By: Jonathan Kwan
July 31, 2015
A few months ago, my friend asked me what the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta is. "Well," I explained. "It is a political party that is neither progressive nor conservative." While I am not here to debate politics here on APH Networks (Although I will still stand by my opinion that Ralph Klein is still the best premier Alberta ever had), if you think about it, the name of the party seems to be self-contradictory. However, if you look a bit more deeply into what they stood for, in the golden days of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, it was progressive on issues that needed to be progressive, and conservative on issues that needed to be conservative. One could say, in Hannah Montana terms, the "best of both worlds". Over the years, that vision dwindled, and became something that is -- as I have joked about -- neither progressive nor conservative. Unfortunately, this meant instead of getting the best of both worlds, we ended up with a party that stood for nothing, and carried the short end of both ideologies. Last month, I reviewed the Seagate Laptop SSHD ST500LM000 500GB solid state hybrid drive. Carrying an ostensibly self-contradictory name, I was worried it will neither be solid state in performance, nor a hard drive in capacity and price. What I found was, unlike the modern Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, the ST500LM000 offered a great balance between performance, capacity, and price. Today, we will take a look at yet another hybrid drive from Seagate. With capacity sitting at a lofty 4TB, and retailing for about $160 at press time in 3.5" desktop form, will the Seagate Desktop SSHD ST4000DX001 be yet another winner? We took one in to see it for ourselves.
Our review unit of the Seagate Desktop SSHD ST4000DX001 4TB came in a medium sized, brown corrugated cardboard box from the company's American headquarters in Cupertino, California. In case you are wondering how far Apple's headquarters are from Seagate, a quick search on Google Maps indicate it is literally just right down the street. Other well-known tech companies like Trend Micro, IBM, and Oracle all have their presence in what is often called the heart of Silicon Valley. Traveling about 2,000km north to us here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, everything arrived safely and quickly using the UPS Saver service.
The rectangular brown corrugated cardboard box is nothing new to us here at APH Networks; the Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB we reviewed last year came in the same way. Also, like the Seagate Laptop SSHD ST500LM000 500GB I reviewed last month, there was a ton of bubble wrap inside to keep the OEM packaged drive safe and sound throughout the journey. When I say "OEM packaged", it means it is simply a bare drive inside an anti-static bag. To ensure adequate protection for fragile, mechanical devices like this, they definitely went all the way. To be honest, I have never purchased a hard drive that is not in OEM packaging in the past, so experienced online shoppers will find this a relatively familiar sight.
With all that in mind, before we move on, let us take a look at the specifications of the Seagate Desktop SSHD ST4000DX001 4TB, as obtained from the manufacturer's website:
Capacity: 4TB
Interface: SATA 6Gb/s
Package: Drive Only
Height: 26.11mm
Width: 101.6mm
Length: 146.99mm
Typical Weight: 610g
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. Conclusion
