This drive was shucked from a Seagate Expansion Desktop external drive of the USB 2.0 variety as I couldn’t stand the slow USB 2.0 performance. Originally bought as a pair, its “brother” drive had long failed, leaving this the only one around. This was during a transitional period as Seagate began changing the model numbers to be more reflective of drive capacity and roles.
The Drive
This particular drive belongs to the Seagate Barracuda LP family, where LP stands for low power. A green-type drive, this one is Made in China and is likely to come from 2011. It has a firmware of CC95 and a 2TB capacity.
The underside is a typical design for drives from Seagate of this era, including the PCB which hides all components (as WD had been doing for many years).
There are no access holes in the side of the drive.
The barcode serial number label is opposite the SATA connector and has a grey rectangle.
Performance Testing
CrystalDiskInfo
This drive has done a modest 9466 hours and claims to be in good health overall. It has a claimed 5900RPM spindle speed, Seagate’s advantage over WD Green’s 5400RPM and even later 5700RPM drives. It is connected using SATAII.
HD Tune
Sequential read performance ranges from 110.4MB/s down to 54.6MB/s, averaging 88.3MB/s with a leisurely access time of 18.8ms.
Write performance is similar, with a maximum of 107.8MB/s, down to 53.5MB/s and an average of 86.3MB/s with an access time of 17.7ms.
This drive may not be in good health as despite multiple attempts, long access time stalls were persistent. Peak IOPS for reads topped out at 52 and writes at 57, both fairly poor numbers for a drive of this era and capacity.
Cache behaviour is visible in the read graph, providing about 8MB effective cache. Writes do not clearly demonstrate any cache advantage.
The cache advantage in writes is seen in the transfer speed graph as a few tall spikes. Full I/O performance appears to require 16kB accesses to achieve.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark reports 117MB/s sequential read, 112.7MB/s sequential write, 47.49MB/s medium-block read, 70.33MB/s medium-block write, 1.471MB/s queued small-block read and 1.478MB/s queued small-block write. The random figures are not bad by comparison to HDTune results.
ATTO
ATTO confirms that 8kB QD4 is enough to provide full performance.