Seagate SV35.6 Series ST3000VX000 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Surveillance Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: What a nice hard drive, heavy tho, but silent, dependable over the month or so I have used it. I have to put my finger on it to see if it is running, and I have a quiet puter. Seagate has been my second best brand for go-to HDs, WD first, but actually, I have not really had a bad time from Seagate except that one where you had to change the firmware with a floppy back a few years ago, I think it was a 500GB, but my memory is not so sharp lately. Every brand has DOAs once in a while, it is the nature of ESD damage mostly, if there is a lightning strike on the plane or it gets near a magnet, ooops. I got the times below virtually off of every size block I used on my little HDTune free tester deal which only registered it as 2199GB, which I guess is their limit, see more below about that. I tested at 8MB, 4MB, 512KB, 128KB, and got within 5% same readings, so I will just give an average: Min 130-MB/s MAX 198MB/s Avg 169MB/s Access Time 11.4ms Burst speed 192.3MB/s tho is showed ms, must be glitch. CPU usage < 1% I had a boot drive of Sata3 SSD Samsung 840 plain, 250GB, and another storage drive of WD Green Sata3 1TB involved in the testing. When I did some transfers in the puter, I got from 110MB/s at 40GB size from WD green to this HD, to 184MB/s from the SSD to this HD. Interesting to me, this HD to SSD was at best 180MB/s which is pretty fast reading in my book for a spinner. Seems well made. Came in cardboard box with the black plastic end caps they use. In ESD bag, thankfully. Here is where I give my speech that people that get consistent DOA items should look into grounding wrist straps, it is really a BIG problem in todays world as it was for the last forty or more years I have worked in the industry of electronics/electrical. I only registered 83 degrees Faren. while testing with a light breeze from a fan on it.

Cons: Would make excellent paperweight, heavier than two regular HDs. Don't even think of putting it into a laptop portable, heh. I don't really have any hard bads about this HD that I could take a star off. I would warn Nubies to look elsewhere unless you have the latest MBs and Controllers working this baby, cause a LOT of manufacturers haven't kept up with the size increases this invokes. Luckily I was using an ASRock Extreme 4 Z77 MB with the windows style interface for what used to be a BIOS. AND it had a little +2TB program to use if you wanted to use the 3TB biggie for a boot drive. That is apparently where most of the problems occur, as opposed to using it as a storage drive. Read up on it if you intend to use it for a boot drive before purchasing unless you are confident of your skill level with software utilization. It ain';t easy peasy if you are a nube. In fact, even for a storage drive, I would advise to stick to 2TB or less if you want to avoid software problems with everything it seems.

Overall Review: Seems nice if you understand the problems that will occur with a lot of other programs and devices. I would say that for a power user, this might fit the bill for a nice RAID arrangement even tho it is intended for video and surviellance uses. Quiet and cool rule in RAID, and dependability matters a lot in Near LIne uses too.

Pros: More storage than most people would need Works good as a boot drive or storage drive Relatively inexpensive for the amount of storage

Cons: Don't understand all the bad reviews... Maybe I just got a good one

Overall Review: I installed windows 7 Ultimate and this drive ran and it went flawlessly! Just wanted to run benchmarks and test it out thoroughly before I put it in my storage server. It ran so well I bought 4 more to create a RAID 5 in my storage server. After I created a raid and an easy install in my storage server I transferred about 3 TB worth of video and other files I have acquired over the years. Everything went seamless and is still running strong as a media streamer and file storage server. I also store my video from my home cameras on a partition in the raid. So far so good! i will update with any issues.

Pros: Performance and capacity are two of this drives best selling points. Just for the sake of comparison to other reviews, and to get it out of the way, here are the numbers I got from benchmarking. These tests were run on the disk populated with roughly 300GB of data. System data in "Other thoughts". ***** CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 ***** -- 50MB Test -- Sequential Read : 191.2 MB/s Sequential Write : 137.5.687 MB/s Random Read 512K : 68.24 MB/s Random Write 512K : 91.79 MB/s Random Read 4K: 1.414 MB/s Random Write 4K : 1.182 MB/s Random Read 4KB QD32: 1.301 MB/s Random Write 4KB QD32: 1.148 MB/s -- 4000MB Test -- Sequential Read : 206.9 MB/s Sequential Write : 199.0 MB/s Random Read 512K : 35.55 MB/s Random Write 512K : 83.11 MB/s Random Read 4K: 0.593 MB/s Random Write 4K : 1.211 MB/s Random Read 4KB QD32: 0.609 MB/s Random Write 4KB QD32: 1.188 MB/s ***** AIDA64 Disk Benchmark Read Tests ***** -- 4K Block Size -- Linear Read Begin: 65.7 MB/s Linear Read Middle: 64.8 MB/s Linear Read End: 65.0 MB/s Random Read: 63.2 MB/s Buffered Read: 37.7 MB/s Average Read Access: 14.91 ms -- 8MB Block Size -- Linear Read Begin: 177.0 MB/s Linear Read Middle: 178.6 MB/s Linear Read End: 99.0 MB/s Random Read: 175.9 MB/s Buffered Read: 124.9 MB/s Average Read Access: 14.59 ms The drive seems to perform well and presented no setup or formatting problems under Windows 7 Ultimate 64 SP1. The drive did great while streaming data to it in the form of video surveillance from two sources, Fraps from gaming, and streaming from a second PC. Under load the drive never broke 37C (100F), and seems to "idle" at or below 32C (90F), in my Cooler Master HAF 932. More details in "Other thoughts".

