Seagate 750GB ST3850640AS SATA drives
Into the Supermicro enclosure, we installed a few of these:
Seagate cram 750GB of platters into one of these, each bit of data stood to attention; the drive aligns its bits perpendicularly on the media. Seagate's spec sheet say an ATA version is available, too.
These disks support SATA or SATA2 transfer rates, but for the latter, a bit of intervention is required.
See that little jumper on the left? It arrived hooked up to the left two pins. On a lot of Seagate SATA drives, this set of headers is reserved for manufacturer use, but in the case of the ST3750640AS drives, a jumper means SATA operation and no jumper means SATA2. It does make a difference, at least it did to us. Our early testing saw very low write speeds in SATA mode, but we saw improvements when we removed the jumper. It's very small, not the usual jumper size, so we recommend you leave in on the drive like we did, lest it be lost.
We tested one of these drives on its own and you'll get to see the performance results in due course. We've already used five of these drives in our Thecus N5200 review, and four of them remain for this review. That's 3 terabytes...ouch!
