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Seagate

Seagate prints CMR, and offers recovery where a term belongs

Three Seagate drives, three families

A four-terabyte desktop drive, a four-terabyte drive for enclosures and a four-terabyte portable drive.

The line nothing else prints

The desktop drive states CMR outright, and adds a workload rating of 300 TB a year and a maximum sustained rate of 255 MB/s beside 7200 rpm and a 256 MB cache. Recording method is the question this shelf usually avoids, and it decides how a drive behaves when it is written to steadily rather than in bursts.

Where the commercial side replaces the mechanical one

The enclosure drive publishes a population statistic, a three-year term and a recovery service, and never its rotational speed, its cache or its recording method; the only cache and capacity figures in its bullets belong to the range rather than to that model. The desktop drive offers a recovery service where a warranty term would be. The portable drive states twice over that it is sold through one marketplace, and states no connector, no measurement and no term.

Every Seagate unit reviewed here

  • Internal hard drives

    Seagate FireCuda 4 TB, the one drive on the shelf that prints CMR

    4 TB · 3.5-inch · 7200 rpm · CMR · 256 MB cache · SATA 6 Gb/s · 300 TB per year workload · 255 MB/s sustained

    A four-terabyte desktop drive that publishes its recording method, its annual workload rating and its maximum sustained transfer rate, and that carries a recovery service where a warranty term would be.

    Best for: A desktop machine that writes a great deal — video work, large game libraries, editing scratch space — where the recording method and the annual duty both need to be known before purchase.

    ≈ £246 / 210 €

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  • NAS hard drives

    Seagate IronWolf 4 TB, with three years of warranty and no rotational speed

    4 TB · SATA 6 Gb/s · 1 million hours MTBF · three-year warranty with data recovery · no rpm figure · range figures printed beside the model figures

    A four-terabyte drive for enclosures that publishes an MTBF, a warranty term and a recovery service, and whose only cache and capacity figures in the bullets belong to the range rather than to this model.

    Best for: A multi-bay enclosure where a published warranty and a recovery service matter more than knowing every figure, and where the drive will be one of several.

    ≈ $190 / £170 / 205 €

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  • External hard drives

    Seagate 4 TB portable drive, with two of five bullets about where to buy it

    4 TB · portable · USB 3.0, backwards compatible with USB 2.0 · compatible with computers and two console families · sold exclusively through one marketplace

    A four-terabyte portable drive whose page names a generation, a compatibility list and a marketplace exclusivity twice, and that never states a connector, a measurement or a warranty.

    Best for: A console or laptop that has run out of room, where four terabytes at a low price per terabyte is the requirement and the interface details can be confirmed with the seller.

    ≈ $190 / £120 / 139 €

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Every price named in a summary was read on the date that review carries. What a shop asks today is shown beside the product, and it moves.