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

I usually love Seagate products but this drive has been a disaster. First, downloading the dashboard takes forever including continuous starts and stops and start overs. Is it too much to include the software on a disc? Second, the initial backup kept locking up my computer and not even ctrl-alt-del would work to reset it. The only way to get it to reset was to push and hold the power button on my computer - never a good thing. Thirdly, the first successful full backup took over 10 hours to complete and that was with about 1.3 TB of data on my internal drive - no big deal but still couldnt use my computer during this period. Fourth, and here is the deal killer for me: when the daily backup starts, it wants to backup everything AGAIN! In other words, the backup plus wants to copy my entire internal drive again, not just the changes since the previous backup. This is ridiculous. After only two days, my new Seagate Backup Plus is almost half full. Ive gone back and forth with tech support (who are helpful and responsive) and they cant figure out what the problem is. Is it software or hardware, who knows? Im a longtime Seagate shareholder (I know, I know!) so it pains me to have to send it back, but this product and its software just dont work for me. Not recommended until they figure out its glitches. **Update** After hours of phone support and alterations to my computer system, the drive is finally working properly - barely. However, I had to explicitly omit the backup of any and all photos and videos from my original internal hard drive. Yes, I have a lot of family and work photos and a few videos but no more than the typical person. The reason for omitting the photos and videos is that it takes up to 10 hours to run a basic daily backup. Thats unacceptable. And whats the point of having a backup hard drive if its necessary to omit 10 years of family photos from the backup process? Even omitting the photos and videos, it still takes a minimum of 20 minutes to backup my original internal drive and thats if Ive only created one or two files during the day. Thats painfully slow IMO, but at least it backs up my work files and appears to be functioning properly now for the most part. Recommended but with reservations.

This drive works as specd and I have two - one bought 15 months again and the other 39 months ago. No issues with either EXCEPT - the versions of this labeled Hub which act as extension USB ports also have a problem with Windows. Windows will NOT RELEASE THEM to eject. Win7 or Win10. It always says it is busy even when you have no programs or Windows Explorer accessing it and it has been idle for an hour. The only way to safely release is to reboot and unplug it when computer gets to bios stage (or do a shutdown). This CAN be very inconvenient. So you might consider buying the NON-HUB version - which Windows will release. I have 2 hub versions and 3 non-hub versions and a few computers - and this is extremely consistent behavior.

I purchased 8TB drive 14 months ago for purpose of it being attached to NAS for a differential backups. NAS recognized it in a breeze, only issue NAS has is that it can not let the drive into sleep mode. I realized this after two months of continuous run on this poor desktop aimed harddrive inside its neat piano black enclosure with convenience of expanding your USB3.0 ports to additional two. Fortunately, the constant strain onto this non-workstation drive havent had any impacts whatsoever. It remains to be superbly quiet while being amazingly fast with a limit of 151MB/s I have noticed on desktop while backing up from local SSDs. May not seem too impressive compared to SATA3 speed limits or SSD drives speeds but considering its a single HDD with its capacity platters and quietness, this is rather impressive, especially comparing my old 1TB usb2.0 Drive which is slower than one 6th of this drives performance. Spin-up is lengthy but the drive supports sleep mode while a source its plugged into via USB cable is turned off and I would say power on spin up time sacrifice is a great feature vs shorter drive life. Once its booted its access time is snappy, may take couple of seconds at most but then again, this is a mechanical drive which does well also in this regard. Best feature is the front USB HUB, and If I knew I will once buy this drive, I would save 30 bucks by skipping the purchase of 4 port USB3.0 hub that also needs power adapter. This drives front hub suffices my needs for USB3.0 ports by itself and places them right where I need it to be next to external optical drive and a card reader separated from the desktop case into a furniture piece with opening for what I call a media peripherals cabinet, it is very convenient just for this matter itself as I hide the wiring clutter in the back of it and all looks neat and tidy. If you keep the drive exposed, you may also like the breathing style logo LED backlight while its at works. When in standby, it just stays lit and isnt intrusively bright. Software-wise, the drive comes pre-loaded with a small application that will forward your web browser to seagate web site regarded to registration of particular product that could be skipped and still provided you with utilities: Toolkit - free of charge for your desktop backups being done once, daily, weekly, monthly, atm or differential backup. RescueData - could be downloaded for a charge and sadly, this utility is not free. Theres a fame that Seagate drives are defective and dont last long, yet I have never had an issue with Maxtor nor Seagate drives since late 90s. Actually It was Western Digital that gave me issues on three different drives. I have 2 seagate IronWolf drives in NAS and are running 24/7 and report healthy with 0 errors for the past year and a half or so. I strongly advise you, dont give on others reviews bashing this brand, seagate honors warranties and wont try to steal your money as some state. This honest company does not need to damage its name. In pc world its just fan war between the brands just like consoles flame wars go about PS vs Xbox, so do the PC spheres go Intel vs AMD, Nvidia vs AMD, Seagate vs WD where in reality, all the products perform about the same and only winner is who throws a better competing price tag onto their product. You are not getting damaged, or 50% less performing product, those who try to tell you that, are completely out of the picture. I dont even believe their said experience with DOA drives, unless they play football with them, place them next to 300WATT speakers magnets, plug and unplug usb or power cord while the drive is being accessed at the very moment pretending its hot-swappable and expect everything to be fine. Of course it wont, nor would it be okay with any brand HDD or SSD. NOTE! 8TB drive, as of Feb. 2020 has a wrong price. Its only 50cents cheaper than 10TB version, whilst I purchased this over a year ago for 149.99 - this needs a FIX do not buy 8TB Drive for more than US$150! UPDATE: Soon itll be 4 years of daily use with backups set once a week, rather occasional write of random files ranging from single kB up to well over a GB, numerous daily accesses. Still snappy & quiet, performs just like on Day 1 and as excpected, CHKDSK report in provided screenshot confirmed theres 0 bad sectors. What more to state than this drive is phenomenal? Only that I truly feel sorry for unhappy owners of this flawless drive. Since my purchase in Dec of 18 price went up 22 dollars and STILL holds lowest price tag for 8TB external drive with added bonus in form of USB hub other brand drives lack, just cant beat it for the price and considering purchase of another one.

