This particular drive came from a salvage, used in a former corporate environment.
The Drive
This drive belongs to the 7200.11 generation of drives, with this specific one seemingly being sold as a regular drive (non-OEM) by the printing on the top cover.
This time, they’ve adopted a strategy similar to Western Digital in mounting all the components on the PCB on the reverse side, to avoid damage during handling and shipment. The PCB size has been further reduced over previous models.
As this is a lower capacity drive of that particular generation, Seagate have devised a lower-profile casing for the drive due to the lower platter count. This is not the first time a manufacturer has done this – I remember the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 6E0L040 being similar as well, advertised at the time being simpler and more reliable due to fewer parts, although mine had failed and been disposed of prior to making it onto the site. I’ve also handled a Seagate Medalist at one stage which was thinner than the norm, but unfortunately, my sample isn’t functioning (and thus didn’t make it onto the site – this might change in the future though).
Performance Testing
CrystalDiskInfo
This drive has only seen a modest amount of service, but is not healthy with its one reallocated sector. It has firmware SD22 and a 16MiB cache buffer.
HD Tune
Some of the access times seemed long (note the “spur” of results going upward), but the sequential throughput seems to be quite brisk for a drive of this age.
The I/O behaviour also shows a slit in the lines, probably related to how the controller optimises seek behaviour. Buffer effects are not clearly visible.
CrystalDiskMark
The results from CDM show a similar result.
ATTO
According to ATTO, full performance is attained by 16kB accesses.