Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 Review

Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - Introduction Just like our 32oz coffee mug says, Size Matters. Just as this holds true for our morning caffeine injection so too does it hold true in the world of computing. The fact of the matter is consumers are figuratively drowning in data – data that needs to be store on something besides the ‘cloud’. While in a perfect world all that data would be stored first on tape for long term storage, and Solid State for short term, the reality is most of that data will end up on the true workhorse of the industry: Hard Disk Drives. Hard Disk Drives’ price to performance, and even its price per gigabyte ratio are simply unbeatable. In other words, the only place to truly find value in the storage marketplace is in the Hard Disk Drive sector. Sadly, most Enterprise consumers - and PC enthusiasts alike, not only want a great value, they also want a massive drive that is blazingly fast. Now that is a tall order. However, what if we told you that right now you can find a single hard drive that offers speeds in excess of 200MB/s for well over 3 Terabytes of its capacity and will never get slower than 110MB/s? What if we could also tell you that you could offline two 4TB drives and replace it with just one of these new models; and even compared against one 4TB it would uses noticeably less power? If this was even just late 2014 that indeed would be an impossible order; however, it is not 2014 nor even 2015. It is now 2016 and the im possible has now not only become possible but practical . This is all thanks to the new ‘v5’ refresh of Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD series. While the ‘v4’ model tapped out at an impressive 6TB via six 1TB platter, this new series has boosted aerial density to 1.25TB per platter and as such is now one of the very few eight Terabyte drives available today. More importantly thanks to its more conservative approach to design, this unit is not filled with exotic gasses, nor does it rely on untested technology like HAMR (heat assisted magnetic recording). Instead this is a drive that is meant for storing a lot of data in a small package, while ensuring that all that data is -relatively- quick to access. Mix in an asking price of only six cents per Gigabyte with a five-year warranty, and on paper this new series seems tailor made for PC gaming enthusiasts who have mutli, mutli Terabyte Steam & Origin collections, and Enterprise professionals who have near-line data in need of instant gratification. Since this model is targeted more towards professional consumers – such as workstation using professionals – rather than home storage enthusiast we have obtained not one but two samples for this review. This way we can show you not only what it can do on its own, but what this new series can offer all consumers in RAID scenarios. Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - Specifications and Features Seagate Specs Seagate Enterprise Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - A Closer Look As with all SATA 3.5″ form-factored hard drives, the recently released version 5 of the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 series by Seagate uses a robust and extremely durable black and silver chassis. Also like a typical hard drive, attached to the bottom is a small Printed Circuit Board that houses all the necessary controller components used with this little power house. Just like its predecessor the – award winning EC v4 3.5 – the v5’s chassis is almost flat and is bereft of ridges usually seen on most hard drives models. This is because Seagate’s engineers once again needed a way fit six platters inside a footprint really only meant for – at most - five platters. More importantly they had to ensure that the ensuing design was stable and sturdy enough to handle the stress that only the Enterprise market can place upon a drive. In order to pull of this rather impressive engineering feat Seagate engineers had to overcome some pretty large obstacles. The largest of which is turbulence. It may not like such a big deal, but when you have high velocity spinning platters in close proximity to one another the actual weight of the ‘air’ hitting each of these delicately balanced platters can make a massive difference. In a standard design the only way to ensure that six platters do not become unstable and slam into each other is buy removing all the ‘air’, replacing it with Helium and then sealing the entire chassis. Such methods are usually called ‘silver bullets’ and rarely work as well as they should in the real world. This is why Seagate has once again not used exotic gasses and instead gone with a more conservative approach that has proven to be reliable in the past. To be more specific Seagate has carried over many of the design features that allowed the v4 series to boast 6 platters… and then improved upon them. For example, the new v5 boasts an improved internal inertia actuator as well as a slightly more capable turbulence reducing top disk separator plate. Equally important is the anti-vibration sensors on PCB are now even more precise and accurate at first sensing and then in real time compensating for any vibrations. This combination is potent that it allows the new v5 to boast even better durability specifications than its predecessor. To be precise the previous v4 Enterprise Capacity 3.5 6TB was rated for a very impressive Mean Time Between Failure of 1.4 million hours, could handle up to 500TB of writes per year, and came with a 5 year no hassle warranty that Seagate’s Enterprise drives have always been known for. The new Enterprise Capacity 3.5 v5 8TB model on the other hand has the MTBF boosted by 42.9 percent to a whopping two million hours, the total drive writes is now up to 550TB per year, and this drive still comes with Seagate’s excellent Enterprise grade 5 year warranty. These improvements alone are indeed impressive but there are actually two more that are included with this new series. The first is even though this is an Enterprise grade hard drive with actually better durability and performance specifications than its predecessor, it also a drive that uses noticeably less power. Specifically, this new model is rated to use 10.6 watts instead of 11.27 watts of power most Enterprise drives use. This reduction may not sound like that big a deal but when