I bought two of these (one for work and the other for redundancy). Plugged one in and formatted it with Disk Utility. I then moved my lightroom pictures onto it and it seemed to run little faster on this than the self powered seagate drives (STEA1000400) that I have purchased previously. It seemed a little loud but I was happy with its performance. And I love being able to plug in my XQD card reader to the available USB 3 ports. Thats handy and fast uploading off my camera. The buzz (kind of like an xbox hum) was perhaps too loud, I wondered, but I figured that was just the way it was going to be if I wanted an inexpensive large volume drive. I left a 4 star review and went on about my day. But Seagate support replied to that review and it got me thinking that perhaps the noise is not normal. I hadnt yet unboxed the second copy, so I then plugged it into my iMac and it was nearly silent. Itll sleep and if I open LR it has an audible spin-up, but then has a very quiet operation. Seagate support is replacing that first drive free of cost so I am changing my review to reflect the fact that its an ideal drive for me. I thought the future was thunderbolt and SSD but the cost of that is excessive so Ill use these drives for the foreseeable future. Perform well and Im really happy with them.

VISTA BACKWARD COMPATIBLE Without installing its on-drive supplied software, I connected this hard drive to my Desktop HP Pavilion [model m9425f]. I used the included USB cord to connect it to the HPs USB 3 front port. (I doubt if beyond a possible decrease in transfer speed, that it would have mattered if I had connected it to an USB 2 port.) The HP has Windows Vista Home Premium as its Operating System. There were no problems with the computer recognizing and installing the driver for this hard drive. Subsequently, without any problems, I downloaded approximately 1TB of data from my desktops hard dive onto this hard dive. Then I connected it to an ACER IX desktop [model Aspire 1X AXC-603-UW15 with Windows 10 as it operating system. As before I did not install the included software that is on this hard drive. Windows 10 had no problem finding an installing the driver for this hard drive. I have downloaded approximately 1TB from the ACER onto it. Knowing that it is so easily backward compatible, I am now going to buy a second one. UPDATE: did buy a second one - would like to buy the higher capacity models.

Like having your own steel drum band on your desk! This drive runs hot and as such it will serve you well as a hand warmer during the cold winter months. It is also very loud every once in a while! For a while, I thought that it was the reverberation of the drive against the wood on my desk. However, it is still loud even after placing shock absorbing silicone footings on the drive. It takes a bit of concentration to ignore all the clicking and clacking noise coming from this drive. I have another Seagate drive that is barely audible. But this one, if it could keep a rhythm, would equate to having my own steel drum band playing on my desk. The drive is perfectly compatible with Mac; just plug it in and youre ready to go. I use it as a data drive for my huge collection of movies instead of how it is marketed, as a backup drive. It could be a backup drive, but I would never keep a physical backup on site. The two USB ports in the front work great and sold me on this drive. The status light is the best that I have seen on any drive. It has a soft faded transition instead of the annoying rapid blinking found on older drive cases. Seagate desperately needs to muffle this drive and throw in a cooling fan. It runs too hot leading me to trust it only because I use an online backup service.

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!

Over 6 trillion bytes of data is still not, technically, 6tb. NTFS also eats at each sector a hare. But, Im banging an old gong about the truth in advertising with drives. Hasnt changed anything yet. So, its a 5.45tb drive. Expect that. Size aside, Im on Windows 10, beefy sata 3.0 (6gb/s), SSD boot disk and 2tb internal. Plugged into the back of the comp in a usb3 port, now I have two usb3 ports in the front. VERY handy. First x-fer was from the SSD. Large files maxed at 133MB/s, scattered small files bog down to about 5MB/s average. So, its just under half the speed of usb3 at full tilt. Thats fast for a spinning drive. Faster, apparently, than the 2tb drive inside my system, which topped out under 100MB/s... might be time for more upgrades. The last bit I didnt expect, but it kinda looks, physically, like it belongs on top of my tower. Its practically a useless element of the drive, but it definitely looks a little sexy. Sexiness does not seem to impede performance.

