Thanks to an eagle eyed STH forum member Deslok, we found an easy way to get 4TB Seagate 2.5″ 5400rpm disks for a paltry $124 via Amazon
The Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Enclosure
Here is the Seagate Backup Plus 4TB enclosure. Of course, we are about to open it up. However, if we were not going to do so, it is actually a nice external drive enclosure. We may order one more for backup duties yet.
To open these you can use one of two methods. You can push along the case’s sides near the seam and get the lid clip to disengage with the rest of the shell. Alternatively you can use a pocket knife and pry. These units, even without screws are well designed so the fit on our drives has been excellent. Here is a picture of where we start from. Start away from the USB 3.0 port.
As you can see, there are very small clips holding this enclosure together. They do a good job. On the lid, you can see two of these clips on the top/ bottom edges and three clips on each side. There is adhesive keeping the lids on so the entire assembly is secure for travel use. The adhesive gives easily so it is not a barrier to opening. You will also see that using the knife method we did bend the metal lid. We were able to bend it back onto the drive but it took a bit of work after being deformed.
At this point, we pulled the drive out via the blue rubber shock absorber. Why have we been using this one? It is blue and we figured there had to be a reason one of the four was a different color.
After removing the drive from the outer shell, we see the drive has rubber shock absorbers and a foil shield around it.
After taking off the shielding and rubber/ silicone shock absorbers, we can see that the actual SATA to USB 3.0 converter is very small.
Here is a picture of the other side of that USB 3.0 to SATA connector. As you can see, it is very compact.
This is a nice compact USB 3.0 to SATA interface PCB which is handy on a standalone basis. You will only want to use this with slower 2.5″ hard drives and SSDs as it only has USB 3.0 bus power available.
It should also be noted that if you get one of these drives you also receive 200GB / 2 year Microsoft OneDrive storage. Here is the Seagate FAQ on that program.
Our total dis-assembly time on these drives was about 2 minutes by our third drive.
The Seagate ST4000LM016 4TB 2.5″ Drive
Inside you will find a Seagate ST4000LM016 2.5″ 4TB hard drive. Here is a link to the official spec page.
The Seagate ST4000LM016 is a 15mm thick 2.5″ drive which has some significant implications. The most important of which is that you need proper hot swap bays. Many hot swap enclosures support only 7mm drives as they were designed for SSDs. The Seagate 4TB drive must pack enough rotating platters for that capacity in a 2.5″ drive size.
We did test the drive and like other sites found that although the spec mentions 128MB cache, our drive shows only 16MB.
Seagate 4TB drive warranty – or lack thereof
Some drives, e.g. the WD Backup drives with HGST 8TB drive we recently tried, will come up on the manufacturer warranty sites even with the bare internal drives. We tested the drives with the Seagate Warranty Validation page:
It appears as though these drives are tracked as part of their enclosures so you cannot RMA the drives outside of their enclosures.
For every eight of the 4TB external drives you buy ($1000/ 32TB raw) you could only buy five of the internal versions of the drive ($1000/ 20TB raw
Performance
Performance of these drives is certainly well below what we would expect from 3.5″ drives or from 2.5″ higher speed drives. The spindle speed and small platter size do not help the drives much. We did a few quick ATTO runs using a number of the drives we purchased and the USB 3.0 interface is not slowing these drives down.
Here are ATTO Benchmarks with the USB 3.0 enclosure:
And with a direct SATA III connection:
These are not scientific, but they do show you approximately how well the drives perform. There was a decent test run variation so assume that these drives are around 110MB/s maximum or the line rate for a 1GbE connection to your NAS.
Conclusion
After trying these drives out, we now have 8 of them that we are planning to use on a backup server. If you have Intel Xeon E5-2600 V1/ V2 systems, older Xeon E3 systems, or Atom C2000 series systems with SATA II 3.0gbps ports, these drives are a perfect match since they cannot saturate a SATA II port bandwidth wise. For those looking to build compact home servers, you can fit four of these drives, for 16TB raw capacity in a 4-in-1 5.25″ enclosure. The drives are big enough that you cannot use denser configurations. We were able to test these with Thermaltake MAX1542 enclosures and they barely fit. Another huge benefit is that the drives work in standard 24 bay 2.5″ 2U chassis. That means you can mix these drives as a slower tier with SATA SSDs as a faster, higher performing storage tier. You can easily get 24x 4TB drives in a 2U chassis for 96TB total raw capacity. Using a mix-and-match architecture (SSD and HDD) you can skip the 3.5″ drive size and standardize on 2.5″ disks. For $200+ per 4TB drive we would not recommend this. At $124 with Amazon Prime
Amazon sells the bare drive as the Samsung Momentus ST4000LM016 for $140.
http://amzn.to/1VPOBBb
It’s a little more expensive but you’re not voiding the warranty by cracking open an external drive. It’s also worth noting that this is a PMR drive. The only other 4TB SATA 2.5 I’m aware of use SMR (shingled) storage which has questionable durability in write heavy situations.
Hi Mike – this was discussed in the forums here. Those $140 drives on Amazon do not have a Seagate/ Samsung warranty as they are grey market drives from a third party seller.
Good to know. Thanks
Been going this route for a few years now, ever since the 1TB 2.5″ seagate has made the external drives available months ahead of the bare drives…
interestingly i never had any problems (lightly used nas 12x 1TB, 12x 2TB, disks in sleep mode ~20h per day), not a single drive has failed. in the same timespan i had multiple wd red’s fail. but i have a far too small sample for any meaningful analysis…
Anyone tested their performance in a RAID yet? I’m thinking of putting 4x 2.5″ in 5.25″ bay backplane. Wondering if the performance will be enough though, maybe with two of those (8drives in a RAID 5 or combining to 4 disk RAID 5’s as a software raid 0) I could achieve 500-600MBs read/write? Any thoughts?
We have a good forum thread on these: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/seagate-backup-plus-4tb-drive-cheap-2-5-4tb-drives.9539/
I would not use these for performance oriented storage. Rather, they could be a good capacity tier option.
You are wrong. ST4000LM016 uses SMR technology. Source: Email from Seagate support.
As an update, these are $75 right now on Slickdeals (Staples). Not sure how hard it would be to buy multiples, but at least there are no rebates involved.
Text from Slickdeals:
Staples.com has 4TB Seagate Backup Plus USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive on sale for $89.99 – $15 off with coupon code 15821 (click ‘Coupons’ in cart) = $74.99 (price shown on final checkout page). Shipping is free or select free store pickup where available.
No noise check?