Seagate Desktop HDD ST1000DM003 1TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: What can I say, its got a ton of space! It actually reminds be of back in the day when we were just getting into the Gigabyte size drives when the talk was “you will never need a bigger drive” well we all know what happens after that...

I am very impressed with the speed of the drive for it only being a 5900 rpm drive. So I decided to compare it to all of my other drives in my system, I will keep the results short. All of these drives are hooked up to the same controller, I was going to add SSD marks too but that would be unfair...

Seagate ST4000DM000 (This Drive) – Avg Read 140.4 Mb/s – Avg Access 16.8ms
Hitachi HTS725050A7E630 (500GB 7200 6Gb/s) – Avg Read 100.6Mb/s – Avg Access 16.9ms
Samsung HD203WI (2TB 5400 3Gb/s) – Avg Read 88 Mb/s – Avg Access 15.5ms
Western Digital WD360ADFD (36GB 10k 1.5Gb/s) – Avg Read 72Mb/s – Avg Access 8.5ms
Western Digital WD10EACS (1TB 5400 3Gb/s) – Avg Read 67.4Mb/s – Avg Access 15.1ms

I want to say for the slow rotational speed and such a huge amount of disk space this drive does rather well, I really wish I had another 6Gb/s drive to test for a closer comparison (other than the 500gb one), but the rest of my drives are all SSD.

As for installing an OS on this drive I easily got Ubuntu 12.04 LTS install and functional on a single 4TB partition without an issues, so I assume any other Distro will be just as easy.

Cons: Well even though my motherboard supports booting from a drive this size, Windows 7 64 Ultimate will not install on it, it simply refuses as it does not like the GPT (GUID Partition Table) you need to use to make a single partition on this drive. You can however make 2 smaller partitions and everything would work fine, although this is not really the drives fault.

I have benchmarked this drive multiple times in Linux and have yet to see the average seek time get anywhere near 8.5ms.

I am unable to get the Average Write Rate any faster than 109Mb/s and the specs boast the average read/write as 146Mb/s.

Overall Review: All testing done under Ubuntu 12.04.2, using Gnome-Disk-Utility. (I want to point out I was using a different computer that supports GPT booting for the Windows 7 Install)

This drive does rather well, and unfortunately I do not have a copy of Windows 8, to test if that will allow me to install onto a 4TB partition. I can not really fault the drive for any installation issues as the drive is not at fault for Microsoft not adding GPT support.

I tested the drive on a Highpoint Rocket 640L, and it lets me Verify that although Highpoint says this card only supports up to 2TB, I have this drive working flawlessly in one large partition, under Ubuntu 12.04.2.

Amahi (Ubuntu 12.04.2) Home Server:

EVGA x58 SLI Mobo
Intel Core i7 9200 @ 2.67Ghz
24GB Mushkin Enhanced Silverline DDR3 1333
Highpoint Rocket 640L 4 port SATA 6.0Gbps Pcie 4x
Currently 7 TB Space...

Pros: Large.

Cons: Not the most reliable. I'm sorry Seagate, but you need to do better. That 2 year warranty is scary enough, but with so many drives failing after a week or a month, how long are these supposed to last??

Mean time to failure should be longer for a hard drive than it is for a gerbil, especially considering kids don't poke and prod the hard drives.

Overall Review: It might be more cost-effective to buy 160 BD-RW drives and 160 BD-RW discs. At least then the process is much easier when they start failing. Might outlast these Seagate drives too...

RMA process is a hassle -- no advanced RMA from Newegg or Seagate, had to buy a new one and wait (hopefully!) for the refund. Losing money on the RMA due to discounts that are no longer in effect (plus I have to get quick shipping to rebuild my array asap).


Just for anybody who experiences similar, if you are building a new array with several disks, new controllers, etc. you might not realize what's going on. If your system hangs (and maybe every so often BSOD) whenever the drives kick in, but you can't figure out which one or when, test them. It's probably a bad drive, and you can just stress one drive until you figure out it's the baddie. If you have an array, pull it immediately. Obviously the array is degraded but if the hangs and BSODs stop, you've identified the problem.

And the problem is Seagate.