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Seagate Seven Benchmarks

03 Mar 2015

I just got myself a Seagate Seven USB3 harddrive to use it for mobile backups. Seagate claims the 'Seven' is the thinnest conventional (i.e. non-SSD) drive on the market, so I was quite curious about its read- and write speed. Here are some benchmarks I got with Ubuntu's built-in benchmark utility, having the drive formatted as Ext4:

First test: File size 10 MiB, 100 samples, read and write:

Seagate Seven Benchmarks 10 MiB

Second test: File size 50 MiB, 100 samples, read and write:

Seagate Seven Benchmarks 50 MiB

With both 10 MiB and 50 MiB packages, files are written between 70 and 80 MB/s and read around 80 MB/s. Transferring bigger files will slightly increase rates, but they'll stay under 100 MB/s. As you would expect, smaller files are written at much slower rates:

Seagate Seven Benchmarks 1 MiB

Transfer rates in rsync and dd

In practise, both read and write rates are somewhat higher than during the benchmark tests. Doing a full backup of my home directory to the empty disk using rsync, I got about 112 MB/s. Using dd to clone my root partition to a disk image on the HDD, I got 94.5 MB/s. During the backup / clone runs, the disk gets notably warm on the outside, but not hot. The disk's noise emission is low and will only be recognized in very quiet environments.

This article has been updated March 3rd, 14:46.