I just bought a Seagate 2.5'' portable 2TB Expansion drive. It's called STEA2000400. All the other brands were 2TB and look like equal choices but I already have a seagate that looked the same as the picture on the box of that one and it was clearly PMR.
This one however is much much slimmer and lighter, is so cheap it's all plastic everywhere and slips very easily on wherever it sits.
Now the worse. I want to save a Vista computer with 4GB of data on it (4x 2 GB disk in Raid1) and put it on another computer.
That Vista computer is a little bit old (Core 2 Quad), only has USB2 ports.
Now the thing is that this disk is very slow even for USB2. I get at best 13MB/s when I get more than 20 GB/S on any other USB2 disk including encased ones.
But the thing is, that from time to time it like pauses at around 100KB/s (from 10 to 250KB/s) for quite some time and then restarts at 11/13MB/s. Furthermore, and I believe this is the OS bad counting, if the transfer begins at doing 100Kb/s, it stays around that figure on Vista, while it is clear there is higher data transferred (around 10GB/S).
I insist that the disk doesn't seem to have any problem but it is well known that if you ever pull an SMR during a copy or have it disconnected or a crash, it may be happening during rewriting that will lead to fundamental data loss, including that which you though you had safely stored.
So I need to know if this behavior reveals that this is an SMR drive or this is clearly an SMR drive from Seagate by the name. I would be unhappy but but I've already bought it and using it, and would like to know if I need to take that much care with it. Not even sure Vista treats that sort of drive when pulling it off by the rules.
This one however is much much slimmer and lighter, is so cheap it's all plastic everywhere and slips very easily on wherever it sits.
Now the worse. I want to save a Vista computer with 4GB of data on it (4x 2 GB disk in Raid1) and put it on another computer.
That Vista computer is a little bit old (Core 2 Quad), only has USB2 ports.
Now the thing is that this disk is very slow even for USB2. I get at best 13MB/s when I get more than 20 GB/S on any other USB2 disk including encased ones.
But the thing is, that from time to time it like pauses at around 100KB/s (from 10 to 250KB/s) for quite some time and then restarts at 11/13MB/s. Furthermore, and I believe this is the OS bad counting, if the transfer begins at doing 100Kb/s, it stays around that figure on Vista, while it is clear there is higher data transferred (around 10GB/S).
I insist that the disk doesn't seem to have any problem but it is well known that if you ever pull an SMR during a copy or have it disconnected or a crash, it may be happening during rewriting that will lead to fundamental data loss, including that which you though you had safely stored.
So I need to know if this behavior reveals that this is an SMR drive or this is clearly an SMR drive from Seagate by the name. I would be unhappy but but I've already bought it and using it, and would like to know if I need to take that much care with it. Not even sure Vista treats that sort of drive when pulling it off by the rules.