Seagate 4TB Portable 2.5" shuckable $95 (Nov 17-27) Costco

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aij

Active Member
May 7, 2017
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Costco is having a sale on the 4TB Seagate Portable drives. $95 is lower than I've ever seen before for these drives new, though I've gotten some for $80 used. Previous sales were for $100.

I don't really *need* more storage *yet*, but I'm not sure whether to buy these while they're on sale or just wait for prices to decrease over time... Prices have been decreasing very slowly lately.

The flier is here. Theoretically, this link should work between Nov 17 and 27.

FWIW, last time, they sold out really fast online but still had plenty of drives in-store.

If anyone knows a better $/TB for 2.5" drives please tell me.
 
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warlockedyou

Member
Sep 4, 2016
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Costco is having a sale on the 4TB Seagate Portable drives. $95 is lower than I've ever seen before for these drives new, though I've gotten some for $80 used. Previous sales were for $100.

I don't really *need* more storage *yet*, but I'm not sure whether to buy these while they're on sale or just wait for prices to decrease over time... Prices have been decreasing very slowly lately.

The flier is here. Theoretically, this link should work between Nov 17 and 27.

FWIW, last time, they sold out really fast online but still had plenty of drives in-store.

If anyone knows a better $/TB for 2.5" drives please tell me.
Flier link is broken.

EDIT: The link is correct in the post, but if you click on it through an email notification, it doesnt work. Weird.
 

aij

Active Member
May 7, 2017
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Flier link is broken.

EDIT: The link is correct in the post, but if you click on it through an email notification, it doesnt work. Weird.
Sorry about that. I noticed it was broken right after I posted so edited it right away but I forgot about email notifications.
 

Bradford

Active Member
May 27, 2016
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I saw this the other day when I got the mailer. Tax makes it about par with the best online price I've gotten, but I need another one for my storage server (I'm hitting my 10TB limit) and Costco's return policy makes this a no-brainer. I was hoping the 5TB would get cheaper faster, but at this point I guess I'm waiting for 8TB 2.5" or a complete rebuild when I have the space for a rack-mount storage chassis.
 
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Schoondoggy

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Apr 26, 2017
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4TB 2.5" 15mm Seagate are on eBay for $90 -$100 no need to shuck. I have four of these, as others have pointed out in other threads, write performance is not good on these. They act very odd if you try to use them in an array. They seem to be OK in a drive pool. The 5TB 2.5" 15mm Seagate is a much better drive.

Sent from my LG-H910 using Tapatalk
 

czl

New Member
May 14, 2016
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I recall reading that some 2.5" 4tb seagate drives use SMR which is undesirable for RAID or any application that has data being updated. I recommend you research the exact model for details.
 

Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
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I've been using 4/5TB drives in my Storage Spaces array for a year now. I've had nothing but headaches and problems with them. At times they are lightning fast and scream then the performance plummets from 200MB/s down to 11MB/s and then system grinds to a halt. I'm running huge reads and writes to the array streaming data to and from it constantly. I replaced all my 4s with 5s and now I"m going back and clearing all the data off them and reconfiguring the whole thing to see if there's a config issue.

This could be a problem with storage spaces, this could be a problem with the drives, this could be a misconfiguration on my part. But for the life of me I wish I had not gone down this path with 2.5" hard drives like these and waited till the enterprise SAS or NLSATA came down in price.
 

aij

Active Member
May 7, 2017
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Yup, all Seagate 2.5" 4-5TB are SMR.
Source?

The Seagate product manual for the ST4000LM024 says "Perpendicular recording technology". I've seen speculation that it's a mix of PMR and SMR, but I haven't seen a source for that.

FWIW, the drives I previously got from Costco had ST4000LM024-2AN17V inside, but those were black and the current ones are blue so who knows.

Drives I got from Ebay were a mix of ST4000LM024-2AN17V and ST4000LM016-1N2170. Several of those had clearly been opened, so who knows whether the drives had been swapped.

IIRC all were model number SRD00F1 externally.
 

Lennong

Member
Jun 8, 2017
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It certainly is related to them being SMR disks. Terrible for anything else than cold storage.

EDIT: It's pretty much all over the web that knowledge. They are based on 1TB SMR platters. It's true that some has seen the 4TB variant with 5 platters which could give room for regular PMR but I have not digged deeper than that as the model numbers are the same.

Also, both are PMR really. So technically the manual is correct. However, it should be SPMR and PMR.
 
Last edited:

Dhiru

Member
Aug 14, 2016
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I've been using 4/5TB drives in my Storage Spaces array for a year now. I've had nothing but headaches and problems with them. At times they are lightning fast and scream then the performance plummets from 200MB/s down to 11MB/s and then system grinds to a halt. I'm running huge reads and writes to the array streaming data to and from it constantly. I replaced all my 4s with 5s and now I"m going back and clearing all the data off them and reconfiguring the whole thing to see if there's a config issue.

This could be a problem with storage spaces, this could be a problem with the drives, this could be a misconfiguration on my part. But for the life of me I wish I had not gone down this path with 2.5" hard drives like these and waited till the enterprise SAS or NLSATA came down in price.
Thanks for writing this down. I had almost pulled the trigger on a similar setup on an R620 (8 x 5TB 2.5'' drives) on hardware raid. Have I not seen your post, I would have had nightmares especially considering I am using a Dell PERC H710P and they are very choosy about drives to begin with. Let alone SMR making matters worse.
 
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I_D

Member
Aug 3, 2017
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With Seagate's shitty reliability, you better buy enough of them to have redundancy. :D