes per year, and comes with the exact same 5 year no hassle warranty that Seagate’s Enterprise drives have always been known for.
That is how Seagate was able to create a 6 Terabyte Enterprise grade drive without increasing the aerial density of the platters. This alone makes the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB rather unique, but Seagate’s engineers did not stop there. In the Enterprise arena drive efficiency is becoming the next big thing™ as such even though these drive have 50% more platters, the increased efficiency of the motor has allowed Seagate to keep the E Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB’s power draw the same as the previous model – 11.27 watts. This means that this drive has rating of 1.872 watts per Terabyte compared to the last generations 2.807 watts. While a 33% increase in performance will not matter much to home users, when dealing with thousands or more drives this improvement will help reduce the total cost of ownership for Enterprise consumers. For us enthusiasts it also means the drive is a lot quieter than its predecessor – a benefit that can’t be overlooked for HTPC builders.
With so much data on the line Seagate is also highly aware that even one drive dyeing means the potential for a lot of a data disappearing. To be blunt, even if the data is secure via RAID the rebuild time is going to be a bear on 6TB drives. This is why the new Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB makes use of Super Parity ECC. In a nutshell what Seagate’s new SP ECC does is add an additional parity bit on top of the normal ECC parity. This extra error correction allows the drive to boast an uncorrectable error rate of 1 per 10 to the 15th power – or 1 uncorrectable bit per 125TBs of writes. This means that even with TLER enabled by default, for enthusiasts not using the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB on a hardware RAID controller that the chances of a uncorrectable error happening is so small as to be not worth worrying about.
While most of this will be only of peripheral interest to home user enthusiasts – besides the additional storage abilities – what will be of great interest to storage enthusiasts is the 50% additional read/write heads does for overall performance. Unlike the consumer grade model which spins at a sedate 5900rpm, this big bad wolf spins at 7200rpm and when you combine 1TB platters spinning at 7200rpms with twelve read/write arms, then mix in a fast dual core controller backstopped by massive 128MB of cache, well that is when true magic happens. When we say magic we mean speeds of up to 221MBs that stay above 200MB/s until the 1.4TB mark, only dips below the 150MB/s at about the 4.4TB mark, and never drops below 102MB/ever. No matter how you slice it that is fast, and we have two of them working in tandem to show you. Some days our ‘job’ really is tough.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Testing Methodology
Testing Methodology
The reasons to purchase a high performance Hard Drive are as varied as the consumers who purchase them. For some application load time is the deciding factor in their purchasing decision. For others it is Virtualized Operating System performance. For others still it is game load times. For others still it is to shave a .1 of second off their synthetic test scores so as to climb even higher in the online rankings that various sites host.
With such a wide variety of criteria it behooves us to use as wide and varied a list of testing protocols as possible. As such we have used a blend of synthetic and real world benchmarks, as well as custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have chosen f popular titles: Borderlands 2, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Saints Row 3. These games should give a good overview of the potential performance a given storage device will offer in real world game centric scenarios.
For game load times testing we have chosen games which are clearly not Internet, GPU, RAM or CPU bottle necked. The system was cold restarted in between each load to make sure no data saved in the GPU’s ram could influence load times. As with all tests all games were run four times and an average rounded the nearest second is recorded as the official result.
For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU.
For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map.
For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level.
For synthetic tests we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS-SSD, Crystal Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HD Tune, and IOMeter.
For real world (non-gaming orientated) testing we have used OS start up, Adobe Photoshop, VMWare, and data transfer times. For data transfer we timed how long a single 30GB rar file took to copy to and then from the devices. We also used 15gb of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 36,000 files in 1200 subfolders.
All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented.
For all RAID testing an LSI MegaRaid 9240 was used; however all drives attached were configured as JBOD and MS Windows 7 built in drive management tools were used to create the RAID array.
Main Test System
Processor: Intel i7 4770K
Memory: 16GB GSkill 2666 Trident X CL11 1.6v
Motherboard: MSI MPower Max Z87
Cooling: Corsair H100i
Storage: 1x Seagate 600 Pro 400GB, 1x Intel DC P3700 800GB.