Cons: None that I encountered during my testing.

Overall Review: Relevant System Data: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 SP1 ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 AMD FX-8350 Vishera @ 4.3GHz 16GB A-Data 1600 XPG All 8 SATA 6 channels are saturated. Note to users: Using a hard drive larger than 2.1TB on any Windows computer may require special setup considerations, this information is available on the Seagate website under "Beyond 2TB". Here is some of the compatibility highlights from that page for quick reference purposes. - Windows 7/Vista with UEFI BIOS: Boot is supported by Windows 64-bit only. Data is supported by Windows. - Windows 7/Vista with PC BIOS: Boot is supported by DiscWizard software only. Data is supported by Windows. - Windows XP with PC BIOS: Boot is supported by DiscWizard software only. Data is supported by DiscWizard software only. - If your system uses the Intel RST driver, your 3TB disk drive may appear to be 800GB. See Seagate's support article about the Intel RST driver. - System memory requirement is 1GB and higher for 32-bit systems and 2GB and higher for 64-bit systems. - Seagate DiscWizard software installs a device driver to achieve full capacity on Legacy BIOS systems. - Windows systems with legacy BIOS using DiscWizard will need two partitions on the boot drive to achieve full capacity. - Windows 7 and Vista native support for 3TB non-booting data drives is with GPT partitions, available on all systems. - Windows 7 and Vista native support for booting 3TB is on UEFI BIOS systems and using GPT partitions only. I tested this drive under three main "real world" uses other than it's suggested. For capturing video from two live video sources, game capture via Fraps, as well as game capture from a second PC via an AVerMedia Live Gamer HD card. The video sources were my Logitech C615 HD webcam and a remote D-Link DCS-932L Wireless IP camera, both fed into the home version of EyeLine Video Surveillance. Of course, the drive had no problems keeping up with two feeds letting them run all weekend. I then tested it for game capture via Fraps by recording about 1.5 hours worth of Battlefield 3 gameplay. Again, not a single problem to report. It kept up just fine. Lastly, using it to record a captured game stream from a second PC, this time using the AVerMedia Live Gamer HD card and playing the game Defiance, the drive also have absolutely no problems keeping up. There is really not much else to say about this drive, on it's own, it has performed very well. If you need a large capacity drive for video, no matter if it's surveillance as it suggests, or game capture, it should have no problems keeping up with your needs. Others have reported failures in RAID, I can not comment on that since I only have the single drive, but as a single drive, I have not had a single issue. If this changes, I will followup. All in all I am very pleased with this drive and would recommend it.

Pros: Impressive transfer rates. Impressively low operating temperature. After beating this drive up for a good hour with no directed airflow on the drive, the temperature was still only 100 F. Most of my other drives run at about 100 F with fans on them. When testing 2 simultaneous data streams, the throughput took a significant hit, but still maintained very respectable numbers. 3 year warranty, which is the best you will find these days. Made in Thailand.

