250GB Seagate 5400.4 Hard Drive Review

The 5400.4 hard disk drive is the second generation perpendicular recording 5400RPM drive from Seagate, offering quite a few enhancements off the old model. On paper these items include lower power draw, faster internal write speeds, increased platter density allowing for larger capacities, and best of all Seagate reliability. While all the paper specifications look great, just how well does this drive perform in our real world testing?

Seagate 250GB 5400.4 Specifications

• Model: ST92508827AS
• Speed: 5400 RPM
• Average Latency: 5.6ms
• Seek: 12ms read, 14ms write
• Interface: SATA 3.0Gb/s
• Cache: 8MB
• Capacity: 250GB
• Areal density: 204 Gbits/inch2
• Size: HxWxL, .374 x 2.75 x 3.945"
• Weight: .23LBs
• Price: 109.99

Test Setup

• Lenovo ThinkPad T60 2.16GHz
• 2GB RAM
• Windows XP SP3
• Belkin eSATA ExpressCard/5

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Design

The new Seagate 5400.4 drive has a couple of differences compared to the older 5400.3, including a newer circuit board layout, difference case sticker, and a smaller vent port. Most of these changes are pretty minor, and most people wouldn't even recognize the changes. Overall what's inside is the important part, and the drive could be hot pink for all I care since it won't be seen once installed inside the notebook.

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Performance

The speed of the 5400.4 drive is quite impressive, going well above my initial expectations. Going off of the paper specifications, the sustained internal transfer speeds were listed at 58MB/s on the new 5400.4 drives across the board regardless of capacity, where as the 5400.3 were listed at 44MB/s, and the 7200.2 at 59MB/s for the capacity I had on hand. This speed put the 5400RPM drive well into the 7200RPM drive territory at a bargain price. For testing we used HDTune and ATTO Disk Benchmark to compare all three drives, all with my Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook.

HDTune

Seagate 5400.4

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Seagate 5400.3

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Seagate 7200.2

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ATTO

Seagate 5400.4

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Seagate 5400.3

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Seagate 7200.2

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As you can see, not only did the new 5400.4 drive blow away the older 5400.3, but it also put my 7200.2 drive to shame in all categories but access speed. Although my drive is pushing a year old by now, I originally paid $120 for the 120GB drive, where now a 250GB drive is faster and cheaper at only $109.

Another change, but not as apparent, is the power difference between the newer and older generation 5400RPM drive. Idle and standby power draw remained the same at 0.6/0.2W between each model, where the read/write were slightly different. The older 5400.3 drew less power on read using 1.9W, with the new 5400.4 listed as 2.0W. On write the newer drive came in on top rated at 1.6W, and the older consuming 1.8W. Since these changes are so small you probably won't even notice a difference, but it might add up for an extra 3-4 minutes of battery life.

New products that offer this drive

With this drive hitting the market only a couple of months ago, most manufacturers are still pushing out their stock of the older Seagate drives, as well as other manufacturers' drives they pick and chose from. We have yet to see any notebook come through our shop with one of these drives, but we did see it inside a new USB external storage drive. Hopefully consumers won't have to wait long for this drive though, since it really blows away the older model transfer speeds, and best of all offers much larger capacities.

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Heat and Noise

Thermal output of this drive was not a problem at all, running about 38-40 degrees Celsius at idle, and 43-45C under load. This was about average for most notebook drive temperatures, but this could change depending on your notebook layout.

Noise was minimal at best, and even with it exposed while running two feet from my ear you could barely tell if it was operating. Seeking noise was super quiet and idle noise was almost nothing. Unless you were in an absolutely silent room I don't think you would hear it.

Conclusion

The Seagate 5400.4 series hard drive is an excellent upgrade compared to the previous generation drive, offering a substantial bump in drive performance and capacity for close to the same selling price. Not only was it a few steps above the older 5400RPM drive, but it also surpassed my current 7200RPM Seagate drive in overall transfer speeds as well as average speed. You really can't ask for more and this drive is hands down a clear winner.

Pros

• Much faster than the previous generation 5400.3, and faster than my 7200.2
• Higher capacity options than older generation
• Operates with barely any noise

Cons

• Not offered in multiple color options (just kidding)

 

Thanks for your review. About your conclusion: it may be faster than your 7200.2 in synthetic benchmarks, but that does not mean it is actually faster in normal usage.

If you want to see if it is actually faster you could do some benchmarks that simulate nomal usage. For example: PC Mark 05 or boottimer.exe.

 

This drive has huge issues in the Asus U6Sg. Breaks down more often than an Aston Martin.

 

May go well with an MSI Wind.

 

You seriously need to add a section about the serious head parking issue that this drive has. I have one, and it parks the head very frequently, too frequently. I wouldn't recommend this drive for long term durability.

Start reading here.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3557285#pos3557285

 

i love these drives and have had 0 issues with them i own 4 of them and they all are awesome and super fast for what they are

 

I have always sworn by Seagate in the past. I've never had a problem with their drives, and my computers always outlived the HDD Seagate devices I had installed in them.

However, the 250GB 5400.4 has had numerous issues as installed in Asus and other models. I have talked with a few other people on the boards here, and my own troubles are well-discussed in the U6Sg Owners Lounge. However, after talking to a friend of mine who is far more into hardware than I am, also says that he has heard of this 5400.4 drive having issues "right out of the box."

No company can hit a home run every time out. I believe that for unknown reasons this Seagate drive is a rare miss from the company in terms of reliability and durability, and would recommend that most people instead steer towards the Western Digital Scorpio 320GB drive, or a 200 GB 7200 RPM HDD instead.

 

Nice review! I especially like the nice touch of humor in the Cons at the end. XD lol

 

I don't think the head-parking "bug" is specific to this drive or even a problem, many drives park the head whenever they can to save power and prevent damage from a jolt. What makes it a problem (at least on the Linux side) is that the ext3 filesystem is constantly writing to the journal so the drive is not allowed to stay parked for long. I suppose it is a similar thing with Vista. I've seen this problem reported on a variety of hardware and experienced it myself on a very old TravelStar in a machine running Ubuntu Linux.

 

I never actually heard the drive park itself while using it during this review. I have them running through an external eSATA setup to test them with my notebook, and the all of the drives stayed powered up and heads loaded. I do have to say that some notebooks (and other devices) have abnormal settings that make certain drives park like crazy. Some like to park the drives for safety as a semi-shock protection feature, while others park to then shutdown the drive after only a couple of minutes of idle time. My Apple TV does this like crazy, and if I remove the drive and put it in another device the problem goes away.

Looking at the complaints on Newegg for this drive, out of 26 reviews only 2 people gave it a negative score for a DOA drive.

I am going to run to the office and start watching the SMART dump and see how many load cycles it have for a given power on time. I will compare it against my other drives to see if anything sticks out.

 

That sounds good, but unless you're using it as your system drive, you're not likely to experience the excessive head parking issue that people using this as there system drive will. Seagate on one hand has admitted to this issue with this drive, but only advises workarounds in an attempt mask it. That's not good enough IMO. This issue should be discussed in your review so that potential purchasers are made aware of it, hopefully before the make the purchase rather than after.

 

This head-parking issue has been written about so much, and yet I have never seen anyone report an actual failure due to it. If the armature that moves the head really does wear out, you could still hook up the drive and read out the S.M.A.R.T. info and show that 1M load cycles in 9 months or whatever correlates with a dead drive. I've never seen a report like this, which makes me wonder if it's not some sort of mass hysteria over nothing.

 

Looked at it, also checked out the linux instructions. They are just doing a simple hdparm adjustment.

It appears that the linux setting is telling hdparm to stick the HD into 'Advanced Power Management" mode 254 (aka High Performance mode without spindown). This is not a band aid, but just another mode that the drive has. The flip side would be mode 1 which enables spindown at idle and other situations to save power and limit noise. Almost all drives have these settings.

Notebooks can mess with these settings themselves, while you can also use software to kinda force the drive back into that mode once the device power cycles.

I have the drive going in my desktop right now, which has been on for about 30 minutes since I got the drive from the office, and it has parked the drive one additional time. This was during the windows new hardware install function when it detected the drive and did a quick power cycle of the drive before it gave me full access. Since then (~29 minutes) it has not power cycled again. This really looks like it is a notebook problem, not a drive problem. Some systems, especially those without internal shock sensors, go overboard and park the drive an unnecessary amount of times.

Here is the SMART dump off this drive

So far in its life the drive has been power cycled 15 times, been on for 3 hours total, and dealt with quite a few install/uninstall cycles swapping back and forth with testing. In that time it has only parked the head 198 times, one of which happened in a 30 minute time period chilling here in my desktop.

 

Oh and if you want to see what a TIVO hard drive looks like running for over a year straight, this is what it is:

lol 208 load cycles in just a bit over 12,600 hours on. I guess that Seagate drive is defective after all!

 

Insightful , thank you . Will we see the same level of improvement with the next gen of 7K drives as well ?

 

Hopefully. I am curious how big of an improvement the new 7200.3 drives are over my 7200.2.

 

Oh yea, another hour added to the list, still the same 198 park count.

 

I'm sure that if you use the drive as most will, as the main system drive, you'll see many more head parks.

 

I had a head parking / unparking problem with another (non-Seagate) HDD last year. I think Vista was too aggressive in trying to shut down the HDD just before something decided it wanted to write something to the HDD. Try increasing the time-out before the HDD is powered down in the power management properties.

Regarding the power consumption, Tom's Hardware show the 5400.4 as having a higher maximum power (3.7W) than the 5400.3 and slightly higher idle power consumption (1W).

John

 

This is inaccurate. Your 7200.2 is faster most situations. Don't let synthetic benchmarks fool you.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...-i-o-benchmark-pattern,693.html?p=1889,1885,,

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...-i-o-benchmark-pattern,691.html?p=1889,1885,,

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...xp-startup-performance,692.html?p=1889,1885,,

 

The power profile setting deals with all hard drives across the board in Windows, not a per-drive basis. If you really want, I will clone my current HD over to the 5400.4 and run it for a while just to show you this.

Interesting that the idle draw would be that much above the listed spec sheet value. For the maximum power draw, is that situation under spinup or under read/write seek?

Most of that comes in with the faster seek time, the 5400.4 still edges it out in peak and average transfer speed. Key part of this review though was comparing it to the previous generation 5400RPM drive.

 

That's correct. And I don't know whether you are aware of this; the seektime is one of the major components in determining the overal speed.

When measured in synthetic benchmarks. That's the keypoint that's missing from the conclusion.

Why would I care about synthetic benchmarks? All I want is drives that perform in real life situations. If you would run benchmarks that simulate normal usage like PCMark05 (or Bapco or VeriTest Winstone) you would see that the 7200.2 edges the 5400.3 out in:
-General usage
-Application loading
-Boottimes
-Virusscanning
(Edit: I'm assuming this, I have not actually tested it)

Tyr it for fun, and you'll get a feel of what i am saying.

By the way, this is not personal critisim to your review, it's critism to the use of synthetic benchmarks as only benchmarks, and drawing conclusions on them.

 

I just checked 3 different laptops:
the first one is an asus m50sv-a1 with the 5400.4 and it had 147 power on hours and 1898 load cycles or 12.9 load cycles per hour

the second one is a gateway 7426gx it has a 100GB Fujitsu, it's a few years old and it has 8188 power on hours and 103,967 load cycles or 12.7 load cycles per hour

and the last one is a 6 year old HP ze5270 it has a 40GB Hitachi and it has 3414 power on hours and 97007 load cycles or 28.4 load cycles per hour

which leads me to believe that the 5400.4 is fine...
and I'll bet that you'll notice a dramatic drop in the rate of load cycles based on the slowed rate of increase... it could be that the benchmarks you ran or something like that parked the heads many times...
and as far as the TIVO I'll bet that it uses an entirely different power profile than a laptop...

 

I have a few questions...

I've been testing my drive (250gb Seagate from M50SV-B1) for the past week when scooberdoober posted this problem on the M50SV owners lounge.

scooberdoober, now that the 5K320 is your main drive, what is the number of load cycles you are getting per hour? And how hot is your drive running compared to Seagate 5400.4?

Also, every seems to mention that Vista and ubuntu are affected, but no one has said anything specific about XP. Does this problem affect XP? The reason I ask is because I'm dual booting Vista/XPPro and if I can prolong the health of my drive using XP, then I'll do that instead. At least then I should get less problems with the keyboard as well and use an older version of software that I'm more comfortable with using.

Who knows, I may just do what scooberdoober did and get another hard drive with an eSATA enclosure. Lord knows that I'd like to stick with this for a long time.

--Woody

 

Yea no doubt the 5400.4 is fine. the Tivo one was a bit of a joke, but since I was using the old HD in the same system I wanted to post it up. The TIVO HD is always writing and reading from the drive, never a moment of idle. That is why you see basically no parks over a 1+ year of use.

 

I have this drive in my M51sn. With 297 power on hours and 9335 load cycles, I get about 31 load cycles/hour. which is significantly different than 12 cycles/hour.

Yet, even if I round up and say about 10,000 cycles/month, considering drives fail around 600,000 load cycles (according to some people...) I won't reach 600,000 cycles for about 5 years. 4-5 years is generally the usable life of a laptop so I'm trying to convince myself not to be too worried.