dealing with hundreds of drives, the power and cooling savings do indeed add up. This is especially true when you consider that these new v5 series boasts an amazing 1.3 watts of power per Terabyte - or a forty six percent reduction over the v4 level. The other improvement is in the aerial density of the six platters Seagate uses. The last generation v4 made use of fairly impressive 1TB platters. However, in a single generation Seagate has increased the density by 25% to an astonishing 1.25TB per platter. This not only increases the overall capacity, but is what allows this drive to boast some awfully impressive performance numbers. Equally important is this has been accomplished without using exotic techniques like Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording. Techniques which may indeed boost aerial density but are untested with unknown reliability levels compared to more mature technology used in this series. Of course helping boost performance even higher than ever before is the fact that Seagate has not only once again doubled the onboard cache to 256MB, and used much more potent controller, but the actual algorithms have also been improved. In testing this combination proved to be extremely potent as the drives almost seemed to be precognizant at guessing what data would be called upon next and moving it to the much faster internal cache array before being needed. 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 rather long when dealing with eight Terabytes of data! That is why the new Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v5 8TB makes use of Super Parity ECC. In a nutshell what Seagate’s 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″ v5 8TB on a hardware RAID controller that the chances of an uncorrectable error happening is so small as to be not worth worrying about. Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - 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 ever 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 bottlenecked. 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 startup, 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 5930K Memory: 32GB Corsair Ballistix DDR4-2666 Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99 Storage: 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - Software Benchmarks 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. We actually had to double check and rerun these tests as we simply did not believe the numbers this drive was posting in and out of RAID configurations. In fact this level of performance was so high we actually pulled them and tried them in another testbed to make sure some unknown RAM caching bug was boosting performance. It wasn’t. Instead this drive is just that fast. 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 not only starts out faster than its predecessor performance accelerates even faster than any drive we have seen to date. Color us impressed. 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 amazed 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 drive 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. 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 v5 8TB is simply dominating all other drives is truly impressive. Put simply when you combine amazing aerial densities with twelve read/write heads, and then backstop it all with 256MB of chache the results are nothing short of astonishing. Even compared to a 10,000rpm VelociRaptor this new series simply outcompetes it. 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 were meant for the server environment so it is not all that surprising to see them shine in this Enterprise orientated test. With that being said they did not just outshine the competition they make the others look downright slow in comparison. More importantly these new v5 drives and their massive cache love deep queue depths like no other hard drive series before it. Since Enterprise environments are by their very nature deep queue depth environments this makes this new series perfect at their intended goal: near-line storage domination. Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - Boot Time and File Transfer Rate 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 giggle worthy regularity this new massive-sized, massive-performance drive is once again redefining what a hard drive can offer. Better still is for the first time not only is a 7,200rpm series capable of matching but actually beating a 10,000rpm based model like the VelociRaptor. That is simply amazing. 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. As the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v5 series is advertised as a ‘near line’ enterprise storage solution it comes as no surprise to see that this is one area where it simply shines. In RAID or out of it this drive really is a data pushing beast. So much so that it really does bring new meaning to the term 'fast'. Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - Software and Gaming 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 faired in the Adobe crucible! Once again this drive makes even 10,000rpm hard drives seem slow in comparison. Better still the new v5 does not need to be in RAID for its performance advantages to shine through. Color us impressed. 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. Unlike the v4 series which had most of its performance advantages negated by the VelociRaptor’s brute force approach of simply spinning the platters faster, this new Enterprise Capacity 3.5 v5 model is so inconceivably fast in and out of RAID that its ‘slow’ 7,200rpm platter speed just doesn’t matter. Yes, the latency is higher than the VelociRaptor’s, but even with this built in advantage the VelociRaptor quickly succumbs to this juggernaut’s technology advances. Basically the EC v5’s onboard cache is nearly precognizant in its abilities and when this massive 256MB cache is combined with ultra-dense 1.25TB platters the results… well the results speak for themselves. 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 knew this new series was going to be good, but there is a difference between knowing something and knowing it. Logically we knew this was going to be even better than its predecessor the ‘v4’ series, but we were not expecting to see multiple seconds shaved off the load time in single and RAID configurations. That is downright astonishing an accomplishment for a single generation. 