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

i am a power user for hard drives. i use big drives running them 24/7 (on Mac). i bought external/internal hard drives since 1987. from all major brands. popular Western Digital have been the worst in terms of quality/noise/speed/lifespan. the BEST overall drives have always been SEAGATE ; ) from design to quality to lifespan to speed and least noise. this is my 2nd Seagate Backup Plus Hub 10TB. advantages: 1. quality 2. speed 3. reliably 4. size: the smallest ext. 10TB i know of 5. industrial design 6. even has 2 USB3 ports in front (for once ; ) - to fast-charge mobiles + for chaining more drives the only improvement i can suggest: 1. more than maximum 10TB 2. different colors/finishings on drive housing the TOP internal drive in quality/speed/reliability/lifespan is one that use HELIUM (clean room) inside - that is, the Seagate Enterprise Capacity | ST10000NM0016 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DAI6JUS/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) Seagate is top - externally or internally (on drives ; ) Has been top in design/quality since 1980s and not slacking off ; )

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!

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.

The unit is simple to install, and has tremendous storage capability with configurable back up schemes. However, the replace I just received does the same thing as the one I returned for the same reason. The units Toolkit software that sets the back up schedule will suddenly indicate that it cannot find the storage unit: this requires unplugging the power cable to the unit and re-inserting it. The light on the unit will once again appear and opening the Toolkit will show the existence of the storage unit and it will then continue to back up. Support from Seagate is sadly complicated, and nearly always results in on-line texting after a very long waiting period. To connect with live/phone technical support is virtually impossible. Although still under warranty, I had to pay nearly $30.00 to return it via UPS. Seagate would not send an RMA ticket with shipping paid by them — even though they initially (and now subsequently) sent me a malfunctioning unit. The reurn unit sent by them was refurbished, not new, despite their sending a defective unit in the first place. Once again, Warranty Support and Techinical Support is overly complicated, cumbersome, and slow. I received my refurbished return after nearly a month. This does not speak well of Seagate or its commitment to its customers. What is more, the Warranty on the replacement unit is precisely the same date as on the initial unit of almost a year ago. That in itself is pretty lame. I will not order from Seagate again.

I purchased this as a slightly more affordable alternative to a WD equivalent I purchased just before it. Needing another 6TB this was appealing. However, the Seagate has MUCH lower performance. The WD gets just over 90MB/s read and write. The Seagate, however, only gets about 50MB/s write and 60MB/s read. Same controller card, same system. Tested with both files and Blackmagic. The small file read/write is pretty abysmal. Further, its sleep is unpredictable. Start a large file restoration from the cloud and occasionally its gone to sleep, forcing the entire process to start over again once I wake it. Would not buy again, but itll do the job of serving as a backup to my backup.

I rated this 5 stars because the item itself is as stated and is a good hard drive. Just beware, I didnt read when I bought it, it needs to be plugged in and stay plugged in. Meant for more desk top type setup.

We have been using this back up hard drive for a few months now and its going strong. Its about 1/3 full and has not hic-upped yet. The USB ports is a nice feature and can be used to copy from one drive to this one. The logo at the top of the drive provides the power and status lights. The external power supply is a large all in one style rather than the previous drives we have bought in the past which are a dual corded brick. About the only thing I wish was different is that you could lay this drive on its side. Seagate mentions you are not suppose to do that with this model and it needs to remain standing upright, boooo! As for the performance it is pretty decent for being a back up drive. This is a shingled hard drive so data has to be rewritten since there are over-lapping areas, which means a speed penalty. At first the drive leaps off the line in Windows 7 large file transfers at 60-ish mbps, which will reduce until its hovering around 28ish mbps write speed on USB 2. Its not bad for back up purposes at all, and you could work off from it, but it wouldnt win any speed tests. One key feature that drove us to this Seagate instead of Western Digital and others is the fact this drive is NOT encrypted, and thats what we want. If you have an encrypted drive and the case burns out and the drive itself is fine...you still lose all the data since the two are keyed together and make the drives data is inaccessible without the case. This particular drive is not encrypted, therefore if anything burns out with the case, we can pull the drive and get to our data via computer or another case. We arent carrying confidential files on this thing anyway so we dont need the encryption, I just dont want to lose several years of photo, videos, and music because a circuit burns out in the case. All in all we are happy with the large storage size for the price and the bonus extra USB hub!

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 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.

For the first time I decided to purchase an actual Backup drive instead of doing a copy/paste into an external every month. I had hoped the software included would allow automatic scheduling of my data which it does. The software totes backs up all the data and submits a report of what it backed up and what it skipped. After the initial backup, I discovered, it backs up everything, every time, not just the files accessed since the last backup. It will not tell you there isnt enough room to make another backup, it will simply fail to do a backup. When the drive is full, you have to manually delete old backups for more current backups to be successful. My PC has an Intel Core i5-7600K 3.8GHz Quad-Cor Processor and 16GB DDR4-2400 Memory. This software bogged down my system so slow I had to walk away from it when opening a browser or opening an excel file. After telling it to back up everything on C drive and J drive (both my internal drives) I found the harsh reality. The software thought the documents folder in C drive was a system file so it skipped backing up 1.28TB of data. It also skipped everything with a .docx file extension. Through research I found a thread on the Microsoft website saying old Word, Excel and PDF files can be identified as System Files using this software. So my ending recommendation is, if you plan to take this hard drive and cull it for use elsewhere, plan to use the software to backup only video and pictures, use it for the extra USB ports it allows for data access or charging, this may be the drive for you. Do not expect the software to do much past copying pictures and videos with any reliability however.