About ~3/4 of the power a drive uses goes into the spindle motor. Only a relatively small part of that is dissipated in the bearings (a quarter or so), all the rest is gas-platter friction, turbulences due to the heads…
You're probably confusing these with SMR drives. These here are standard PMR, so they are just like any other hard drive regarding random I/O.
Are you sure that you had Seagate EC drives, and not Seagate Archive drives? The latter are DM-SMR and therefore poorly suited to pretty much anything doing random write I/O (e.g. rsyncing directory trees, rdiff-backup…
About ~3/4 of the power a drive uses goes into the spindle motor. Only a relatively small part of that is dissipated in the bearings (a quarter or so), all the rest is gas-platter friction, turbulences due to the heads…
You're probably confusing these with SMR drives. These here are standard PMR, so they are just like any other hard drive regarding random I/O.
Are you sure that you had Seagate EC drives, and not Seagate Archive drives? The latter are DM-SMR and therefore poorly suited to pretty much anything doing random write I/O (e.g. rsyncing directory trees, rdiff-backup…