By: Jonathan Kwan
January 22, 2016
If I asked you what the fastest way to transfer 8TB of data from New York to Los Angeles is, what would your answer be? If you answered anything along the line of establishing a Gigabit connection over a fiber optic network of some sort, then you are wrong. Even if that connection speed was sustainable -- and I am betting it probably is not -- it would take nearly eighteen hours for this task to complete. On the other hand, a quick online search indicates a direct flight from New York to Los Angeles takes only six hours and twenty minutes. This means, theoretically, the fastest way to transfer 8TB of data from New York to Los Angeles would be to simply put all your data onto a hard drive, and send it off by plane. As you can see, if you want to be on the cutting edge, sometimes, you need to jump to a whole different level to achieve your goal. Over the last couple of months, I have covered some pretty awesome hard drives, like the Western Digital Black WD6001FZWX 6TB and Red Pro WD6001FFWX 6TB. However, as awesome as these drives are, they are still consumer grade drives. If you want to jump to a whole different class of awesomeness, Seagate has something in store for you. The Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V.5 ST8000NM0055 8TB not only offers seriously massive storage (Yes, you can use this drive to ship 8TB of data from New York to Los Angeles via plane), but also enhanced reliability and optimized workload performance. Whether you are an IT manager working at a local datacenter or a geeky enthusiast searching for some mind blowing storage disk, what will $550 get you? We took one in to find out.
Our review unit of the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V.5 ST8000NM0055 8TB came in a medium sized, brown corrugated cardboard box from the company's American headquarters in Cupertino, California, USA. A quick glance at our records indicate this package came to us here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in early December 2015, which means one could say... this drive has been with us since last year, haha. Anyway, elementary school humor aside, Seagate's epic HDD was delivered to us via UPS Saver, and as always, has arrived in excellent condition for our review today.
The rectangular brown corrugated cardboard box is nothing new to us here at APH Networks; all Seagate products we have reviewed in the last little while came in the same way. Similar to the Seagate Desktop SSHD ST4000DX001 4TB I reviewed roughly half a year ago, 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 a clear plastic clamshell. 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.
Keeping this in mind, before we move on, let us take a look at the specifications of the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V.5 ST8000NM0055 8TB, as obtained from the manufacturer's website:
Features
Protection Information (T10 DIF): —
Humidity Sensor: Yes
Super Parity: Yes
Low Halogen: Yes
PowerChoice Technology: Yes
PowerBalance Technology: Yes (512 Emulation models only)
Cache, Multisegmented (MB): 256
Advanced Write Caching (2M Internal NOR Flash): Yes
Reliability/Data Integrity
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF, hours): 2.0M
Reliability Rating @ Full 24×7 Operation (AFR): 0.44%
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read: 1 sector per 10E15
Power-On Hours per Year: 8760 (24×7)
Sector Size (Bytes per Logical Sector): 512 and 4096
Limited Warranty (years): 5
Performance
Spindle Speed (RPM): 7200
Interface Access Speed (Gb/s): 6.0, 3.0, 1.5
Random Read/Write—16QD WCE (IOPS): 164/342
Max. Sustained Transfer Rate OD (MB/s): up to 237
Average Latency (ms): 4.16
Interface Ports: Single
Rotational Vibration @ 1500 Hz (rad/s²): 12.5
Power Consumption
Idle Power, Average (W): 9
Typical Operating, Random Read (W): <10
Power Supply Requirements: +12V and +5V
Environmental
Temperature, Operating (°C): 5 to 60
Vibration, Nonoperating: 10Hz to 500Hz (Grms): 5.0
Shock, Operating, 2ms (Read/Write) (Gs): 70/40
Shock, Nonoperating, 1ms and 2ms (Gs): 300
Physical
Height (in/mm, max): 1.028/26.1
Width (in/mm, max): 4.010/101.85
Depth (in/mm, max): 5.787/147.0
Weight (lb/g): 1.720/780
Carton Unit Quantity: 20
Cartons per Pallet: 40
Cartons per Layer: 8
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
