Seagate Desktop HDD .15 (ST4000DM000) 4000GB HDD Review

Anvil Storage Utilities

Version and / or Patch Used: RC6

So what is Anvil Storage Utilities? First of all, it's a storage benchmark for SSDs and HDDs where you can check and monitor your performance. The Standard Storage Benchmark performs a series of tests, you can run a full test or just the read or the write test or you can run a single test, i.e. 4K DQ16.

Anvil Storage Utilities is not officially available yet but we've been playing with the beta for several months now. The author, Anvil on several international forums has been updating the software steadily and is adding new features every couple of months.

The software is used several different ways and to show different aspects for each drive. We've chosen to use this software to show the performance of a drive with two different data sets. The first is with compressible data and the second data set is incompressible data. Several users have requested this data in our SSD reviews.

Incompressible Data

0-Fill Compressible Data

Read IOPS through Queue Depth Scale

Above we find the Desktop HDD on par with its smaller brother, the 2TB Barracuda, all the way through the scale.

Write IOPS through Queue Depth Scale

At the top of the charts here, we find the WD Red pushing over 500 Random Write IOPS. The Seagate Desktop HDD, again sticks to being on par with its previous .14 Barracuda.