Power Supply: Corsair AX860i
GPU: 2x NIVIDIA GeForce GTX 780
Monitor: Dell U2714H
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Read & Write
Read Bandwidth
For this benchmark, HD Tune Pro was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these storage devices. We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and thus we no longer included it. The most important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.
Write Performance
For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.
Because it has 6 platters we were expecting some rather spectacular results in these tests and the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB delivered in spades. Put simply these drives never really get all that slow and when you can use them in RAID they are downright fast. We can just imagine Enterprise Storage admins and enthusiasts alike salivating at the thought of having a full rack full of these bad boys.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Atto Disk Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.
The power curves of both the single and RAID results are downright spectacular. This new drive starts out fairly quick and then skyrockets into the stratosphere. Color us impressed.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Crystal DiskMark
Crystal DiskMark
Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB.
We are simply astounded at how fast this drive is. Historically the only way to noticeably improve small file performance was to either increase rotational velocity, or increase aerial density – and even then 10,000rpm drives usually were still ‘better’ than the ‘slower’ 7200rpm models. Seagate did neither, and yet have been able to create a drive that is faster than any model we have seen to date. That is truly impressive engineering.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – AS-SSD
AS-SSD
AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data.
The very fact that in single and RAID scenarios the EC 3.5 v4 6TB is able to dominate the competition is amazing and it is all thanks to that massive increase in read/write heads. After all, when you can literally read or write 50% more than your predecessor (or 100% more than the VRaptor) you don’t need to have the platters spin around as fast! This is a very elegant solution to what is usually handled in a brute force manner – ie to get better small file performance you simply make the platters spin faster and make the heads work ‘harder’.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – IOMETER: File Server Test
IOMETER: File Server Test
To test each drive we ran 6 test runs per device (1,4,16,64,128,256 queue depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 6 subparts were set to run 100% random, 75% read 25% write; testing 512b, 4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 6 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 6. This gives us an average score for that particular queue depth that is heavily weighted for file server usage.
These drive series was meant for the server environment and seeing it out and out thrive in IOMeter is not all that shocking. Put simply these drives love deep queue depths as only here can they put their mega-sized cache buffer and highly tuned firmware to proper use.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Boot Time
System Boot Time
When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. While all the other tests were run with a Windows 7 operating system, this particular test uses another older test bed’s “day to day” OS (copied over to our new testbed) which has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.
With almost monotonous regularity this new mega-sized, mega-priced, mega-performance drive is out and out dominating the competition. Once again the one hard drive consumers can purchase that will be basically as fast is a 10,000rpm model and even then the VelociRaptor will not necessarily outperform this new beast.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Real World Data Transfers
Real World Data Transfers
No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter is it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. To this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 30.00GB contiguous file, then a folder containing 1200 subfolders with a total 36,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (15.00 GB total).
Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found.
Better than 440 Megabytes per second large file and 200Megabytes per second small file performance. Just let the sheer size and scope of that level of performance sink in for a moment. That’s the equivalent of a 25GB Blu-Ray disc every 57 seconds (large file) or one hundred and sixty seven e-books per second (small file). More impressive still this performance is coming from 7200rpm drives. This really does bring new meaning to the term ‘fast’.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Adobe CS6 Load Time
Adobe CS6 Load Time
Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit fared in the Adobe crucible!
Being able to tie and even slightly pull ahead of what a VelociRaptor is capable of is nothing to sneeze at. Put simply these drives are just as fast and even arguably faster than one of the fastest consumer hard drive series available today. That really is impressive.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – VMWare Load Time Performance
VMWare Load Time Performance
VMWare is a powerful application which allows users the ability to run a virtualized Operating System from inside their main OS. This program is not only processor and RAM intensive but puts significant load on the storage subsystem with deep, heavy read/write IO requests to the drive. To help give you a general idea on the performance improvements from running a RAM Drive we have timed the time it takes to load XP SP3 from inside VMWare.
There are two ways of looking at these results and it will basically come down to whether or not you actually RAID the EC 3.5″ v4 6TB drives or not. On their own there is no denying that they are fast, but when you actually put them into the configuration they were meant to be in, well that’s when they truly shine. As you can see the difference is noticeable and the EC v4 easily leaps ahead of the VelociRaptor. By the same token, in single drive ‘array’ the VelociRaptor 1TB’s higher rotational speed and lower latency can negate most of the EV v4’s advantages; however even here these new 6TB drives are not what we would classify as slow and it is only the VelociRaptor that can outperform it.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Borderlands 2 Load Time
Borderlands 2 Load Time
For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map.
