Seagate Backup Plus Portable 5TB & Backup Plus Slim 2TB Review: SMR for the Consumer Market
by Ganesh T S on June 18, 2019 8:00 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
Performance numbers are not the only metric of interest for the target market. Value additions and other factors play a role too. We have already discussed about the value additions in the first page of this review. In this final section, we first take a look at the thermal performance and power consumption numbers.
Thermals and Power Consumption
The thermal design of the enclosures for HDD-based DAS devices is important because hard drives can't withstand as high a temperature range as flash-based devices. Higher temperatures tend to lower the reliability of the drives. In order to identify the effectiveness with which the enclosure can take away heat from the internal drive, we instrumented our robocopy DAS benchmark suite to record various parameters while the robocopy process took place in the background. Internal temperatures can only be gathered for enclosures that support S.M.A.R.T passthrough. Readers can click on the graphs below to view the full-sized version. The Backup Plus drives have similar thermal profiles - at the end of our sustained writes test (robocopy benchmark), the drive temperatures were only 48C and 49C respectively. The enclosures are made of plastic and do not get unduly hot.
| Storage Enclosure Thermal Characteristics | ||
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Power consumption is measured while processing the same workload on each of the DAS units. CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2's benchmark traces with a region size of 8GB and the number of repetitions set to 5 are used. For bus-powered devices like the Seagate Backup Plus we are considering today, Plugable's USBC-TKEY power delivery sniffer was placed between the host PC and the storage bridge to record the power consumption. The pictures below present the numbers in a compact and easy to compare manner.
| Power Consumption - CrystalDiskMark | ||
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Peak power consumption for the 5TB drive was around 4.2W, while the 2TB drive came in at 3.9W. Corresponding idle numbers are 1.4W and 1.1W.
Final Words
The performance profile of the Seagate Backup Plus Portable and Slim drives are as advertised. Which may not seem like high praise, but it's actually a feather in Seagate's cap: the company has been able to tune the firmware of the drives to largely hide the detrimental effects of SMR. It's not perfect, and prolonged use shows more performance degradation compared to traditional CMR drives. But the vast majority of the users are unlikely to notice anything causing significant issues.
On the pricing front, the 5TB drive is available for $95 - $130 (depending on the color), while the 2TB Slim is $55 - $80 (again, color-dependent). The 4TB WD My Passport comes between $100 and $115. On a per-TB basis, the 5TB Backup Plus Portable is quite cost-effective.
We would have liked both Seagate Backup Plus drive models to move to a Type-C interface or bundle a Type-C adapter, but those are minor quibbles in the whole scheme of things. The drives offer a unique value proposition in the bus-powered external hard drives market, particularly when the value additions are taken into account. As portable backup drives and for usage in write-once / read-many scenarios, the Seagate Backup Plus Portable and Slim drives are perfect fits. As long as the users are aware of the potential pitfalls / effects of SMR for their use-cases in the long run, the drives are definitely worth consideration.
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Oliseo - Sunday, June 23, 2019 - link
If swapping a cable solves your issue, then it's the cable and not the connector. Otherwise a new cable wouldn't resolve the problem.My money would be that your bending the cables too much, and this stress is fracturing the core.
abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
I find it hard to trust any drive with really valuable data. And it gets worse as capacity increases.So when I had to upgrade and expand a RAID6 of 8x2TB 3.5" drives I could have gone with fewer drives at higher capacity, but RAID6 becomes really unattracive at lower disk counts, RAID1 wasn't really ideal without a hot spare and sticking with older low capacity drives didn't seem really attractive either.
So I took a chance and switched to 2.5", which had the exact same €/TB cost as 3.5" drives, but retained a high spindle count for throughput at much lower power and I was glad the old 2.5" price premium is finally gone.
Only Segate had them at 4TB and with RAID support, which gave me the extra capacity at a tolerable price. Not sure I'd want to suffer a RAID6 rebuild on 8x 14TB drives: It already takes three days at 4TB.
I used to operate another RAID with WD notebook HDDs, but without TLER I had too many unnecessary rebuilds and abandoned "extra low power RAID" for a while.
I'd have taken a WD, because they are my favorite brand for the last decade, but they don't offer a product in that "above notebook" NAS range below SAS drives. So I deliberated, compared technical data sheets, researched Seagates recent quality history a bit and risked a dive.
Six months 24x7 no issues so far, confidence is rising. The backup system runs a mix of WD-Green and Red but also Seagate "video surveillance" drives (all 3.5") since at least 5 years, again, no issues, but not 24x7.
I don't think there are significant constant quality defects in any surviving HDD manufacturer, when it comes to a conservative middle spot of the drives themselves. At the very leading capacity or technology edge, they sell to the hyperscalers on unforgiving contracts so by the time the product reaches mass market, they know what they do and what they cannot afford.
They might cut corners in an external chassis, customers might also forget these chassis contain delicate mechanics that are susceptible to heat, humidity and power variations, but the core hard drive is a known quantity.
Which is why these drives should never contain the only copy of anything you consider valuable.
abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Just to be clear: Those 4TB drives in the RAID6 are absolutely not SMR...azfacea - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
Imagine buying hard drive in 2k19 LULneblogai - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
I can easilly imagine doing that, if my 4.5 year old 3TB Toshiba died. The issue is, buying a 3TB now would not be cheaper, than it was then.neblogai - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
Edit: 5.5year old.nandnandnand - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
How much was your 3 TB when you bought it? What kind (internal, external, portable)?neblogai - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
It is internal, 81.6 British pounds, bought in Jan 2014 on Ebuyer. Yes, I know it can be found a little bit cheaper now- but, you know, 13 pounds cheaper after 5.5 years, in tech? Inflation alone was 11% 2014-2019.quiksilvr - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
Cost of steel, import taxes, etc. are all huge factors. The big reason why HDD prices are still what they are at these capacities is because there is no cheap alternatives (yet) at these capacities and there is only so much optimization you can do. SSDs have basically toppled the HDD market in anything less than 1TB but they still cost over 2x as much in the 1TB realm and 3-4 times in 2TB because the difference in 1TB and 2TB in the HDD space is from $50 to $60, not $100 to $200 like an SSD.imaheadcase - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
People still do use them for home servers for Media. Its not practical to stream or upload all type of content available. Esp if have shoddy internet access. While SSD drives are getting better in size and reliability...the price is not anything close yet to mass storage for all media types.Its not uncommon for people to have regular hardrives for 5-10 years of operation in a server for just homes. I think my oldest is from 2014 and still going strong.