An enterprise-grade 2.5″ drive in the modern day is something special, with this one avoiding Seagate’s ongoing story with the Rosewood’s. While “Enterprise Capacity 2.5 HDD v3” is certainly an unwieldly title, this isn’t something Seagate decided to stick with. This particular model is still available for purchase today, under Exos 7E2000 series branding, retaining the same model number.
There’s no SMR in sight with this one!
Drive Attributes --------------------------------------------------- Seagate Enterprise Capacity 2.5 HDD v3 ST1000NX0313 --------------------------------------------------- Capacity 1TB Mfc Date 2016-12-23 Format 2.5" Height 15mm Interface SATA Platters 3 Heads 5 Cache 128MB RPM 7200 Protocol Serial-ATA/600 Origin China (ST) Codename Avenger ---------------------------------------------------
Seagate released a huge amount of revisions with this line-up, but it’s important to note that only two capacity options are available in the now Exos 7E2000 series. These being the ST1000NX at 1TB with 3 platters and 5 heads, alongside the ST2000NX with 5 platters and 10 heads. The suffix notation of 4 digits dictates the sector size alongside if the drive supports self-encrypting (SED) or not. The ST1000NX0313 in-particular is listed as a 512 emulation sector-type, without SED.
As a result, these boast 200GB per surface, 400GB per platter. Surely pushing this one up to 1.2TB wouldn’t have been a difficult task, right Seagate? Either way, with one surface side being unutilised on these drives, a single-side defective media sample can be used as a result, if necessary.
Bearing Seagate’s “new” logo is a first for drives covered on this site, but the label itself is quite useful. Fortunately, it doesn’t adhere to Seagate’s frustrating date code format as with previous iterations, clearly being made at the very end of 2016. QR-code galore!
The PCB is bare, as expected with a drive this modern. The logic is on the opposite side, which is shown a little bit later. Seagate very much tried to save as much space as possible with this HDA, achieving the five platter achievement of the ST2000NX.
The asset label on the side suggests this drive was put into service, or inventoried, on the 16th of May, 2017.
Handling such a modern 2.5″ drive with a 15mm z-height is quite the feeling, but as with a miriad of SAS models, it has its place. Compared to a measly 9.5mm unit, these are quite the tall monsters.
Removing the PCB reveals the all too familiar insulation material. There’s a thermal pad for the microcontroller IC, alongside the usual head-stack & spindle motor connection points.
It’s worth noting the thermal pad was mangled as a result of removing it from the microcontroller for a proper IC picture. It’ll still do its job just fine when re-installed.
Nothing interesting is revealed under the insulation, simply another QR code and a manufacturing cast stamp.
A staggeringly blank PCB is revealed, although that isn’t too unsurprising. The microcontroller is an LSI branded chip, with part number TTB71001V0. The only major interesting element to this IC is LSI’s lingering brand name use, particularly after they were acquired by Avago Technologies (now Broadcom Inc.) back in 2014.
To the right of the microcontroller is 128MB of cache from Samsung. The spindle motor controller is from STMicroelectronics, under their Smooth branding.
This particular drive had a fairly long work life in an enterprise environment, no surprise given the series. Nonetheless, this drive has no issues appearing thus far, so it should hopefully last a good while longer. Enterprise systems usually expect much more, after all.
| ST1000NX0313 Benchmarks | |
|---|---|
| Parameters | 100 samples, 10MB size |
| Average Read | 102.5MB/s |
| Average Write | 94.8MB/s |
| Average Access Time | 11.72msec |
Performance isn’t blissful, but it’s what to be expected for the density & form-factor. It’s not bad at all.
Seagate’s 2.5″ designs in the enterprise segment sure are impressive, this one is certainly somewhat of a treasure.
Seagate Enterprise Capacity 2.5 HDD – Specifications Manual (pdf)
If you missed the video I made on this drive, you can find it here: