Thursday 26 May 2016

Seagate Mobile HDD 2TB

Seagate Mobile HDD 2TB

Seagate play devil’s advocate for those comparing speed and capacity

Seagate has something of a battle on its hands with laptop users, because once you’ve used one with an SSD, it's difficult to go back to using a mechanical hard drive. But as its latest laptop storage designs show, it still has one card up its sleeve and that’s capacity.

The ST2000LM007, to give its full title, is available in either 1TB or 2TB capacities and also as a straight drive (reviewed here) or in encrypted or encrypted/FIPS flavours.


What’s most impressive about it is that even the 2TB model weighs just 90 grams and is 7mm thick. That’s 25% lighter than the model it replaces, if you’re keeping score. Using the standard 2.5” form factor, it should fit into almost any laptop designed to accept SATA drives this size, where you have access to make the swap.

For those who go with one of the government-grade encryption models, Seagate promises that being secure won’t make the drive thicker, heavier or degrade the performance.

It also says these drives can survive an operating shock of up to 400Gs and non-operating loading of 1000Gs. As humans can’t actually withstand either of those stresses, make sure you aren’t holding the drive when they experience that at any point. Being able to handle that level of abuse has also allowed Seagate to offer a two-year warranty on the drives – longer than most laptop makers will give you.

In terms of the performance you might reasonably expect, Seagate claims 140MB/s, and none of my tests refute those numbers.

Using Windows 7 SP1 on a Skylake PC, I got 143.3MB/s reads and 140.8MB/s writes using CrystalDiskMark. By laptop drive standards, those are highly respectable numbers, although they’re about a third of what you might expect out of a decent SATA-connected SSD.

However, a 2TB SSD like the Samsung 850 Pro is easily £680, and this one costs less than £100.

And that’s the rub really, because while I’m sure we’d all like 2TB of lighting fast flash in our laptops, the ST2000LM007 is a singularly more affordable option.

If you have a laptop that can accept two drives, that’s the ideal situation, because you can use a small SSD to install the OS and apps, and this drive for your data storage. Those with only a single drive have to make a judgement call, because for what this drive costs, they’ll only get a 512GB SSD or a quarter of the Seagate’s capacity. It comes down to how much data you need to carry around with you and if you're willing to sacrifice high performance to have more.

The ST2000LM007 is an impressive piece of drive engineering, but I do wonder how much further the debate between this and SSD technology can go, given the speed at which SSD prices are falling. Mark Pickavance

Lots of drive space and decent performance.