Review on Seagate Barracuda 4 TB ST4000DM004 hard drive by Adam Libera ᠌

Name: Seagate Barracuda 4 TB ST4000DM004 hard drive
Item: Seagate Barracuda 4 TB ST4000DM004 hard drive
Rating: 3

April 21, 2023

Not a bad product, but you can find better.

Shingled magnetic recording appears to be standard on all new Seagate products with "004" in the model number (SMR). Meanwhile, the longer recording times that occur when previously recorded data must be erased should be mitigated by the larger cache. Within 12 hours, I had around 4 terabytes of data recorded for me.

The SMR system has traditionally been placed in archive disks. This is a model I might suggest to friends, but with caveats.

For Seagate's product lines, the maximum supported workload is:

BARRACUDA Compute and FIRECUDA Compute have a limit of 55 Tb/year, whereas IRONWOLF NAS and SKYHAWK have a limit of 180 Tb/year. BARRACUDA PRO Compute and IRONWOLF PRO NAS will handle surveillance workloads of up to 300 terabytes per year.

A series of WD Gold TM enterprise-class hard disks, by comparison, can handle up to 550Tb per year in data.

Pros

Four terabytes of data may be stored on just two pancakes, the device generates little to no heat or noise, it is lightweight and compact, and it costs very little.

Cons

Poor writing pace. The manufacturer-recommended maximum yearly read/write load is 55 TB (55 4 TB = 13.7, thus you can't overwrite the entire disk more than 13–14 times per year).