 

Just to let you know guys that I bought a Asus U6Sg in March and two Seagate Momentus 5400.4 drives suddenly failed.
The scenario for both these failures were the same, I would use the laptop on the train, close the lid therefore the laptop goes to sleep, put on the sleeve then on laptop bag. Then at home I open the lid and press power, and then drive is no longer recognized.
First instance the drive didn't make any particular sound, the second failed drive was making a clicking noise though.
AFAIK my usage pattern shouldn't have lead to an early (read less than 2 months of light usage) failures..........
End result is that I will get my Asus U6Sg refunded and will now wait for the new Centrino 2 laptops and if the laptop contains a Seagate drive then I will replace it ASAP!

 

Has anyone had any experience with the 5400.5 HDD's (ie. head parking etc)?
The 320Gb is selling for $125, not a bad price.
Then there's the 320Gb 7200.3 which is selling for $190. I've only used Hitachi drives and they're superb, just not too sure about the Seagate ones..

 

I haven't run any tests on it yet, but I can tell you that it does not make the "ping pong" sound at all, as a matter of fact this is the most silent hard drive I've ever used. I'm very glad that I replaced the Seagate with this Hitachi.

 

well i have to eat my words i guess. one 5400.4 failed on me today and the other drive from the same notebook is making all kinds of racket now.. no clicking or ping pong type sounds but its crazy loud searching the platter.. i ca hear it over the system fans at high speed even.. arghh i just bought these oem drives i cant send them back either.. this sucks

 

There is a fix for the head parking issue: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425

I tried NHC, but prefer hdparm method using the .bat file from pg. 18 I think. hdparm allows you to disable the advanced power management of the hard drive (the constant head parking). It works for me, no load cycles when APM is disabled and the drive is very silent.

The only side effect seems to be a little more heat (I can hardly notice), reduced battery life, and the drive is not as protected from drops I believe (w/o any head parking).

 

What you're not understanding is how by using the drive as your main system drive, it will be accessed much more frequently than the way you have been running it, and therefore the drive will be parking and unparking the head much more frequently.

 

Yes because we all know that drives that are being used frequently like to go into idle modes, and drives that are not being used like to stay active and never go idle right?

Drives dont park (unload) unless they are right about to go into a power saving mode to spindown or detect excessive G-force and want to prevent a head crash.

 

I own several Seagate drives, external, desktop, and notebook, both SATA and PATA. I've never had a problem with any of them. I also have a Hitachi desktop drive, and it's an excellent drive as well. The only disks I've had problems with are a couple of Western Digitals that - literally - started smoking one day, and even those I've had ones that work just fine as well.

Besides, it's just a hard drive. It stores data. So long as it doesn't catch fire or arbitrarily erase your files, what more do you want? We're not talking about a CPU or GPU here, that will affect on-the-fly performance; I don't care that much if it takes me 25 or 28 seconds to boot.

 

scoober - You need to understand that not everyone gets a perfect drive. Failures do happen, and apparently you had one. Of millions of drives that are produced, and still functioning today.

HDD failures like what you experienced could be caused by your laptop, or the hard drive. Or a combination of the two...I've seen that happen before.

These comments of yours are nothing but fanboyism, and a lot of people will read it that way. I suggest you find other threads to crap on.

 

We're not talking about "all" Seagate drives here, just this one that the thread is about.

 

Actually on my ASUS W3J, I have had a Fujitsu drive and a WD drive, and both of them suffer from the constant clicking noise problem and for me the solution was to install NHC so it would change the spin-down time settings in Windows. (For the record, I have owned the WD drive for about 4 months or so and the Load/Unload cycle count for me is ~110,000). Seems much likely to be an ASUS BIOS programming problem, as their BIOS programming is pretty poor in my experience...

 

It seemed like scooberdoober is not the only one complaining about this drive. By reading most of this thread, I got the idea that many people are experiencing problems with this drive.

If it is true that this drive has more issues than others I think it should be mentioned in the review.

 

i am now almost positive my second 5400.4 is now dead as well. i can no longer access windows and simply get a disk not found message now no matter what i do.. i get nothing. the bios cant even find it as a drive.. im sad to say i am pretty sure its dead. sucks up till about a week ago when the trouble started i had nothing but praise for these..i am not the only person who has now had issues with these that i know i just assumed the issues they had were a fluke

 

Do you think this had anything to do with the excessive head parking or was is another issue all together?