Cons: None that I could come up with in my week of testing, so I will use this space for benchmarks. --- As always, thanks Hiyohiyo, for providing us the Crystal Disk Mark Utility for free. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo ----------------------------------------------------------------------- * MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s] Sequential Read : 193.185 MB/s Sequential Write : 147.687 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 70.271 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 94.643 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 1.477 MB/s [ 360.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.182 MB/s [ 288.5 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.429 MB/s [ 349.0 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.213 MB/s [ 296.2 IOPS] Test : 50 MB [E: 0.0% (0.2/2794.4 GB)] (x9) Date : 2013/09/21 17:54:27 OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64) Increasing the test size to 4GB yielded: Sequential Read : 177.777 MB/s Sequential Write : 174.552 MB/s Since this drive is advertized as specifically for video surveillance systems, I ran 2 tests with 50MB test files at the same time to see how it handled multiple streams of data: Stream 1: Sequential Read : 43.194 MB/s Sequential Write : 50.274 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 25.802 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 44.845 MB/s Stream 2: Sequential Read : 45.930 MB/s Sequential Write : 50.614 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 26.831 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 44.620 MB/s --- For comparison, here are the results for a 3 TB Seagate consumer model drive (ST3000DM001) (also using a 50MB test) : Sequential Read : 165.473 MB/s Sequential Write : 161.033 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 72.686 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 89.637 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 1.390 MB/s [ 339.3 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.177 MB/s [ 287.3 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.601 MB/s [ 391.0 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.082 MB/s [ 264.2 IOPS] and for a Western Digital 2TB green drive (WD20EARX) (also using a 50MB test) : Sequential Read : 350.437 MB/s Sequential Write : 56.323 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 323.979 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 112.958 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 4.765 MB/s [ 1163.4 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.529 MB/s [ 617.4 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.917 MB/s [ 467.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 2.430 MB/s [ 593.2 IOPS]

Overall Review: This hard drive seems to fall somewhere between their Constellation (enterprise) drives and their normal consumer drives. The price is 20% higher than their 3TB consumer model ST3000DM001 drive, (see my review for item N82E16822178117), but the performance really isn't any better (see cons, where I am putting stats). I have never owned a Constellation drive, so I have no benchmarks. As with other drives from Seagate and other manufacturers, they have designated this drive as a special purpose drive to entice people to buy this over a standard drive. In this case, for use in a video surveillance system. Like other specialty drives (Enterprise, or NAS drives, for example), the claims are difficult to verify, and you are left to wonder if they are worth the higher price tag, I have been running standard Seagate 1 TB (SATA II) hard drives in my video surveillance server for almost 8 years now and have only experienced 1 hard drive failure. Granted, I am using analog cameras, however I have a lot of them and am recording nearly 40 GB of video per hour. Adding this drive to the mix improved video search functions, but that was not unexpected given the age of the old drives. Perhaps once I upgrade to megapixel cameras, and to a new server, the benefits of this drive will become obvious, but for now, it's difficult to justify the specialty drive price tag. Depending on your environment, the additional warranty might justify the increase in price, but in my experience, a longer warranty does not signify a better drive, as I have actually had more 5 year warranty drives fail in the first year or two of use than 1-3 year warranty drives (excluding DOAs of course). Reading the other reviews for this drive, longevity might be a problem, but only time will tell. RAID, RAID, RAID.... Since a more affordable RAID 5 (n+1) array will devastate your performance, it should never be used in a video surveillance server. That leaves you with 2 options: Either buy twice as many drives and configure RAID 1 or RAID 10 arrays, or take a risk and use single disks. If you have gone to the trouble and expense of installing a video surveillance system, that data must be important do you, so that really leaves only 1 option: multiple RAID 1 arrays or a single RAID 10 (these are close enough to the same concept to call them 1 option). In this configuration, you will always survive a single disk failure (and possibly more), so why not buy the least expensive drives that give you the performance that you need?

Pros: decent drives, good speed. TGF raid.

Cons: 50% failure rate so far. have reordered drive.

Overall Review: Will replace faulty drive. no idea what happened, just failed. Thank goodness for raid, no data loss.

Pros: I received a bare "OEM" drive, as I would expect based on the description. You too will receive no cables, or any software, but that is OK. Seagate makes drive installation easy with Seatools that you can download for free from their site and run on a USB stick or burn to CD/DVD media. The drive itself is 3.5" form factor, the dimensions and other basic specifications are listed here. its 2TB unformatted, so just like your file cabinet could hold 2 million or trillion pages without folders, this could hold its full 2TB, but to work right it needs formatting for the system its installed in, so you end up with around 1.81TB of useable space on a Windows system. Its advanced 4K clusters, when the drive natively stores data it has to store them in segments, and for years drives and Operating Systems used smaller segments. Since data has grown, storage size needed to grow, and smaller segments were not efficient. Its Sata III interface, which allows for higher burst data rates, but is not saturated by the drive's read and write capabilities. Speed. The main factor in many purchasing choices. Multiple passes of HD Tune Pro shows the following. Read 212MBps Peak uncached. Average 156MBps uncached Lowest 122MBps uncached. Burst 212MBps uncached Average seek time was around 13-14ms, lower than advertised. I mention uncached, as that is the speed of the heads writing and writing to the platters, not using the 64MB of buffer or cache memory. It shows what the drive is truly capable of. With the buffer enabled the cached read/write speed varies depending on what is already in the buffer for files, but it was between 200 and 320MBps. Filling the Que length up to 32 showed the drives 64MB of cache and logic was well matched up, the drive never stalled even when performing reads and writes of a mix of mismatched small 1Kb and 64Kb files. the drive exhibited no noise beyond what I would consider normal in operation and wake. It was running much cooler than the 750GB drive it replaced. All in all it is a solid product.*

Cons: None I encountered.

