Seagate Skyhawk Surveillance Hard Drive 6 Terabyte

Performance:RW speed is slightly faster than 2tb barracuda 7200 rpm (could be because it's empty and the barracuda is full) so far no issues all goodDevice Model: ST4000VX016-3CV104Firmware Version: CV10User Capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physicalRotation Rate: 5400 rpmForm Factor: 3.5 inchesATA Version is: ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s

Great drive, great price!

This Skyhawk hard drive from Seagate specifically targets the video surveillance user. Seagate’s new “Guardian Series” drives feature high MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), RVS (Rotational Vibration Sensors), huge amounts of cache, 7200 rpm spindle speed, and high workload ratings. The SkyHawk in particular also boasts enhanced ImagePerfect™ firmware. The series overall seems aimed at home or small business users who want huge, reliable storage, but aren’t necessarily setting up an enterprise level server. Pulling this bare drive out of its protective hot dog package, you realize it is something special. It’s got a heavy bulk to it that’s just different from other drives. It’s got your standard SATA and power connectors, along with the 4-pin jumper set that goes ... MoreThis Skyhawk hard drive from Seagate specifically targets the video surveillance user. Seagate’s new “Guardian Series” drives feature high MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), RVS (Rotational Vibration Sensors), huge amounts of cache, 7200 rpm spindle speed, and high workload ratings. The SkyHawk in particular also boasts enhanced ImagePerfect™ firmware. The series overall seems aimed at home or small business users who want huge, reliable storage, but aren’t necessarily setting up an enterprise level server. Pulling this bare drive out of its protective hot dog package, you realize it is something special. It’s got a heavy bulk to it that’s just different from other drives. It’s got your standard SATA and power connectors, along with the 4-pin jumper set that goes unused. Installing the drive was uneventful. I have tested this drive’s bigger brother (the 10 TB version) and for whatever reason it didn’t have all the proper mounting holes. This “little” guy does have them though so it’s all good. Seagate makes the claim that the drive is optimized for recording up to 90% of the time and supporting up to 64 HD cameras. With a Workload Rating of 180TB per year, and MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, the SkyHawk should certainly have no problem handling that. Though it’s clear that the drive is marketed at the home or small business user who will likely not even approach those numbers. If you’re a user big enough to have 64 cameras, you’d likely spend the extra 20% it takes to snag Seagate’s Enterprise level drive dubbed “Helium”. The ImagePerfect firmware is a caching mechanism allowing for quick spin up of the drive when it’s needed (e.g. when a camera detects motion and needs to instantly start recording). The RVS helps with interference if you have lots of spinning drives in the system. This SkyHawk ST3000VX010 was immediately slapped into a recently built Kaby Lake i5 system to help perform DVR / NVR duty. Recording over-the-air TV and several 3MP IP cameras, this drive didn’t miss a beat. The SkyHawk’s closest direct competitor would be the Western Digital Purple series, which, while comparatively priced, has half the cache and spins at 5400 rpm. Overall this new drive from Seagate fills a great need for many home users who are constantly needing more and more fast, localized storage.

Store All The Things

This behemoth hard drive from Seagate specifically targets the video surveillance user. Seagate’s new “Guardian Series” drives feature high MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), RVS (Rotational Vibration Sensors), huge amounts of cache, 7200 rpm spindle speed, and high workload ratings. The SkyHawk in particular also boasts enhanced ImagePerfect™ firmware. The series overall seems aimed at home or small business users who want huge, reliable storage, but aren’t necessarily setting up an enterprise level server. Pulling this bare drive out of its protective hot dog package, you realize it is something special. It’s got a heavy bulk to it that’s just different from other drives. It’s got your standard SATA and power connectors, along with the 4-pin jumper set that goes ... MoreThis behemoth hard drive from Seagate specifically targets the video surveillance user. Seagate’s new “Guardian Series” drives feature high MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), RVS (Rotational Vibration Sensors), huge amounts of cache, 7200 rpm spindle speed, and high workload ratings. The SkyHawk in particular also boasts enhanced ImagePerfect™ firmware. The series overall seems aimed at home or small business users who want huge, reliable storage, but aren’t necessarily setting up an enterprise level server. Pulling this bare drive out of its protective hot dog package, you realize it is something special. It’s got a heavy bulk to it that’s just different from other drives. It’s got your standard SATA and power connectors, along with the 4-pin jumper set that goes unused. Installing the drive was mostly uneventful, save for missing two of the middle-side mount holes usually found on a 3.5” form factor drive. C’mon Seagate, really? You’d think at this level one wouldn’t need to one-screw-wonder the thing. Seagate makes the claim that the drive is optimized for recording up to 90% of the time and supporting up to 64 HD cameras. With a Workload Rating of 180TB per year, and MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, the SkyHawk should certainly have no problem handling that. Though it’s clear that the drive is marketed at the home or small business user who will likely not even approach those numbers. If you’re a user big enough to have 64 cameras, you’d likely spend the extra 20% it takes to snag Seagate’s Enterprise level drive dubbed “Helium”. The ImagePerfect firmware is a caching mechanism allowing for quick spin up of the drive when it’s needed (e.g. when a camera detects motion and needs to instantly start recording). The RVS helps with interference if you have lots of spinning drives in the system. This SkyHawk ST10000VX0004 was immediately slapped into an aging but capable i7 920 system with 8GB of RAM which serves DVR/NVR duty. Recording over-the-air TV and several 3MP IP cameras, this drive didn’t miss a beat and obviously provided a massive increase in storage potential (Thanks, DVR, for letting me know a year’s worth of HD video recording is now available). With a 64K allocation size, NTFS formatted, GPT partition, the drive shows 9.09TB available in Windows 7 (that’s 9,957,049,892,864 bytes for you nerds that understand). Multiple real world file copy tests showed this drive averaging around 120 MBps. Pretty reasonable for a spinning drive with 10TB of space. The SkyHawk’s closest direct competitor would be the Western Digital Purple series, which, while comparatively priced, has half the cache and spins at 5400 rpm. Overall this new drive from Seagate fills a great need for many home users who are constantly needing more and more fast, localized storage. The only ding is the missing mounting holes and that wasn't worth losing an entire egg over.

