Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When reading product reviews, I usually check the unfavorable reviews, first, to see what the biggest issues are with the product. With this drive, I found negative review after negative review where the buyers' primary complaint seemed to have something to do with them believing they received the WRONG product! First off, the models "ST500LX025" (500GB), "ST1000LX015" (1TB), and "ST2000LX001" (2TB) are the model numbers for the NEWEST version of the drives. Amazon isn't shipping out the "old" version. The "Z" part of the model number seen on the packaging has to do with the fact that these drives now come in a basic brown box, instead of the colorful retail packaging. Also, the FireCuda line is now called "Compute" (see Seagate's website and product manuals to confirm), so receiving a drive that doesn't say "Gaming" does not mean you got the "wrong drive", it means you got a more recently-manufactured drive with an updated label. None of those reviewers even bothered looking up model numbers or drive information to see if they actually got the "wrong" product. In fact, as of writing this, the "Top Review" for this drive is a 1-star review from someone that doesn't know how to turn off their OS's drive spin-down and also incorrectly claimed they received an old model. The product they received was fine, and the review actually highlighted their own, personal flaws, yet their 1-star review now says "55 people found this helpful" under it. Really? THAT review helped people? For an actual product review, so far it seems like a standard 5400 RPM drive. Yes, it is 5400 RPM, and it also uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). SMR drives have reduced write speeds compared to standard Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) drives, but read speeds are pretty similar. That's one reason why this drive was marketed as a "gaming" drive. You install a game once, but read from it many times. Read speed is the important part, and so with that SMR should work just fine. This drive is not recommended if you write tons of data and need the fastest speeds. For that, a 7200 PMR drive or SSD would be recommended. The limited benchmarking I've done make the drive look like a typical hard drive. I get around 140MB/sec speeds from the outside of the platters, and only around 60MB/sec on the inside of the platters. Programs like CrystalDiskMark may give a good idea of what kinda of speeds to expect from an SSD (where read/write speeds are consistent on all available storage), but can give quite misleading results on a hard drive (where speeds are a LOT slower near the inside of the platters or when data is highly fragmented). In most scenarios, this will operate as a standard 2TB 5400 RPM drive. However, some frequently-accessed data will be saved in the 8GB NAND cache, allowing for much faster loads. This only works with data that is repeatedly accessed. Playing one game over and over yields the best results. The first load with be normal speeds, but each load after that should be quicker and quicker, eventually getting near-SSD speeds. However, if you frequently rotate games, playing different ones every day, you may not notice the speedier loading as much, as the cache will less likely to have the data you're trying to access. It's unfortunate that most of the submitted photos for this product are screenshots from CrystalDiskMark (which give no indication of read/write speeds for the entire drive) or pictures of the actual product received (from buyers that think they got the "wrong" drive). For a great, in-depth review of the drive's performance (with multiple benchmarks), do a Google search for the eTeknix' review of the ST2000LX001. I didn't give the product 5-stars for a few reasons. One, I figured my review might get lost in all the other 5-star reviews. Two, I felt there were compromises in the drive's design. Even if the drive performs GREAT as-is, how much better do you think the performance COULD HAVE been if it was a 7200 RPM drive? Or if it used regular magnetic storage instead of the slower "shingled" magnetic storage? Or if the NAND cache was 16 or 32GB instead of 8GB? Or if the RAM cache was 256MB instead of 128MB? Sure, the drive might cost a bit more, but it would still be way cheaper than an SSD with the same amount of storage space.