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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sheh - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
Seagate's had a few bad 4TB models. ST4000DM001, and maybe DM005 and DX001. Models like DM000 seem better:https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-fo...
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-fo...
sheh - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
(This was a reply to oRAirwolf. Anandtech's commenting system fails to create a sub-comment without Javascript.)sheh - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
22 hours to write the whole 5TB drive?!abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
I am a little surprised, that a consistent sequential write to an SMR should drop the data rate below a non-shingled drive. AFAIK only updates-in-place of a shingle should trigger the SMR write-amplification, unless the firmware actually always writes to a none-shingled section of the drive first, similar to an SLC buffer on TLC/QLC SSDs. That seems to happen with the fio workload, but not with the backup: Otherwise its performance would have to drop similarly.I guess that is where SMRs would have a command set which allows applications to steer that behavior by hinting how data should be handled. And perhaps they should support a variant of TRIM, by which an OS could signal, which parts of a shingle no longer need preservation and avoid the write amplification.
The problem is that without some low-level tool as a user you currently don't really have control over an SMR drive's behavior. The OS could/would/should know perhaps, that the large set of files you are copying are in fact intended to replace your last backup, but at the block level of a drive, without some help from the OS or a hint via a tool all that useful information is lost and the firmware needs to second guess your intentions.
I don't think I have heard of any SMR specific optimizations on Windows, and to be honest not even on Linux. And then this isn't just OS but also file system specific and AFAIK exFAT isn't known for its sophistication.
In any case I'd expect your experience to vary over the life-time of the drive. First time you fill it, it might be ok enough, but once you're into incremental backups replacing smallish files at near medium capacity, the 25% capacity increase may turn out too expensive in extra time.
If you're doing full backups only, erasing first might help. But only, if there is a way to tell the drive that entire shingles don't need preservation.
Kastriot - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Pricing for 5TB model is very tempting.ballsystemlord - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Only one grammar error, good work Ganesh!"Sustained sequential writes for a hour or more are not realistic workloads for a majority of the retail consumers."
"an" not "a" (Yes, its an English idiosyncrasy, not the typical "an" before vowel "a" before consonent):
"Sustained sequential writes for an hour or more are not realistic workloads for a majority of the retail consumers."
ballsystemlord - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
*consonantaustonia - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
The 5TB drives are often $95 or $100 at Costco. I have half dozen, they work fine.badbanana - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
for those using such devices for backup, over time the files stored in this external HDDs would fail eventually (according to my findings). therefore i make sure to have another backup somewhere, like the cloud, to ensure that the files will be readable in the coming years. that's my plan B.for the rest of you, what are your plan Bs?
Chloiber - Saturday, June 29, 2019 - link
Interesting read, thanks!We often use external hard disks from WD to create archives of certain datasets (usually very large, single files) and had to use the 5TB Seagate version for the first time as we exceeded 4TB.
I did notice that it took very long for the copy - I don't think I have kept the logs, but this would explain a lot!