Seagate STEL8000100 Backup Plus Hub 8TB External Desktop Hard Drive Storage

Got this at a good price. I removed the drive from the case and put the drive in my PC (voids warranty). The units casing has has three parts, the body and the two panels. From the vertical orientation you can remove the smaller beveled side panel by prising it open along the seams. The other panel is curved in the front where the USB ports are. The other The panels are attached with multiple clips which are in the form of squares. The tabs on the other panel rests in the centre of these clips, so it is quite hard not to break them. Four large rubber washers hold the drive in place on molded ridges on the casing. The drive is attached to a metal plate which runs under the PCB. The PCB is screwed to the larger side panel. Do note that it is thicker than your usual 3.5 drive. This drive will become hot if run continuously , and I would suggest it be placed in a well ventilated bay. As an external drive with no forced cooling, I believe it would get quite warm as well. Performance (in terms of copying large amounts of data) exceeded my expectations. [Update January 2018] Bought a second drive in September 2017. My first drive was a ST8000AS marked as an archive drive (which still works fine). This time I got a ST8000DM004 marked as a Barracuda compute. This model is still a SMR drive with a small cache and spins at over 5000 rpm. This second drive started to give me problems after a few months. It would connect and disconnect sporadically and Windows would ask me to reformat the drive whenever it become acessible. Tests with Seagates seatools would show the drive passing all tests. I tried changing cables and putting it on another sata controller to no avail. Today, it finally failed the seatools. Unfortunately as Ive extracted the drive from the case, Ive no further options. If you get the drive version I did, you would be well advised to do some testing before committing your data to it. Revised my rating to 2 stars based on this.

The hard drive is an archive hard drive so you wont get very high speeds when backing up into the hard disk but when reading and finding things in it, its fast. Essentially read speeds are fast, write speeds are slow. You can remedy this by switching from quick removal to better performance with write caching but do so at your own risk if there are power failures. This will essentially speed it up from 30 MB/s average to almost a 100 MB/s ,sometimes faster. You will however need to safely remove hardware every time you power it down though. Overall, good hard disk and the front usb slots do support 2x 2.5 external hard disks but there was no info on how fast they would transfer at so the 4 star rating. It is a very fast hard disk though for something quite cheap. Excellent choice for laptop owners who have limited usb slots.

Just a great drive at a great price (at the time I bought it anyway). Holds 7.something TB of movies or whatnot easy. hasnt failed me yet. and the USB hubs are very convenient.

The drive functions perfectly as a Time Machine backup drive for my MacBook Pro. It chugs along without problems. BUT it reminds me of a crabby old man because it grumbles! I dont know, maybe it is quieter than other external drives, but the fan whirs most of the time and it makes this sort of light mumble/grumble, like someone trying to clear their throat quietly during church. Took me a minute to figure out where the noise was coming from, now that I have identified it, I just need to get used to it. All that said, Im still very happy with the unit as it is working perfectly for my purposes.

I purchased two of these for on and off-site backup. Primary drive hooks up in the back of my desktop and I only connect the second as needed. Already had a just-repaired SeaGate 5TB drive and thankfully transferred all of the data in less than 15 hours. 1. Drive uses a 3 amp power adapter (more than the average, so make sure youre using the right one (ive got quite a few external drives laying around, and even more adapters -- most are interchangeable) 2. Built-in hub is zippy when I used a USB 3 256GB flash drive to transfer data to and from (sustained 80 MB per second) 3. I connected my second 8 TB using the firsts hub in the front (to duplicate the data on the second drive) -- for some reason, I couldnt exceed 25 MB per second. When I moved the second drive to a free USB 3.0 port on my desktop, next to the other, the write speed jumped to a sustained 187 MB per second for the larger files). It may not make a big deal in the future, since I dont plan on doing regular, MUCH smaller backups, so write speed wont be as important, but still disappointing. 4. I hate having drives spinning all the time, so it was nice to see that it auto-powers down, but still shows up in the file browser, and spins back up when you click on it. 5. Nice to see no extra crap on the drive itself when you plug it in. I frequently see some kind of software preloaded that just gets immediately whacked after I start using it :). Im satisfied, if it lasts long enough. The seagate 5 TB before it only lasted about 3 years, and the PCB went out. Had to have it replaced to get it up and running. (I should note, I still have a Maxtor 500 GB usb 2 drive that is closer to 8 years old and still works. dont use it for vital data, but hey, just sayin :).