This is an excellent surveillance camera drive. As an IT technician, I cannot count how many time...

This is an excellent surveillance camera drive. As an IT technician, I cannot count how many times surveillance systems fail, right when you need them, just because you're not using the right drive. Also, using a desktop hard drive or NAS for surveillance will waste the cop's precious time. Have you ever tried scrubbing through days of video while simultaneously recording? I have, and I will tell you it's not fun! Unfortunately, this drive failed after just a couple months of use, but Home Essentials Direct (and Seagate) are good on sticking by the warranty. So 5 stars on that end. I've had good success overall with these Skyhawks in surveillance applications and would use them again.

Works Well in NVR and DVR

It's funny, when I look up reviews for surveillance hard drives, almost no one actually does real world field testing. Just benchmarks. Which never tell the whole story. I only have 12 cameras, Seagate claims this drive can handle up to 64 but that's partial nonsense since I was experiencing dropped frames and other typical issues with this drive when it was alone. I imagine Seagate is thinking if put into RAID. And really, almost every modern drive can handle 12+ cameras when put into RAID. I think this drive is worth buying over faster drives for DVR/NVR applications but is it absolutely better than, say, a NAS drive with a better warranty? Hard to say with real world results versus paper. This drive's firmware definitely helped with more consistency in a ... MoreIt's funny, when I look up reviews for surveillance hard drives, almost no one actually does real world field testing. Just benchmarks. Which never tell the whole story. I only have 12 cameras, Seagate claims this drive can handle up to 64 but that's partial nonsense since I was experiencing dropped frames and other typical issues with this drive when it was alone. I imagine Seagate is thinking if put into RAID. And really, almost every modern drive can handle 12+ cameras when put into RAID. I think this drive is worth buying over faster drives for DVR/NVR applications but is it absolutely better than, say, a NAS drive with a better warranty? Hard to say with real world results versus paper. This drive's firmware definitely helped with more consistency in a multi-camera setup and I did get fewer dropped frames, on average, but I'm still left wanting better performance in that area. A good drive with a bit over zealous marketing jargon that relies on technical benchmarks instead of real world conditions, I'd say. Fairly useless benchmark, but I'm including it in case people are going to use this drive outside of DVR/NVR applications, which I'd advise against doing since Seagate's other drives are similar in price and better suited, in raw numbers, at least: Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 189.403 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 185.861 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.101 MB/s [ 268.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.288 MB/s [ 314.5 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 189.371 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 186.214 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.519 MB/s [ 126.7 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.324 MB/s [ 323.2 IOPS]

Works great in it's intended use

I am using this in my Zmodo 4 Camera 960H DVR. It has been in use for about 3 weeks now, so no long term reliability information, but so far so good. This is kept in my unconditioned garage, temps range from 40°F to 95°F. I have 3 of the 4 cameras hooked up, 1 records 24/7, the other 2 are on motion activation. This drive is the 2 TB version, replacing a WD Green 2.5 TB drive that has been in it for about 2 years. First thing I noticed once the drives were swapped is it is almost silent now. Not that the WD green was loud or anything, just this Skyhawk drive is super quiet. I checked the temp of the case over the HDD with an IR thermometer, and with the WD green it would be about 10-15°F above ambient, the Skyhawk is 5-10°F above ambient, so it does run a little ... MoreI am using this in my Zmodo 4 Camera 960H DVR. It has been in use for about 3 weeks now, so no long term reliability information, but so far so good. This is kept in my unconditioned garage, temps range from 40°F to 95°F. I have 3 of the 4 cameras hooked up, 1 records 24/7, the other 2 are on motion activation. This drive is the 2 TB version, replacing a WD Green 2.5 TB drive that has been in it for about 2 years. First thing I noticed once the drives were swapped is it is almost silent now. Not that the WD green was loud or anything, just this Skyhawk drive is super quiet. I checked the temp of the case over the HDD with an IR thermometer, and with the WD green it would be about 10-15°F above ambient, the Skyhawk is 5-10°F above ambient, so it does run a little cooler. I do get a little less time from this drive than the WD Green, but it also has 500 gb less storage space, so it is to be expected. With my current camera setup, I should get 6-7 weeks of storage. As for playback quality, I don't really see much of a difference between this and what was in there before. Knowing I have a drive designed 24/7 recording is a nice thing though, I was always a little worried about using the Green drive for that. While this is designed for DVR/security cameras, it is a drive that can be used anywhere you need a HDD. I debated using it in my HTPC, but decided to use it in it's intended purpose. I did not run any transfer speed tests, I just stuck it in the Security system. I have read some sites state it is a 7200 rpm drive but have no idea if it really is.