Seagate Constellation ES.3 4TB Enterprise Hard Drive Review

One of the best-known storage benchmarking tools is HD Tune, as it’s easy to run, covers a wide-range of testing scenarios, and can do other things such as test for errors, provides SMART information and so forth. For our testing with the program, we run the default benchmark which gives us a minimum, average and maximum speeds along with an access time result, and also the Random Access test, which gives us IOPS information.

Seagate’s ES.3 drive continues to perform very well here, beating out everything aside from WD’s VelociRaptor in the throughput tests, and coming ahead of that in the write access time test.

A trend that’s becoming obvious is that Seagate’s ES.3 drive is a great performer where writes are concerned. In most read tests, it goes head-to-head with the WD RE, but in the write, as with the graph above, it inches ahead. The gains are not “blow it out of the water” good, but it’s undeniable that Seagate has an edge here.