Used to have a 4th but that failed after about 2 years. Love the USB ports on the front but I do live in constant fear that I will have a catastrophic drive failure without warning. These are relatively quiet and provide adequate but not stellar performance on our network of Macs.

Great drive with good features and a good price. I use two of these as primary and redundant backup for my computer and thousands of digital photo files. Im a photographer and shoot countless photos and videos every year. When my old NAS backup started showing signs of dying, I picked up a couple of these to replace them. Initially, I was just going to use the drives out of them in my Buffalo TeraStations but figured Id just set one as my primary backup, and the second would act as a redundancy for the first, all using Acronis software. Much faster than a NAS using the direct USB 3 connection and a whole lot smaller. Ive used Seagate for decades and had very few issues. The two times I did, Seagate replaced the drives with larger capacity ones at no charge!

What else can I say? No issues until recently when the drive (not enclosure) power cycled several times during a large file transfer. I bought two Seagate 8TB drives to replace this. Ill keep using it as a scratch drive until it finally dies then repurpose the enclosure with a SSD. FWIW: Primary use, A/V media storage for my AppleTV and secondary, Time Machine backups.

If you compare this drive to a 7200RPM or higher RPM or an SSD than yes its slower. If you plugged it in an USB2.0 port than yes it could be slow. The specs said max. data transfer = 160MB/s. Using USB3 I could get peak upto 190MB/s and typical 130MB/s. Even with very small files I would get nothing below 50MB/s. If you use USB3 and get 20 something MB/s more than likely its your windows 10 drive policies setting. Windows 10 by default will set the drive policy to Quick removal instead of Better performance so that you can remove the drive fast without clicking Eject Device. You can change this policy. DO IT AS YOUR OWN RISK since you will have to remember to click Eject Device every time you want to remove the drive while the system is on. Its actually really safe but I just have to say it. Most people dont plug and unplug the drive everyday. Here is how: Open Device Manager, Disk drives and click on your drive then select Policies. Check Better performance box instead of Quick removal (default). Also check the box Enable write caching on the device. You should get your full speed now but remember to click Eject Device every time you want to remove it while your computer is on. I always do this anyway since its safer.

I first purchased this product in July 2017, to use with my Apple Macbook. For two years it received only occasional use, as an archive for photographs and work documents. Periodically (every 2–3 months) I would plug it in, archive files, and run a Time Machine backup on a second partition which I had created. Earlier this year, I noticed the drive would very occasionally eject itself. I figured I had bumped it, and didnt pay much attention as it always re-mounted and seemed to be fine. (IF THIS HAPPENS TO YOUR DRIVE, IMMEDIATELY MAKE A COPY OF IT, PLEASE.) Little did I know, that was an early sign of failure of this drive, and I wish I had done something then. In September of this year, after making a large backup (because I suspected the graphics card on my laptop was about to fail), suddenly this drive would not mount. Restart didnt help, Disk Utility showed nothing, and thennn the drive started making the click of death. This drive failed horribly, in the moment when I absolutely needed it, after very minimal use for two years. Much to my chagrin, the limited warranty on it had *JUST* expired as the drive passed the two-year purchase mark. To reiterate — it failed one month after the warranty expired. I sent the drive to a data recovery facility, and theyve confirmed that the drive has platter damage and they wont be able to recover all of my files. The recovery that they are able to do will cost me $3000. It contains my entire professional archive, and all of my personal photos, videos, and documents. To contrast, my very old WD external hard drive that Ive used since college, moved across the country three times and definitely wasnt as careful with as I should have been.... is totally fine and works like a charm. In summary: saving some cash on this drive now may cost you dearly later. Seagate devices have a mediocre reputation for a reason. If you insist on using a Seagate, please learn from my mistake and have TWO that you maintain as clones of each other, so if one fails, you dont lose all of your data.