INTRODUCTION

   Whenever storage related products make their way to our lab i always look back to the days when we used to carry our work around in floppy disks (sometimes just one) and the hard disk drives used in our PCs were but a few megabytes in capacity. Who would had imagined back then that less than 30 years later our storage capacity requirements would had skyrocketed to entirely new levels that even several TBs would not be able to cover (for example just my personal backups are over 50TB in size and I know people who have over 100TB in backups)? The really strange thing however is that even though manufacturers like Seagate, WD, HGST and Toshiba release larger capacity HDDs all the time our needs increase with them so in the end we're always just one step ahead. Still we can only use what's available and with 8TB hard disk drive models gaining popularity over their 6TB cousins today we thought it would be nice to test Seagate's 3.5" flagship model the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v5.

   Founded in 1979, Seagate is the leading provider of hard drives and storage solutions. From the videos, music and documents we share with friends and family on social networks, to servers that form the backbone of enterprise data centers and cloud-based computing, to desktop and notebook computers that fuel our personal productivity, Seagate products help more people store, share and protect their valuable digital content. Seagate offers the industry’s broadest portfolio of hard disk drives, solid-state drives and solid-state hybrid drives. In addition, the company offers an extensive line of retail storage products for consumers and small businesses, along with data-recovery services for any brand of hard drive and digital media type. Seagate employs more than 50,000 people around the world.

   The Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v5 8TB model is currently available in SATA 6Gb/s and SAS 12Gb/s variants (a self-encrypting drive/SED is also available) and uses a total of 6 platters (1.33TB per platter) that spin at 7200RPM and a total of 12 heads. The drive also features 256MB of DRAM cache (twice as much as the previous V4 line), a dual-processor (LSI/Seagate TTB71001VD), PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording), RAID Rebuild (PDF), advanced write caching (AWC - 2M Internal NOR Flash), power loss protection (for the cache) and PowerChoice along with PowerBalance (power save features). Seagate covers the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v5 with a 5 year warranty and gives it an MTBF (Meantime Between Failures) of 2 million hours with an endurance/workload rate of 550TB/year. The Enterprise Capacity line (former Constellation ES) by Seagate has always been about quality and performance so let's see just how good the latest v5 version is compared to all its predecessors and more.