Overall Review: I used my test drive after running it in an existing windows install with seatools I cloned the existing drive and its now been running through many virus scans, defragments, installations, uninstallations, and very heavy use. It is a China made drive, but I have had no issues with it and after another month of successful use the prior drive will be formatted.

Pros: First it’s important to note that this drive is “Optimized for 24x7 video surveillance systems”. What does this tell you? It tells you that it is optimized for sequential and continuous writing and play back. If anyone gives it bad ratings for being slow as a general application drive it’s because they didn’t know enough to understand what it was they were buying. This is a great drive for “brute” storage, of pictures, videos, or just files you want to keep around but don’t need rocket speed access to. It would also be fine for a generic non-performance related PC. It wouldn't be a particularly great drive for gaming, though in most cases you would want a large amount of DRAM for that which may in some (not particularly all) cases work to pre-load files before they were needed so you may not notice any problems. The fact that it is rated great than 1M hours MTBF (Mean Time between Failures) means that it’s likely to be around for some time. This rating is misunderstood by many – as it doesn't tell it is likely a theoretical calculation which is calculated by using the MTBF of all the components in the unit. It doesn't mean that there are no early life failures, but it means that it’s not that likely unless unlucky you will have problems. For grins, though I wasn’t expecting any earth shattering results, I ran IOMeter which is an open source program still widely in the industry (even though the last release was in 2006) it still is a highly configurable disk testing utility (with a little bit of a learning curve). What you should find on a drive like this is it will get a very high MBs per Second speed with large packets and very low for small packets. This is true with most drives but would be even more so with a drive optimized for streaming video recording and playback. So it seemed more worthwhile to run mixed packet sizes and rates so I ran the “ALL IN ONE” option over my SATA 2 link to a drive caddy. IOMeter 2006.07.27 On a SATAII i7-920 12GB using 8 threads running “ALL IN ONE” script on all eight threads. Note that earlier version of IOMeter would read faster as the developers changes something in the way it performs these tests. HD tests like this *cannot* be compared in any meaningful way to any other test and are only useful in comparing to other drives benchmarked against this specific test. Total I/Os per Second = 587 Total MB per second = 7.52 Average I/O Response Time (ms) = 13.6 ms Maximum I/O Reponse Time (ms) = 650 So what’s this mean? It means that it’s actually reasonable response for a mechanical drive. If you were streaming video you might get a magnitude or more greater than 7.52 MB/S but this is a mixed rate. If I were putting together a PC for myself and wanted a reasonably decent machine, I might install a 250GB SSD and then something like this for secondary storage. Or if I were putting together just a generally utility machine this is actually a reasonable solution.

Cons: NONE

Overall Review: I’ve worked at various disk storage companies and an SSD manufacturer – specifically those involved with video storage and retrieval and an embedded systems software engineer. I have never worked for Seagate. There are really few who know drives and if you know enough about them, you will realize that you probably don’t know that much about them as they are really complex (I fall into this camp). But I have put in some hours disk testing and think I can make a few semi intelligent comments about this drive. For what it is, for what they state it is, it looks like a pretty decent deal. I would buy it and recommend buying it if your intended use matches my previous statements.

Pros: Very quiet Runs cool 64MB cache Plenty fast SATA 3.0 interface 3 year warranty

Cons: None found. Initially had problem with drive dropping into SATA 1.0 mode, but found a faulty cable to be the cause.

Overall Review: My computer is getting a bit dated, but it still has a SATA 2.0 interface which should provide plenty of bandwidth for a traditional hard drive. Test computer runs an Asus P5E motherboard (ICH9R chipset), Core 2 Quad Q9450. Ran 3 read and write tests with HD Tune and averaged the results. Read speeds: Minimum - 90.4 MB/s Maximum - 205.0 MB/s Average - 160.9 MB/s Access time - 14.3 ms Burst rate - 205.4 MB/s Write speeds: Minimum - 81.0 MB/s Maximum - 203.6 MB/s Average - 156.6 MB/s Access time - 13.9 ms Burst rate - 186.7 MB/s I did some "torture testing" and checked the temp with the drive's internal sensor as well as a Micro Temp infrared thermometer: External temp never exceeded 87F / 30.6C Internal topped at 89.6F / 32C I do worry about drive longevity based on some other reviews and because this is the first drive I've owned that's made in China. This drive blows my old Western Digital WD6400AAKS out of the water. The slowest component in your PC is the hard drive and even a few years makes a huge difference. Color me impressed.