Is this drive defective?

[danann]

I purchased a Seagate ST4000DM004 (4TB SMR drive) for archival of media files and I'm wondering if it's defective or what.

I knew it was SMR but it should be fine for the use case and there was a decent price difference.

 

Plugged in, simple benchmark, run Seagate's tool tests, full format as a simple test - write speed (as indicated by Windows Task Manager) was about constant during the whole format, apart from the expected gradual slowing as it gets into the inner tracks).

Checked SMART and everything looks fine. Let it idle for a few hours.

 

Enabled Bitlocker and proceeded to copy some files into it. I'm copying about 2TB of some ~3000 files to it, so it's a very sequential workload, but I noticed the write speed is all over the place and response time is over 10s (hitting 20s sometimes). Like, what? See screenshot.

 

 

Is this expected behavior because it's SMR or is it defective? Or maybe something else is wrong?

I thought SMR drives were fine for sequential workloads. As a matter of fact, I have another Seagate SMR drive (an external 4TB one) and this doesn't happen with it.

I'm keeping an eye on SMART and all still looks fine. Checked for firmware updates and there's none.

 

Thanks!

[5x5]

It's because it's a super cheap, low end Barracuda drive. They're junk. Have always been junk. It's working as intended - poorly.

[danann]

2 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

It's because it's a super cheap, low end Barracuda drive. They're junk. Have always been junk. It's working as intended - poorly.

Aight. Now for some serious constructive answer, please?

I have 5 Barracudas, including another SMR one, and none of them behave like this new one.

[5x5]

1 minute ago, danann said:

Aight. Now for some serious constructive answer, please?

I have 5 Barracudas, including another SMR one, and none of them behave like this new one.

This is normal for the newer ones. Each generation is worse than the last. That's why we avoid them like the plague

[danann]

For comparison, here's (attached) sequential copy to a ST4000LM024 (2.5" 4TB SMR) drive.

Slower because it's nearly full and 2.5" over USB, but surely consistent with not as crazy response.

It's bad, but consistently at it.

 

It's ok to be slow, I'm just worried my new drive is defective.