ST4000DM004 is an SMR disk – its internal storage is not linear, but firmware-managed much like on SSDs (as the overlapped SMR layout makes it impossible to update sectors in-place).
With SMR (and with SSDs), even though your writes intend to replace the existing logical sectors, they nevertheless get redirected to new physical zones/areas at first, with old data only being overwritten only later during the disk's idle maintenance – until the amount of new data causes the disk to run out of usable space, in which case it needs to perform internal reshuffling in a hurry.
Instead of zeroing via /p:
or other tools that do regular writes, perform an ATA Secure Erase on the disk if possible, and/or issue TRIM commands (discards) using blkdiscard
. (You might need a Linux box and a USB-SATA adapter for this.)