 

dont know honestly i never heard any real noises till the other day and it started to sound like bad brakes on a car at times. then it failed. the second one was making some light noise then got louder and louder kinda like a grinding noise though from this one..

 

Start posting some SMART logs, documented firmware problems with the drive, or something beyond Asus notebooks that may or may not be having problems with this drive. I have logs that show this drive to be near flawless and you are posting that it is the most horrible drive in the universe with nothing to back it up. Unless I see these problems manifest on something in my hands I cant in good faith condemn this drive without any evidence.

Like I and others have posted, different devices can make drives go pretty park happy, and it is not a defect of the drive, but the way the notebook handles power states or shock protection.

Attached is an application I use to monitor drives. It is part of the Smartmontools package found on linux that was ported over. Unzip the application, put it on your root c:/ area, and type this command in the console: (might have to type "cd\" first)

"smartctl.exe -d ata -a /dev/hda"

If the drive is a 2nd or 3rd drive, use "hdb" or "hdc" and so on.

Paste the results, maybe we can try and find a common link. Would be interesting to find out if firmware revisions differ.

 

The reviewer can only report on what they find during the review.

Reliability problems tend to show up after time and the comments in this thread suggest that some people have encountered problems. Any prudent person who reads a review also reads the discussion. I see no reason for the review itself to be amended.

John

 

We just want to raise awareness and point out that in real life usage this drive is rubbish. Regarding what the reviewer reports, this is debatable and often incentives change outcomes.

The review should be amended because it sells a product that is not reliable. For example, I read tons of official reviews about the U6SG and nobody stated the 3 cell bug and the parking issue of the drive. The reviews were like this one, how great and how sexy it is. When I read those, I said, whoa, this is HAWT, I will buy it. 2 Weeks after i bought it, was still waiting for it to be delivered, I joined the board and I saw what a big mistake I did. Why? Because nobody did a proper U6Sg test. Just because it works 1 day it does not mean it is reliable. My laptop broke down after 6 days of usage. The 3 cell bug is horible and makes the laptop downclock to under 1 GHz.
The person who did this Seagate review should test the drive under the conditions we mention and it will fail miserably.


I ask you, how is a component reliable if under, these so called bechmarks works fine, and when you use it normally it fails?

 

All drives have a failure rate, as a matter of fact yours can possibly fail in the next few seconds. Its very hard to tell if the drive is gonna reliable or not especially when its not gonna be running under the same conditions and same system as everyone else

For all we know someone is gonna put a drive like this into a overheating laptop, causing it to fail pre-maturely or function improperly. Also your advanced power management (APM) of the HD can cause issues which doesnt occur for others.

There are many factors to a HD's lifespan and reliability other than the usual manufacturing defects which is inevitable. This is why we get Yays and Nays for every HD brand.

 

in the windows version I just do "smartctl.exe -a sda"

 

We have a few very vocal forum members who have unverified reports of this drive failing. Searching for reports of this drive failing actually brings up this thread right now, so it is not like there is much history or anything of massive problems with this drive.

You also have to remember that in almost any case of hardware reliability, people rarely post online to say how great a product is, but they are almost certain to complain if it fails.

Taking that into consideration, if people who have had this drive fail want to PM me with serial numbers, purchase dates, fail dates, retailers, etc, I will see if I can piece together any pattern. Considering notebook manufacturers tend to get the first batch of any new product to ship to the public first, it may be a case of a early generation having problems compared to what I had. Even better if you can paste the SMART data to me, and I can check for abnormally high park values and firmware revisions.

 

i have smart disabled so i cant provide smart data

 

Doesnt matter, the drive still collects and stores the data on its own memory. disabling smart really only makes your computer disregard the data if a failure is coming up.

 

The reason posts keep getting deleted is because you're starting a flame war that is becoming increasingly off-topic to the discussion of this review. The Admins and Mods have no problem with people who take issue with the site, the forums, or the opinions of the reviewers and mods, but the majority of our site visitors come to the discussion threads of a product review to discuss that product.

There's no "power-tripping, ego-boosting censorship" in these forums being overseen by "dictators" ... just average Joes and average Janes who are trying to keep the forums civilized and organized/relevant to the original discussion topic.

To further satisfy your apparent desire to talk about how horrible, disgraceful, and childish the mods are let's move this discussion to where it belongs ... OFF TOPIC. We welcome anyone to the site who wants to share comments that don't agree with the admins, mods, and reviewers ... but if you just want to talk about that it doesn't belong in a discussion about a hard drive.

ADMIN EDIT:

If your post is not showing up in this thread anymore, it might have been moved here:

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