We must admit that we are surprised at these results. While we logically knew that the new Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB was capable of outperforming the Western Digital 1TB VelociRaptor, knowing it and actually seeing it happen in gaming scenarios is another thing all together. As far as we are concerned this seals the deal – the EC 4v is faster than the VelociRaptor and you will have to move up to Solid State Drives to beat this level of performance.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – CoD: Ghosts Load Time
CoD: Ghosts Load Time
For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU.
Once again these drives post numbers that basically are stunning. For all intents and purposes the simple 2 drive RAID numbers are basically twice as good as the single drive results. Even more impressive is we can clearly see that the EC v4 6TB is indeed faster than the VelociRaptor 1TB, and unlike the single drive results which could have been due to rounding errors, two seconds is a tad too much to simply waived away as such. That is damn impressive performance for a 7200rpm model.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Saints Row 3 Load Time
Saints Row 3 Load Time
For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level.
Obviously these drives’ firmware have been optimized for RAID scenarios, and it’s only when they are actually in RAID that you can see what they are truly capable of. Of course having 256MB of cache to spread the load across doesn’t hurt either, but these stellar results really do come down to the EC v4’s highly tweaked firmware. Any way you look at them – single or RAID – the EC 3.5″ v4 6TB is one powerhouse performer that will noticeably cut game load times!
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Partial and Full Drive Performance
Partial and Full Drive Performance
While it is important to know how a drive will perform under optimal conditions, more realistic scenarios are just as important. Knowing how a drive will behave when partially or even nearly full than when it is empty is very important information to know. To quickly and accurately show this crucial information we have first filled the drive to 50% capacity and re-tested using both synthetic and real world tests. After the completion of this we then re-test at 75% and 90% of full capacity.
Synthetic Test Results
For our synthetic testing we have opted for our standard VMWare test.
Real World Results
For a real world application we have opted for our standard Adobe CS6 test.
Even though all drives are filled to 50/75/90 percent and are all being compared in an apples to apples fashion the EC 3.5″ v4 6TB almost seems to have an unfair advantage of the others. That is because it does. Even when filled to capacity this drive still has 50% more read/write heads and still can write or read for 6 platters at a time. This really does give this series a much needed boost and you are unlikely to find its equal until higher areal density platter based designs are released. Put another way this drive is the epitome of 1TB platter engineering and really doesn’t get much better than this!
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Performance Summary and TL;DR
Performance Summary and TL;DR
In an effort to make sorting through all the results as easy as possible we have combined the results all of all the test results into an easy to digest summary format. By comparing the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB to similar products in all the various tests you will be able to easily find the result(s) you are interested in, see the improvement and decide if the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB the worth the investment.
As you can see Seagate has made massive strides in just one generation. Yes we are sure it took a lot of time, effort and money to develop a non-exotic gas based 6 platter design, but as it does pay dividends. Thanks to this 50% increase in read/write heads and the fact that it can write or read up to 12 bits at a time, this 72000rm drive acts more like a next generation 10,000rpm VelociRaptor than the next gen 7200rpm drive it really is. No matter how you slice it the very fact that you have to compare it to 10,000rpm drives to find its near equal just underscores how potent the EC 3.5″ v4 6TB really is.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Score Card and Summary
Score Card and Summary
Performance:38 out of 40.
When a 7200rpm drive makes a VelociRaptor seem slow you know you are dealing with something special. This drive is darn fast and the only way to get faster than two of them in RAID is to move up to Solid State Drives. That is how fast these drives are when in RAID arrays and we are still stunned at how much performance just two of them have to offer.
Technological Innovation:18 out of 20
This drive is chock full of innovative features its actually hard to list them all without sounding like raving fanbois. Everything from Super ECC, to its redesigned chassis, to its ability to safely use six platters, makes this drive rather impressive from a Technological point of view.
The only area Seagate could possibly be accused of dropping the ball is on not upping the ante and using an even higher aerial density. Though to be honest, with 6 Terabytes of space we doubt many will care all that much one way or the other about it using ‘mere’ 1TB platters.
