![]() This review is for the Seagate 4TB USB 3.0 Backup Plus External HD for Mac I bought at Amazon and received : Don't know why Amazon is lumping this New 4TB Drive review in with the old. My previous review was for an older model 2TB Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive I bought and returned in June, 2014. Hopefully this review will help some people to better design their solutions by understanding the ways the drive works in different scenarious. It took many years to understand these things and what caused them as the manufacturers themselves tell you very little and it was a lot of effort to learn from many people little bits of information on how it worked. I hope people understood the technical problems which were explained. ![]() ![]() The difference being with the older firmware using this to store large amounts of data would cause errors or crash the operating system while a backup would only write out changes from the last backup you did so did not exhibit this problem. In essence now this is a real backup drive where you can backup your system image and such with speed AND also be able to use this as a storage drive. The big cache area used in the drive would basically cause time outs and crashes when copying large amounts of data with older firmware's so using a much smaller cache buffer seems to have fixed such problems. Now changing data would still cause some problems but not as much as before. But it does show maturity of Seagate programmers in fixing some of the issues that caused problems before. This will not happen with this drive as the entire track would be written out anyway. So this SMR firmware works even better than the advanced format firmware with boundary layer cross over where the 4k windows NTFS cluster over laps 2 advanced format sectors as the 512b translated sector is not aligned properly with the 4K NTFS cluster to the 4k advanced format drive sectors due to drive firmware or operating system mis-alignment (this was a major problem even if Microsoft had special routines to fix this issue as Seagate did not properly align the drive sectors with some firmware), the copy speed would fluctuate widely due to this mis match as the drive would basically do a read and then a write to create new sector data crossing 2 sector boundary layers almost imitating an SMR type drive. And it only took 3 or so years to perfect the firmware to get it to a working model. Other than maybe some of the old guys running things might have passed onto greener pastures for changes that should have been done a decade ago. That is not praise for a multi billion $$$$ company that sells hundreds of millions of these things. So Seagate has learnt after a decade of trial and error like some kind of baby growing up. So you can see how each track is being written in spurts unlike the smooth motion of PMR drives but unlike the older models where it would almost stop when the large buffer is being moved onto the SMR data area. But here it looks like once its buffer is full, it will write out the buffer directly onto the SMR track. It is still slower than PMR drives which would copy them at almost twice the speeds. I copied a 2TB drive over and it went at around 80MB/sec speeds. On of the main changes seems to be the way the drive works, Unlike previous models where data was stored on a 20GB area and then that data was moved onto the SMR storage area, this newer model seems to store data directly on the storage area. So you can actually hear and feel the head movement. But this drive shakes when the head moves unlike the WDC drive. Adding 2 or 3 more platters seems to make the drives almost twice as heavy as smaller drives, the 8TB WDC drives are also heavy. While older cases it would get to 60C and I had to turn them off at that time. This new version uses a newer case with holes on the bottom and sides to dissipates heat so it stayed under 50C after using it a few hours. The last time was for the 2TB drive which used 1TB platters to create a very fast cool running drive and it was only that particular drive as the rest were utter crap and so were almost all other Seagate drives I have had since or before. It has been a long time since I said anything positive about Seagate.
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