Benchmark:Seagate Backup Plus 5TB

I have been playing around with the idea recently of decomissioning my big server in favor of a rather powerful Raspberry Pi (8GB ram, 4 core CPU). The big server has a sizeable RAID with pretty impressive IO performance (~400 MB/s write speed). The big concern though is storage capacity, as that server backups up a number of devices passively, which doesn't really require high IO. With that in mind, I purchased a Seagate Backup Plus 5TB drive at my local store to see how it performs as a replacement, or at least as a backup system.

TL;DR

The quick summary for those who don't care to read all the metrics, over a USB 3 port, the drive maxed out at 144 MB/s sequential write and 144 MB/s sequential read, without a filesystem.

NOTE: This benchmark was performed using a tool I wrote in bash called dd-bench. It's open source (GPLv3), so please feel free to use it and send feedback and pull requests to nullspoon@oper.io.

files/seagate-backup-plus-5tb.png 
Benchmark started at Sat Nov 28 21:52:18 MST 2020

1 KB Block Size

Nov 28 21:52:18: *** Testing 1 KB blocks
Nov 28 21:52:21: Wrote 1K 10240 times. 10 MB written at 3.2 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:52:24: Read 1K 10240 times. 10 MB read at 3.3 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:52:29: Wrote 1K 20480 times. 21 MB written at 4.8 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:52:32: Read 1K 20480 times. 21 MB read at 6.0 MB/s.

1 MB Block Size

Nov 28 21:52:32: *** Testing 1 MB blocks
Nov 28 21:52:40: Wrote 1M 1024 times. 1.1 GB written at 143 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:52:48: Read 1M 1024 times. 1.1 GB read at 129 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:53:48: Wrote 1M 8192 times. 8.6 GB written at 144 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:54:48: Read 1M 8192 times. 8.6 GB read at 143 MB/s.

4 MB Block Size

Nov 28 21:54:48: *** Testing 4 MB blocks
Nov 28 21:54:56: Wrote 4M 256 times. 1.1 GB written at 141 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:55:05: Read 4M 256 times. 1.1 GB read at 126 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:56:04: Wrote 4M 2048 times. 8.6 GB written at 144 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:57:05: Read 4M 2048 times. 8.6 GB read at 143 MB/s.
Nov 28 21:59:35: Wrote 4M 5120 times. 21 GB written at 143 MB/s.
Nov 28 22:02:05: Read 4M 5120 times. 21 GB read at 144 MB/s.

1 GB Block Size

Nov 28 22:02:05: *** Testing 1 GB blocks
Nov 28 22:02:13: Wrote 1G 1 times. 1.1 GB written at 138 MB/s.
Nov 28 22:02:21: Read 1G 1 times. 1.1 GB read at 126 MB/s.
Nov 28 22:03:22: Wrote 1G 8 times. 8.6 GB written at 141 MB/s.
Nov 28 22:04:23: Read 1G 8 times. 8.6 GB read at 141 MB/s.

Last edited: 2020-11-30 03:58:15 UTC