ST1000LM035-1RK172 - Junk Seagate 1TB SMR drive

This nightmare started with my wife's Asus Vivobook 14. We should have gone for the SSD model, but I thought the usage being light, the HDD model would suffice. Little did I know the amount of trouble will this decision give me!!

So when we received the hardware the 2 major complaints were the screen even though having FHD resolution, had abysmal viewing angles and weird color reproduction. This was overcome with a custom color profile. Its still not good for long time usage, but for her for about 1 hr a day video calls, it was enough.

The second issue was slow HDD performance. I tried a few dozen things. Optimized windows 10. Optimized partitions. But it was junk slow. The R/W speeds never crossed 5-6MBps. And when windows update kicked off the whole thing would grind to a hault. 

With optimized settings it worked decently for about a year. 

But now with many windows updates in and also so many files in, it just could not take it. Even sad is the drive won't fail. It would chug along at its miserable pace. 

So finally it sucked enough that my wife's user profile won't even load. So I dug out the newer lenovo which I had fitted with a Maxtor SSD. Took out the SSD and put it in this Vivobook. And its suddenly lightening fast. 

Let me give you some figures. The average access time for average hdd's, is from 4-6 ms to 100-200 ms at full load. For this seagate junk, it was 120+ ms average and with full load it would be 3000-4000 ms. That prooves this thing is junk as an OS drive. 

Now Im not going to throw it away. But rather Ill try to use it for backups to see if its somewhat usable or a complete rust pile.