Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V.4 6TB Hard Disk review

Verdict

The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V.4 squeezes up to 6TB of storage into a 3.5-inch drive, a capacity that previously could only be achieved across multiple disks. With a large cache, optional drive encryption and high platter density, fast performance is possible, bringing speeds almost to the levels of SSDs.

We liked

The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 6TB is an excellent hard disk, delivering great all-round performance along with an enormous capacity. It has double the cache of other large drives and there's a wide range of configuration options, not only including both SAS and SATA connectors, but support for different sector formats too, if your storage setup requires them.

We disliked

It's expensive. But enterprise hard disks always carry a premium over consumer models and since this is a brand new capacity, high prices are to be expected.

Final verdict

Lower-cost drives will surely trickle down soon and for business environments, the ability to add 50% of fast extra storage without requiring additional rack space could be worth more than the high retail price of the drive.

Seagate offers a five-year warranty, with above-average quotes for mean time to failure. Sequential transfer rates over 200 MB/s is a new record for a 7,200 rpm hard disk, and its access time compares most favourably with many other disks.

Hard disks may not be the hottest or most exciting storage technology any more, but they're not done for yet, at is clear from the ST600NM0024.

Seagate managed to deliver an exceptionally capable drive at a much lower price compared to the HGST Helium HE6. The latter, while promising, still comes second to Seagate's flagship drive. How both will compare to Western Digital's 6TB Red drive remains to be seen.