Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0023 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SAS 6Gb/s 3.5" Enterprise Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Newegg product listing N82E16822178306, Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0023 boasts as solid drive. I haven't visited Seagate's High-end product line since their departure from the 5-year warranty of standard consumer lines several years back and only have had two 1 TB models recently for video editing / capture ( RAID 0). Since some time has passed from owning a high-end Seagate product, I welcomed the opportunity to see what Seagate has been putting under the hood lately on their Pro line of hardware, especially one in the price range near a half grand. Even with a high price there are just some inherent advantages that SAS offers over SATA and I occasionally prefer offloading to a SAS CPU than having local system boards handling data so seeing what SAS2 is in comparison to consumer lines and SATA will be interesting. (Wiki offers a good starting place for the casual beginner when looking at SAS vs SATA and determining if one or the other is a good choice for and particular utilization if you are new to SAS). With Seagate's Pro lines, I'm seeing a toe-to-toe stance when dealing with their competition and perhaps even a little extra toe stomping when it comes to exceeding longevity and outliving the problems their competitors have on their Pro lines. The drive is smooth, well put together and operating quietly and surprisingly cool, when compared to other Seagate drives and competing brands. If you see the notes in the "Other Thoughts" section, you should notice that this SAS2 drive falls in line with pretty much the performance of SATA III 6.0 drives. Keep in mind that SAS offers drive controller intelligence that SATA does not; also, SAS has the ability to monitor backplanes via sideband cable options on most mid to high level SAS cards. SATA more often mimics monitoring via software solutions weighing the system down more so than SAS hardware solutions. Another big factor that stands out is the little amount of heat that this drive puts off. True, I'm not running SQL Server or Oracle DB on the drive, but given the fact that I am moving a 40GB chunk of data all over the drive for an hour, and it's doesn't really get warm, helps draw the conclusion that Seagate's enterprise class drives run cooler and can take on more tedious encounters on a 24/7/365 basis. Further, not a single sector showed any defect, skip or error after a pounding 24 hour testing session

Cons: With me, the only major and prohibitive hurdle Seagate has thrown me for Pro line models is the price for owning their products SATA or SAS models. In order to get a 5-year warranty, there is a considerable price point difference. With lesser warranty as compared to their competitors for consumer lines, I choose to look at warranty length, reviews / failure rate, customer service and price when buying into a product line for use in my equipment. With consumer lines you'll see a shortfall but no so with the Pro line models. Other than the above, I am not seeming much of any cons physically with the drive or performance. Still, I honestly have to admit, though impressive performance, at it's current price point it's not something that I'd personally jump at first sight, so do some research to make sure this is designed for YOUR specific needs; otherwise, a good SATA III 6.0 will offer close to the same performance. I might be tempted to burn through a handfull of cheaper drives in a 1 or 5 RAID array at a cheaper price and still be able to have a few spares on hand. With 3 and 5-year warranties for consumer line from Seagate and other competitors, some TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and performance/failure probability calculations may be in order to see what points work best for any given scenario.

