This is not a review in the sense that it explores the drive in every possible aspect, this is better seen as a user review.
I got this drive on 2016-04-06 (6th of april), the first thing that catches your eye about this drive is that every inch of the space a regular hard drive uses (that empty area under the disk) is used, as a consequence, there is no middle screw hole, only in the back and in the front, a bit of a problem for many computer and NAS cases that rely on that hole to fasten the drive in place.
So, formatting the system into ext4 and copying files onto it, the drive seems very fast, how fast exactly remains to be seen in the coming few hours as i can only run the test after ext4lazyinit completes and finalizes the ext4 partition. I also enabled lazy write-back and removed the journal (tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdb1)
Now, let us take a better look at some parameters that were given to us by seagate
This is not the SMR (Shingled magnetic recording) disk, this is a proper hard drive meant to run as your desktop’s hard drive, the hard drive features 6 1.33TB plates, which is very high density compared to any disk on the market.
Price per gigabyte at the time of writing on this drive is 4 cents, that is pretty good for a desktop hard drive (The archive drive costs less per GB, but is much less of a performer), the archiving drive, with the SMR needs to delete neighbouring bytes and rewrite them whenever it needs to update a certain byte, so it suffers in performance, not to mention that other things are designed with this in mind too.