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

Capacity and tech support is excellent sleep mode for the purpose Im using it isnt very effective cuz its not connected to the computer its actually connected to a TV so I had to get a on/off switch for a USB hub so I can shut off the drive when its not connected to the TV which houses home movies

I purchased this drive December 2018 to extend the storage capacity of my Dell Duo Laptop which I used to edit in Premier pro and Photoshop. Within months the drive capacity as a hub became unreliable and I feared I had purchased another lemon. I have not tried using the two USB ports since back than; but otherwise, today is June 28, 2022 and this drive has served me without incident until now and is still going strong. Look at the photos, for the past three years the drive has been sitting in a sliding keyboard draw, you see the dust it has collected? In this period I have used it to store my video, audio, and photo files - I depend on this drive. She is almost 4 now and I have to expect she will not last forever. I looked at some other drives and read the various reviews and recommendations - none made me feel confident to try something different. Fortunately, the Seagate STEL6000100 Backup Plus Hub 6TB External Hard Drive is still available. Im upgrading to the 8GB and I hope my experience will be again among the 89 % of the more than 9,000 satisfied buyers. I have been happy with my purchase.

I bought this drive so I can house my streaming media (Films, TV Shows, ...) so I needed a high capacity storage drive. It is great in that regard. However, it is very noisy when it operates! really really noisy... When I place it on my desktop, I can feel the vibration created by the disks spinning - Never had that with any other HDD and Ive been around the block for more than a few years. I had to put it on top of my PC so I wont be disturbed with those annoying vibrations. Please keep that in mind before buying this drive!

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 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.

Zero Stars. If you want to buy a product where the power supply dies within the first 2 months and then the only free warranty option is to SEND YOUR DATA & DRIVE to these folks, buy this then. The sign-up and warranty support replacement is overly painful on purpose I suspect. Why did I have to keep typing in my serial number when I could see they had it listed under my account and it is the only product under this account? Intentionally painful in hopes the customer will give up? I used to love this company and used their corporate backup software for which I travelled and trained in FL. I will never trust my data to this now very sad company. I captured the registration and warranty frustrations while filling stuff out and may add that to this review if possible.

If you need a simple space for differential backups of your computer or media storage, this offering by Seagate more than fits the bill. It is not the fastest but as stated its really about a large storage capacity and ability to read or write as needed. It remains moderate to slow but if you use it for playback of media files, it works very very well and doesnt break a sweat as in getting too hot. I purchased this product to store media files that I use with an Nvidia Shield TV. The files range from a few megs to many many gigs in size and to date, no problems. I have tested the device with NTFS formatting and also Mac OS formatting. Neither misses a beat. For those interested in software included, please dont consider my review as a starting point as I didnt need any additional software and thus, formatted the device and wiped out the software. I would recommend this device (to date) as it seems to have had no issues and did exactly what I wanted for the job it was intended for (media storage and playback).

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.

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.

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.