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 are rather incredible. Not only does this new series scale very nicely in RAID, they don’t have to be in RAID to in order to get excellent performance numbers. Put another way this new v5 makes even the 10,000rpm VelociRaptor seem ‘slow’. Brilliant stuff. 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. It comes as no surprise to see that Seagate’s new Enterprise Capacity model has been optimized for RAID scenarios. While it is indeed extremely fast when only in JBOD / single drive scenarios, it is when RAID’ed that this drive goes from being incredibly fast to simply amazing. Some of this boost is due to having nearly half a Gigabyte of cache to further boost performance, but these results really do come down to the EC v5's highly tweaked firmware and denser platters. In either case, the new v5 Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD series is one power house of a performer – in and out of raid. Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - 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 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. As you can see this new series is incredibly consistent in its performance. Equally impressive is its performance curve is not only extremely predictable it is downright amazing at how small the drop off is. Even when filled to capacity, a task that does take quite some time to say the least, this drive is still rather peppy - almost as if it has an unfair advantage. This is because it does. Thanks to its combination of incredible aerial density, six platters to concurrently read and write to, and that amazing onboard cache the new V5 raises the bar for what consumers can expect to get from a ‘mere’ hard drive. Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - Performance, Score Card 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" v5 8TB 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" v5 8TB is worth the investment. Score Card Performance: 39 out of 40. This drive redefines what ‘fast’ is when dealing with Hard Disk Drives and the only way for the average consumer to get better performance is to step to SSD – and even then the differences are not all that extreme outside of application and OS load times. Technological Innovation: 19 out of 20 This drive is choke full of innovative features its actually hard to list them all. Everything from improved caching algorithms, to its ability to safely use six platters, to 1.25TB per platter aerial density, this drive series is simply filled to capacity with innovation. Build Quality & Warranty: 19 out of 20 With a five-year warranty backstopping a drive that is built to such high standards we have almost no concerns on the build quality or warranty fronts. The only possible issue is one of perception – as losing 8TB of data in one failure is a rather scary thought. However, Seagate has done all they can to make such a loss highly unlikely. Value: 16 out of 20 Yes the new EC 3.5 v5 series is rather expensive. Yes, two of them costs as much as an entry level system. However, this series is so robust, so fast, and so massive that even with such a high asking price the overall value is actually pretty darn good. Not ‘great’ – but very decent all things considered. Final Score: 93 out of 100 TL;DR 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, that was capable of offering 8 Terabytes of capacity - but that effort it does pay dividends. Thanks to this 25% increase in aerial density this next generation drive actually makes the competition look downright slow in comparison. Seagate E.C 8TB HDD V5 - Closing Statement While some internet pundits have been decreeing the death of hard drives for some time now, obviously Seagate did not get the memo. Instead they have continued to show why when businesses need data to be stored in an easily accessible medium, professional’s reach for Seagate Hard Disk Drives. The great thing about Seagate continuously redefining what hard drives are capable of is that it does trickle down to the rest of the market – including the home user market. For example, this drive maybe designed with near-line data processing in mind, but as we saw in testing this hard drive in and out of RAID is incredibly fast and offers application, and game load times that are encroaching in on SSHD and even older generation SSD territory. Equally important is while it is (slightly) disappointing to see that this drive does not rely upon exotic sounding technologies like HAMR the fact of the matter is that the technology used in this drive is proven and extremely reliable…. and when dealing with 8 Terabytes of data, stability and reliability are paramount. The only issue that anyone can have with this new ECC v5 model is the asking price. As with the v4 series before it the 8TB v5 does redefine the term ‘expensive’. For the typical home user, even just thinking about purchasing one Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v5 8TB is going to require a lot of thought. However, it is hard to blame this drive for this, as this series is 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. To perfectly candid, and even excluding the massive performance this new series has to offer, the seemingly ‘huge’ price premium is anything but massive when you actually run the numbers. For example, to find the equivalent capacity in Western Digital branded models, consumers would have to purchase two Western Digital RE 4TB drives. Each of those drive retail for about $235; require over twice the power; produce over twice the amount of heat and noise; take up twice the number of ports….and are twice as likely to have one fail (as the rule of thumb is to take the MTBF and divide it by the total number of drives used). In the grand scheme of things an extra $35 to negate all those issues is not that big a deal. In the end there are a lot of reason to like this new v5 and very, very few to dislike it. Even if you can’t afford the ‘flagship’ capacity version of the new Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v5 series, we do think you should give a lot of thought over the new Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ v5 series. All will have that legendary quality and durability that made Seagate famous, and all will be darn impressive drives in their own right.

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