Overall Review: Some important considerations for those getting into the SAS arena and Enterprise drives are as follows. Be aware that /w Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0023 & many other SAS drives, you will need either a back plane or cable with supporting connection of SFF-8482 (SAS 29 PIN) and not standard SATA; though they look very similar, you won't be able to plug your data or power cables into the SAS drives as you would on SATA drives. StarTech offers cable solution part SAS808782P50 / UPC 65030848039 /w life time warranty that workes on SAS. SEE NE listing N82E16812400142, if needed. In my case, it was just a simple task of opening the side panel on rack, opening server chassis and unplugging my (Mini SAS) SFF-8087->SATA cables, swapping to SFF-8087->(29 pin SAS)SFF-8482 x4 cables and plugging the power into the Y pig tails. The particular SAS card used to drive my SAS array and SATA is a Highpoint RocketRAID 2720. Initially the BIOS didn't support over 2TB and the Seagate showed up as 2TB; flashed SAS controller to BIOS V1.5 and had no issues after that; it was a 3-second Flash fix, and everything went beautifully without issue and the drive just worked after that. Both, the HighPoint RocketRAID 2720 and the Seagate drive, worked well hand in hand. Some basic Drive Stats via HD Tune Pro 5.50: Configured as JOBD stand-alone. Test capacity: full Read transfer rate Transfer Rate Minimum : 84.0 MB/s Transfer Rate Maximum : 182.8 MB/s Transfer Rate Average : 144.9 MB/s Access Time : 12.3 ms Burst Rate : 227.1 MB/s CPU Usage : 5.1% Test capacity: full Write transfer rate Transfer Rate Minimum : 82.6 MB/s Transfer Rate Maximum : 183.8 MB/s Transfer Rate Average : 145.7 MB/s Access Time : 4.11 ms Test capacity: full, Read test Transfer size operations / sec avg. access time max. access time avg. speed 512 bytes 81 IOPS 12.296 ms 26.132 ms 0.040 MB/s 4 KB 83 IOPS 11.949 ms 27.584 ms 0.327 MB/s 64 KB 79 IOPS 12.628 ms 22.027 ms 4.949 MB/s 1 MB 48 IOPS 20.634 ms 67.447 ms 48.464 MB/s Random 60 IOPS 16.422 ms 97.053 ms 30.897 MB/s Burst Rate : 210.3 MB/s CPU Usage : 3.6% Extra Tests: Test capacity: full, Read Random seek 84 IOPS 11.962 ms 0.041 MB/s Random seek 4 KB 93 IOPS 10.761 ms 0.363 MB/s Butterfly seek 73 IOPS 13.779 ms 0.035 MB/s Random seek/size 64 KB 79 IOPS 12.724 ms 1.208 MB/s Random seek/size 8 MB 23 IOPS 43.907 ms 92.352 MB/s Sequential outer 2830 IOPS 0.353 ms 176.897 MB/s Sequential middle 2426 IOPS 0.412 ms 151.614 MB/s Sequential inner 1348 IOPS 0.742 ms 84.274 MB/s Burst rate 3634 IOPS 0.275 ms 227.133 MB/s Test capacity: full, Write Random seek 243 IOPS 4.110 ms 0.119 MB/s Random seek 4 KB 199 IOPS 5.033 ms 0.776 MB/s Butterfly seek 209 IOPS 4.779 ms 0.102 MB/s Random seek/size 64 KB 192 IOPS 5.197ms 2.958 MB/s Random seek/size 8 MB 21 IOPS 47.022ms 86.235 MB/s Sequential outer 2835 IOPS 0.353 ms 177.218 MB/s

Pros: Drive came in a nice clear plastic case and wrapped in Bubble wrap. The 4TB size is superb for an enterprise drive. Physically the drive looks like a standard 3.5” black and metal Seagate drive (but still nice!) The Formatted size with a single NTFS Partition was 3.63TB space available! This drive has SAS Performance and quality with energy efficiency + 6GBps! Here are some bench results: Using AS SSD (it was one I had available) Seq Read: 172.87 \ Seq Write: 170.85 (MBps) 4K Read: .80 \ 4K Write: 2.05 Acct Read Time: 11.927ms \ Acct Write Time: 1.877ms Using Crystal Mark3 @ 1000MB Sequential Read: 181.9 \ Sequential Write: 178.8

Cons: SAS drive so you are limited to a SAS controller with the correct pin setup to connect the drive – you cannot connect this to a SATA controller. The temperature of the drive seemed to be a little hotter than SATA drives, but for systems that would use this type of drive as sufficient air cooling is necessary anyways, this isn't a major deal. The difference may have only been 2-5 degrees but I don’t have a Infrared Thermometer to accurately read the temps so was just an observation from touch.

Overall Review: This was installed in a WHS 2011 Server. I used this drive with an SAS controller (LSi PCIe 2 x4 card (SAS9211-4i). The cables I had were only for a SATA drive, so I did have to order another cable (Mini SAS to SAS). I thought I had one, but was wrong) You’ll have to make sure that your SAS controller card supports the 6.0 Gbs speed, has a SAS cable, and that it supports a 4TB hdd. I was unable to put the drive into a raid to test raid performance due to only having a single drive in this size / format. However I’m sure the performance in a raid setup would be quite nice! To help with speed references, My Server Hardware is an ASROCK AM3+ motherboard with a Phenom II 965BE processor, 8GB DDR3 memory with multiple HDD’s. This was installed as an additional drive with server storage. (not used for primary OS) The speed of this drive does not match up to the performance of an SSD (as most would expect), however in comparison to other mechanical hhd’s with the size and performance for money.. this is still a great performing drive, and still only a 7600 RPM!! Overall, if you have a need for a drive like this for your system, Order one!

