The Seagate Desktop HDD.15 is a 3.5" form factor, 6Gb/s SATA interface drive with a unique spindle speed of 5,900RPM that hits the 4TB capacity mark and is explicitly designed for desktop implementation. Building on their 4TB Barracuda drive (now rebranded HDD.14), the Desktop HDD.15 uses Seagate’s 4TB platters inside. Thanks to the slower spindle speed, Seagate has been able to drive down power consumption on the Desktop HDD.15 to an average of 7.5W, an idle rating of 5W, and standup and sleep mode ratings of just 0.75W. 

With a market inundated by a range of HDD offerings, Seagate’s aim here is to provide users with a reliable, low power-consumption drive that still provides satisfactory performance levels. The drive isn’t geared to enthusiast users looking for maximum performance; its target is those users who require the most robust capacity available from a reliable maker that still features enough potency to handle a wide range of workloads. On that note, the Desktop HDD provides up to 180MB/s of sustained throughput, with 146MB/s average data rate and an average latency of 5.16ms. Those quoted figures are pretty impressive given the drive’s 5,900 RPM spindle speed and thanks in large part to Seagate’s improvements in cache management that the company claims are better by a 45% margin. Of course for those who want faster performance in a desktop drive, Seagate offers a 2TB solid state hybrid drive (SSHD), which couples onboard NAND to drive faster throughput, up to 190MB/s second when hitting the caching NAND.

Seagate added some other features to the Desktop HDD.15 to smooth out users’ transition experience. For instance, users with legacy BIOS or Windows XP users are typically limited to 4TB drives without updating from the native BIOS to UEFI. Seagate’s free DiscWizard software enables those users to still utilize their 4TB Desktop HDD. Adding on to the power quotes for a "greener" drive, Seagate says the Desktop HDDs utilize at least 70% or more of recyclable materials. As to how the company achieved the 4TB platter mark, Seagate used their AcuTrac technology to enable accurate reads and writes to tracks that are just 75nm wide.