Seagate ST2000LM007

Product Information

And that’s the rub really, because while I’m sure we’d all like 2TB of lighting fast flash in our laptops, the ST2000LM007 is a singularly more affordable option. In terms of the performance you might reasonably expect, Seagate claims 140MB/s, and none of my tests refute those numbers. This presents itself immediately. The HDDs are designed with a height of 7mm, but have the ability to contain 2 platters. Previously, the limit of 7mm height HDDs was to contain a single platter. To achieve this it has been necessary to redesign the HDD completely. Usage of SMR technology is justified in environments that are used to archive cold data that is not updated frequently because write performance of such HDDs may be rather slow. Client PCs both read and record data and it remains to be seen whether performance offered by SMR-based client HDDs will be sufficient for the end-user. The Seagate Mobile HDD 2 TB is around 60% slower than the Seagate Laptop HDD 2 TB based on maximum sustainable transfer rate.

Using Windows 7 SP1 on a Skylake PC, I got 143.3MB/s reads and 140.8MB/s writes using CrystalDiskMark. By laptop drive standards, those are highly respectable numbers, although they’re about a third of what you might expect out of a decent SATA-connected SSD. Seagate did not disclose whether SMR platters used inside the Mobile HDD 2 TB are made in-house, or by Showa Denko K.K. (SDK), the world’s largest independent producer of hard drive platters.In addition to SMR technology, Seagate used its new mechanics, including new head, preamp, channel and other mechanisms for the Mobile HDD 2 TB HDD. Slimmed down mechanical components allowed Seagate to integrate two platters into a 7 mm hard drive. Our random 4K benchmark with IOMeter puts more strain on the drives in terms of throughput. Although the drives were close, the Seagate HDD outperformed the Samsung HDD in both read and write, with 98 IOPS and 259 IOPS, respectively. Seagate has started to ship its highest-capacity hard drives for notebooks. The new HDDs use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology with very high areal density as well as slimmed-down mechanics. Considering these HDDs from a reliability/data recovery point of view, then we would have to say, from the current experience at CDR, that these HDDs present as some of the least reliable HDDs made. Moreover, they present as some of the most challenging disks we have seen in recent years to achieve a completely successful recovery of the data.Run Seagate ST2000LM007 X1P87.exe as administrator if you want to update firmware for 2 TB hard disk drive. Editor's note: photos are of an engineering sample and the final product will have a different appearance

The Seagate Mobile HDD posted a stronger performance than the Samsung Spinpoint in our gaming trace. These results are somewhat validating for the Seagate Mobile HDD, considering that the Samsung Spinpoint was originally designed to serve primarily in this use case. The Seagate drives posted 26.7MB/s and 499 IOPS, with an average latency of 16.0ms.In terms of average write latency, the Seagate Mobile HDD slightly outperformed the Samsung Spinpoint (3.9ms vs. 4.9ms, respectively). When switching to max latency, the Seagate drive handily outperformed the Samsung drive (440ms vs. 2038ms, respectively). To allow access to the diagnostic port it is necessary to alter code found in the serial flash ROM chip. Once complete many, but not all, operations using the diagnostic port can be completed. Highly degraded media and complex firmware Seagate’s engineering name for this series of HDD is ‘Rosewood’. These ‘Rosewood’ disks are frequently found as portable external hard drives, and OEM branding includes the following:

Our final consumer synthetic benchmarks compare the drives in a series of mixed-server workloads with a queue depth of1 to 128. Each server profile has a strong bias towards read activity, ranging from 67% read with the database profile to 100% read in the web server profile.If you have a laptop that can accept two drives, that’s the ideal situation, because you can use a small SSD to install the OS and apps, and this drive for your data storage. Those with only a single drive have to make a judgement call, because for what this drive costs, they’ll only get a 512GB SSD or a quarter of the Seagate’s capacity. It comes down to how much data you need to carry around with you and if you’re willing to sacrifice high performance to have more. Seagate’s new Mobile HDD provides 2TB of storage in a 7mm form factor. During a time when SSD innovation leads the market for this form factor, this drive holds unique appeal for users whowant to upgrade their laptop storage without switching over. Although SSDs indisputably outperform HDDs, the Mobile HDD allows users to load up to 2TB of storage into their laptop at a fraction of the cost of an SSD.