Pros: I am using this as my primary genomic dataset decompression/analysis/recompression drive. It replaced the competitor’s highest-end consumer-grade performance hard drive, which also has a five year warranty. Sustained writes of 170MB/s are amongst the highest I’ve seen from a single (mechanical/platter-based) hard drive. For comparison, the drive it replaced topped out at 150MB/s according to my testing. This Seagate drive also has slightly lower latencies than the drive it replaced. At idle it pulls a few watts less than the drive it replaced. Finally, it is noticeably quieter (though in an enterprise setting this is irrelevant).

Cons: It runs a few degrees warmer than its predecessor (it’s in the same spot in the same case so I am confident in that assessment). The system also pulls 2-3 watts more under sustained use as measured from the wall controlling for the addition of the SAS controller card I installed.

Overall Review: Moving from a high-end consumer drive to this enterprise drive yielded minor performance increases given my usage scenario; I am most pleased that it is quieter than the drive it replaced though as alluded to most purchasers likely will not put this in an mATX case that’s sitting on a workstation desk. Of course, I unfortunately can’t yet comment on one important aspect of a hard drive, reliability.

Pros: Drive is quiet, fast and has excellent throughput - can you ask for more?

Cons: None at present, will add another review if that changes.

Overall Review: Purchased two at the same time. Both units are working well.

Pros: This Dive is solid as a rock. You can not bet the 5 year Manufacturer Warranty. I have mine on 24x7x365 with no down time. but even more the 128MB Cache this is top of the Line.

Cons: So I have order 100 of these drives over the last 2 years, and found a new drive fail rate of 4% with in the first 3 months.( Don't Return it to Newegg use the Manufacturer Warranty From Seagate. They can overnight the Drives. Just be Nice and let them know it is time sensitive) Then the fail rate drop to next 0% after that. I can't ask for anything better.

Overall Review: SAS is not SATA this is just like WIFI is not Ethernet. Just because they do the same thing dose not mean they are the same! How Can you Tell what you need SAS or SATA? in SATA Drive you will see a clear air Gap in the pin bar. in SAS drive looks like a sata but there is NO air GAP in the pin bar. So that is one solid Pin bar. There are some other ways to tell but this way is the most straight forward. 6Gb/s SAS is O, So nice in the RAID.

Pros: SAS drives are fast for hard drives. These have a good reputation as long as you avoid bad batches (alas we don't know which ones those are in advance).

Cons: Don't buy this if you don't know what "SAS" refers to. There will be a good chance an adapter cable will work for you, but there will be a good chance you'll need to return it. It is neither the seller's fault nor a failure of the hardware for you to purchase the wrong thing. It is important to check the hardware. Many tools for looking at "SMART" data will retrieve the equivalent SAS data. Nearly all third-party sellers have sold all new stock and are instead shipping refurbished or open box stock, instead of *new* stock. Anything with a power-on time greater than 0.2 hours is unlikely to actually be new. Since Seagate has moved onto their next round of drives, the new drives you get are likely to have a date of manufacture 1-2 years in the past. This isn't a concern for me, but if you believe sitting on a shelf in a warehouse causes wear then you may worry.

Overall Review: I have to downgrade my rating due to the prevalence of open-box (at best) or refurbished drives in circulation. What you'll actually get if you order *new* is essentially a gamble. As such I cannot recommend purchasing from this listing.

Pros: 16 of these in production at present in a large file storage cluster. So far they've performed well.

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: This probably goes without saying, but as drives get bigger, it's really important that you engineer your solution for not only enough raw space but also enough IOPs.

Pros: SAS connection and instruction set. ES.3 is a good improvement. Fast and reliable. I am using these and the 1TB versions in a SAN environment and have had good success.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: This is not a SATA drive. SATA drives will work with a SAS connection, but SAS drives will not work with a SATA connector. It is not a SATA drive. I wish Newegg would remove 1 star reviews from people who clearly gave poor ratings because of their mistake...