Seagate’s 4TB Backup Plus and 4TB Expansion are both “portable” external hard drives. Seagate 4TB Backup Plus to the left and 4TB Expansion to the right. However, there is another way to acquire these drives. The ST4000LM016 retails just north of 200USD. But, the 2.5″ WD Red series tops out at 2TB, so overall system power will be lower for the same capacity. It is a little more power hungry than the 2.5″ WD Red series drives. This sure beats the 5.1W write/read and 1.1W when idle that the 10K RPM VelociRaptor consumes. In regards to power, the ST4000LM016 consumes 2.1W of power when writing, 1.9W when reading and 0.85W when idle. According to Seagate’s datasheet, the ST4000LM016 has a SATA 6Gb/s interface, 128MB of cache, and can sustain 130MB/s transfers.

While 15mm is too thick to fit into a laptop, it is the standard height of 2.5″ enterprise drives that typically reside in the SC216. The ST4000LM016 is a 4TB 5400RPM hard drive in the 15mm tall 2.5″ form-factor. However, there is the ST4000LM016 made by Seagate. Most manufacturer’s only have 2TB drives in the 2.5″ formfactor. The problem with the SC216 is it has 24 drive bays for 2.5″ drives. Finding a good quality rackmount case, with hot swappable drive bays, at a reasonable price leaves just one option, the Supermicro SC216. To start the build, one needs to have a case. Specifically, transcoding Plex streams to Chromecasts and Fire TVs is a stuttering affair. While it can still handle print and file serving, it is having issues with its newer tasks. The current local server, a HP Proliant Microserver (Gen 7 with a N40L) is four years old. This is the first in a series of posts regarding a new server build one is working on.

4tb backup plus portable hard drive