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

I needed a backup drive for my Macbook, I know this drive is labelled for mac, but the only difference is it is white. You can take any drive, format it as HFS+ on a OSX machine and you have a backup drive for mac. Many people mention random speeds but in my opinion, it should not matter cause it is a backup drive. To top it off it is not even a portable drive (comes with a power adapter with plug for all countries). This is a desktop drive. Its intended purpose is backup (likely via time machine). Unless you are using it as a transfer drive to share huge files, speed should not be an issue and is negligible. The extra USB ports in front is nice to charge additional mobile devices and I love it. Tough it doesnt work like a USB hub but whatever, I got too many on my desk as it is. If you need a backup drive AND white color, this is a good bet, if color is not important to you (again should be irrelevant for a backup drive that is suppose to sit in a corner) go for any other drive, just format it for OSX timemachine back and you are good.

Works well and is an economical solution to external storage.

bought this drive to backup my photos (mac user). not only is it confusing to set up, but i found out only after searching that there is additional software you have to download to even use it as an external drive. otherwise, you can only use it as a mirror - that doesnt help me at all since im trying to free up space, not just backup 8TB of data. my laptop isnt even 8TB, so why would i need a mirror for that? so the software is downloading now - it says itll take an hour - and then i found out that many of the best photo features (social) were discontinued earlier this year. so not only is it false advertisement, but its probably going to end up being another useless piece of equipment for the landfill. very upset that i made this decision. save yourself the headache if you are looking for an external drive for storage. UPDATE: after installing second piece of software, i was able to manage my photo files by simply dragging+dropping to the drive. the software doesnt do anything to help manage the files. just use it like a normal drive. now i just need to find a case that fits it since the one amazon suggests is TOO SMALL. UPDATE: I found this one - I think amazone was just showing the wrong item! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F6BB2XY/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I know one can get a lemon sometimes, but how Seagates customer service dealt with the matter left me discouraged. Seagate states they provide a 2 year warranty, but let me share with you my experience in dealing with the dead drive covered by support/warranty ... The product was purchased about 90 days ago, but was not used for several weeks; and thereafter, usage was light (for example, Time Machine backups for a couple laptops). Then after about 2 months of use it died last week. I attempted to locate another adapter to confirm that the adaptor was not the issue, but was unable to locate the unique one that comes with this unit (Seagate power supply: 12V 3A / barrel outside 5.5mm inside 2.5mm center positive). Therefore, I contacted customer service regarding the matter and they asked me to purchase one to test their drive. Yes, they wouldnt send me a replacement adaptor to test their product, but rather wanted me to purchase one. So with that support interaction, I elected to return the unit under their product warranty coverage. That is when I was informed that they only warranty the product and DO NOT cover sending the product back to them to replace. And BTW, their warranty replacement unit will be a refurbished unit, not a new one ... another surprise in warranty coverage. Today I mailed the drive to Seagate, and my wallet is another $20+ dollars lighter ... YIKES. Therefore, due to the experience of the units life (60 days with light usage) and Seagates support/warranty, I have to rate this product a ZERO!

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.

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.

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 :).

I formatted it for EXT3 and connected a Chip ([...]- $9) to through the front USB hub. The Debian-Linux OS on the Chip powers up just fine, and I can connect to the wifi on the Chip via my wifi router as I would expect. A micro USB port is the power port for the Chip - you can also connect to it from a computer that way and do TTY straight into the Chip. I did sudo apt-get install usbmount to allow the Chip to auto-mount USB drives - v nice. [1] The Chip doesnt see the drive through, it only receives power from it over the USB cable :-( Is it a proprietary file system protocol over the front hub USB cable? Something that only Seagate software can work with (phones being the intended platform). If I plug in a second (regular) USB connector (the USB3 cable that comes with the Seagate) the Chip powers down. I think the Seagate doesnt allow two things to seemingly connect to it at the same time, and cuts power to the front hub [2]. OK, if I separately power the chip (a spare phone USB charger), everything works. Specifically - Chip is on, Chip can see the mounted hard drive, I can SSH to the Chip over wifi and do regular dir/file things to it - yay! This is more cables and power sockets than I planned though - I wish I could overcome [1] or [2] with firmware settings.

This product (black version) works well once formatted and loaded with Toolkit software. The hub I received was unformatted. 3 tech support reps gave me bad advice and were no help in diagnosing the problem. I had to pay a repair shop to delete the hub drives partition on my computer, reinstall it, and format the drive as NTFS.

Got it to use for backing up laptop, phone, etc. , and archiving stuff that I PROBABLY wont need again but might. Works GREAT for those purposes and with 8 TB of capacity it will be a while before its filled up. Quiet when in operation and worked fine with a windows laptop and an Android phone EXCEPT (reason for 4 stars)... If I plug the phone into the laptops USB port, then I can transfer files to this drive (connected to another of the laptops USB ports. HOWEVER, if I try to connect the (Android) phone directly to one of the USB ports on the disk drive I get an error message USB Device setup failure and it wont install the phone for backup. The USB ports on the drive DO provide power to the phone for battery charging and they DO see the phone and try to set it up, but the setup fails every time. There is the workaround of connecting the phone to the laptop instead of the drive, but I would hope that the drive would work like its diagram says and recognize the phone directly. Hence the 4 star rating.