Ive bought 3 of them, so far. Two of them have been working great since around December of last year. Its really hard to beat the price on these things, when they go on sale. I wouldnt try to play games off of them or anything that requires a lot of random reading/writing to the disk. However, its great as an archive drive, seeing how thats literally what these things are made for. I store most of my Plex library on one of these and havent had any issues with streaming stuff off of it. Technically, random reading isnt usually too big a deal, I just wouldnt do anything that involves a lot of random writes to the disk. The one likely exception that comes to mind would be a game like Diablo 3 that rapidly loads assets from the hard drive as you play. So, some games might actually run just fine off of one. Either way, I didnt really test playing games off of one but I wouldnt recommend trying it and I think most people have moved to SSDs for installed apps like games at this point anyways. The third one makes an annoying buzzing noise while idle. Im guessing theres something wrong with its ability to park the drive heads. So, I already setup a replacement for it. The built in USB hub is convenient but it also makes the drive incompatible with devices like the PS4, even though you can use the hub free Expansion version of the drive just fine with it. Keep in mind, the PS4 only supports up to 4 TB, currently. Its worth noting these things do not have on/off switches and they will not power up until the USB cable is connected. I had long stuck solely to internal drives, so I was a little surprised to find out you cant even get them to power on with just the AC adapter plugged in. This seems to be common functionality for external hard drives because most of them dont even have power adapters and the ones that do typically only power up when connected by USB. Its also worth mentioning that while its generally safe to connect an external drive while your PC/console/whatever is turn on, disconnecting it isnt generally considered safe. In other words, the only safe way to disconnect an external drive is after powering off whatever device you connect it to. Technically, you should be okay as long as nothing is being actively written to it but with background processes accessing drives without giving any form of notice, it can be a gamble. Since Seagate drives go on sale more often, I have 7 Seagate external drives compared to 2 Western Digital ones. All were bought online. Out of all of them, only the one 8 TB Backup Plus has had any problems. Normally, Im a strictly WD person, since all of my internal drives are WD and have been for over a decade. Its simply because Ive always had better luck with them. 100% of my internal Seagate drives since 1996, have had issues and 100% of my WD drives have lasted long enough to be retired due to being obsolete. That said, Ive only owned 2 Seagate internal drives and probably over a dozen WD drives, neither of which is enough to really say anything about either brand. Also, bad drives tend to happen either in batches or to specific models. Sometimes the problem is with the model itself and sometimes its as simple as bad handling during shipping. I average about 80-85 MB/s transfer speeds, even on the one Im sending back. Transfer speeds can be affected by any number of things, from drivers to the USB controller chip on your motherboard to any cable or hub connected in-between. So, if youre getting significantly worse speeds than others are reporting, you have an issue and it may or may not be the drive itself. Be sure to save yourself some grief and verify its specifically the drive causing any issues before returning one. Try other USB ports, other USB cables (if you can,) other PCs, be sure to connect it direct without a USB hub and update your drivers. If none of that fixes your problems and you have other external drives performing just fine, its fairly definite at that point you have a defective drive. Always be sure to test stuff out within the return window, if you can help it. Its been my experience that sending a hard drive in for an RMA with the manufacturer can result in you being sent a refurb drive to replace your broken new one. Refurb hard drives are something you generally dont want because they already have a bit of wear on them which can have an impact on both performance and longevity. Getting a refurb from an RMA seems to be a common issue with computer components and electronics in general but hard drive manufacturers are notorious for this. Something like what formatting you use on a drive can make a huge difference, even if it doesnt seem that important. WD external drives tend to come with exFAT formatting. Some PCs will refuse to boot with an external hard drive connected that is formatted with exFAT. I know, I ran into that very issue myself. Im not talking about a Windows or driver problem here, it flat out refused to even POST. These drives come with NTFS formatting, which is what I prefer. Another thing to watch out for is that nearly all external drives, these included, use passive cooling. If you make the mistake of putting two of these drives too close to each other, theyre pretty much guaranteed to overheat. So, watch your spacing. I started getting blue screens and couldnt figure out why until I realized two my external drives had slide together, while I wasnt looking. Overall, these things are a great deal, as long as you get one that works. The part of me that remembers using a single 500 MB drive for everything is amazed at how big and cheap storage is these days. The part of me that remembers seeing storage size grow by a factor of 10 on nearly a yearly basis is disappointed a little at the slow down that happened when hard drives started to approach 1 TB. Based on the growth rate I had witnessed during the late 90s and early 2000s, I expected to see at least 1 PB drives at around $200-$300 each by now. Im not even sure if its a problem of the market or tech that slowed progress. Anyways, I have over 37 TB in external storage and most of that was filled the day I got it. The endless quest for more storage space continues.

I have 2 identical drives setup to mirror each other for data protection. 1 drive runs consistently at least 10 degrees hotter than the other. Same environment for both drives. Worried about quality control and length of time before a drive fails. Too soon to know as of now.