Build Quality & Warranty: 19 out of 20
With a five year warranty backstopping a drive that is built like the proverbial tank there really is not much to complain about on the build quality front. The only possible nit to pick is over the perceived risks of losing all that data. This however is not the fault of the EC 3.5″ v4 6TB as Seagate has done all they can to make such a loss highly unlikely. To be honest you are spending a lot of money for this drive and its quality is almost unbeatable.
Value: 15 out of 20
Yes one of these drives is expensive. Yes the cost of two of them is bordering on the surreal for home consumers. But neither of that matters. This drive is so big, so fast, and so marvelously over-engineered, that even with a nosebleed asking price two of them in RAID are a surprisingly good value. Not a great value, but a surprisingly good value – one that puts to shame the likes of the VelociRaptor series.
Final Score: 90 out of 100
With the all new EC 3.5″ v4 6TB have rewritten the rules on what a 7200rpm hard drive ‘should’ be able to do. Put simply it massive cache buffer and twelve read/write heads allows these drives to act more like 10,000rpm models. However, unlike the itty-bitty 10,000rpm models this drive also has a capacity that is simply stunning. If you can afford the asking price, two EC 3.5″ v4 6TB will be surprisingly easy to justify. But you have to be able to afford them as each one represents a luxury car mortgage payment, and explaining that level of spending on ‘storage’ to your significant other is going to be tough.
Seagate EC v4 6TB – Closing Statement
Closing Statement
Let’s start with the large and annoyed Gorilla in the room – these drives bring new meaning to the term expensive. Even just purchasing one Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB is going to be a major financial undertaking for the average consumer. This is to be expected as these drives are not built with home users in mind; rather they are meant for corporations who care more about long term costs than they do about upfront costs. To this end these drives are built to such exacting standards, and go through so much extra factory testing, that yes they deserve to be more expensive than their consumer brethren. Put simply quality costs, and if you want the biggest and best SATA drive available the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB is the one you want – Western Digital’s offerings can’t even come close (right now).
To be blunt even with their exorbitant asking price, these drives are actually a good value for your money. On the surface that may sound surreal, but before you start flinging around terms like ‘sellout’, remember value is not about being inexpensive. It is about being the best use of your limited financial resources. As long as the performance and quality is high enough, then yes even pricey drives like the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB can indeed be a good value. When it comes to performance these drives offer, terms like ‘unbeatable’ and ‘indomitable’ spring to mind. To find a model capable of even coming close to what the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB offers you have to move up to the more exotic 10,000rpm models. Even then one Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB can outperform a 10,000rpm 1TB VelociRaptor in both synthetic and real world scenarios. Better still when put into a simple RAID array they make one potent game load time reducing mega-array.
Even excluding their break neck speed, the fact of the matter is $650 for 6TB of space is actually not all that bad. For example two Western Digital RE 3TB drives will cost you about $570, so $650 for one ‘flagship’ drive is not a huge price premium. While yes you can indeed get two 3TB Seagate ‘Cuda drives for about 2/3rd this amount, this new series is not a consumer grade drive. Comparing them to consumer grade prices is simply not fair. However, even doing precisely that your additional $240 of investment gets you a single point of failure vs two. Its buys you a much longer warranty (5 vs 3 and via their Enterprise not Consumer RMA division). It buys you a much faster drive. It buys you the ability of adding a lot more capacity down the road – even in SFF builds. It even buys you a more robust and reliable drive. That is a lot of tangible benefits and when you combine all these features with downright insane speeds, 240 dollars may not be the bargain of the century, but we do recommend looking past the initial asking price and seeing this series for what it really is – a good long term investment.
In the end, if you have neither the budget nor the space to accommodate a bunch of smaller drives, and want performance that belies their 7200rpm speed, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB is the drive you should have at the very top of your list for further consideration. Its unique blend of performance, reliability, warranty, and yes even value, do make for one heck of a compelling argument. Even if you can’t afford the ‘flagship’ Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 6TB version, we do think you should give a lot of thought over the new Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v4 series. Seagate has created what is easily the most impressive 7200rpm hard drive series we have seen in a long, long time.
