#SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS SLIM 2TB REVIEW ARCHIVE#
#SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS SLIM 2TB REVIEW PORTABLE#

In contrast, the Porsche Design Mobile drive (of the same capacity) had frequent dips to around 20 MBps. The WD My Passport 4TB shows the system image write out being consistently between 70 MBps and 110 MBps. The same data was also used to put the other hard drives in the 'used' state.ДЄ system image of the testbed was then taken on the extrnal drive, while the read and write transfer rates to the drive were monitored. To test this, we brought back the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile 4TB (also a SMR drive) and filled it to around 14% of the capacity with system images of different PCs created using the System Image Backup native utility in Windows.

Thus, once the SMR drive is, say 20 - 25% full, it is likely that users will see considerably worse performance compared to a fresh drive. However, it must be noted that the drop in transfer rates may start to happen after all the non-shingled areas are already filled with data. Sustained sequential writes for a hour or more are not realistic workloads for a majority of the retail consumers. Backing up System Images - A Real World Test The 5TB drive is actually able to avoid writing to the SMR space for more than 90 minutes before yielding to the inevitable.

#SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS SLIM 2TB REVIEW PORTABLE#

The same behavior is seen in the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 5TB drive also. This results in the drop of the instantaneous write rates to 10 MBps periodically. It can be seen that the firmware tries to avoid these slow write scenarios as much as possible (almost a hour of sustained sequential writes), but, the amount of traditional PMR space in the platters eventually runs out and the drive is forced to record to the shingled space. Worryingly, we have drops down to 10 MBps frequently. The Seagate Backup Plus Slim, on the other hand, starts off between 125 and 135 MBps and ends up between 60 and 80 MBps. This drop (based on the sector location in the drive's platters) is a well-known phenomenon due to the presence of a larger number of sectors on a per-revolution basis as we move further away from the center of the platter. We see a gradual steady drop down to 50-70 MBps as we move towards the center. We see the bandwidth numbers between 90 MBps and 110 MBps as we start off at the outer edge of the platters. First off, we take a look at the processing of this workload on a CMR drive - the WD My Passport 4TB. This 128K sequential write workload was set to span the entire capacity of the drive. The fio workload used for this purpose was adapted for running on the external hard drives. One of the tests we have recently started doing on flash-based storage devices is performance consistency under extremely stressful sequential write workloads. Detecting SMR - The Sequential Writes Test With the passage of time, Seagate has improved the firmware to such an extent that the tests detailed in the link above can no longer reliably detect the presence of SMR in a drive.

#SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS SLIM 2TB REVIEW ARCHIVE#

While the Archive HDD (one of the first SMR drives from Seagate that went into mass production) had dismal performance consistency, the Innov8 carried substantially improved firmware that enabled much better overall performance numbers. Our first tryst with SMR in the lab was the 8TB Seagate Archive HDD, followed by the retail-focused Seagate Innov8. Even replaying real-world work traces often only provides slight hints about the presence of SMR. The nature of the platters in a hard drive (CMR or SMR), unless explicitly mentioned, is not immediately evident from the specifications or even artificial benchmark tests that use a small work set.

Seagate backup plus slim 2tb review