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Netherlands, Amsterdam
1 Level
695 Review
29 Karma

Review on ๐Ÿ’พ Seagate BarraCuda 5TB Internal Hard Drive HDD โ€“ 2.5 Inch SATA 6 Gb/s 5400 RPM 128MB Cache - Ideal for Computer Desktop PC (ST5000LM000) by Patrick Stowers

Revainrating 2 out of 5

High density, hot and very slow

Revain appears to be having serious problems selling legitimate versions of this drive. I ordered 5 of these discs and only one of them was fully guaranteed with a green label. The remaining 4 were gray market, no guarantee, with a white label. You can get such a drive out of a cheaper USB case for about $50. It's worth noting that all 5 of these drives failed during testing. Everyone started giving read/write errors in the last 20% of the disk. I'm a bit concerned that a bunch of people bought drives they thought were good, only to have them fail when they were running low on capacity. I ended up removing two drives from the above USB enclosure and both passed the test well. I suspect white label discs are being sold, although this listing may be a technical example and unreliable. All white label drives are also shipped in non-damping mailboxes so they may have been shocked to death during shipping. In terms of performance, these drives are also VERY slow. I got a write speed of about 120 MB / s for the first 25% of the disk, from 26-75% the speed dropped to 60 MB / s, and for the remaining 25% to 30 (!) MB / s. Read speeds seem being above the 100MB/s range for most drives, which isn't bad, but don't expect your backups to be very fast. Random I/O also reduces performance. I've seen it drop to 2-3 MB/s on random I/O. They got pretty hot too: I measured 42C with limited air cooling. A Western Digital 4TB 15mm 2.5" drive in the same drive bay was 37C.

Pros
  • The best
Cons
  • New competitors have emerged