Features:

  • Ideal for everyday desktop and computing storage
  • 1TB capacity stores 120 HD video, or 200,000 photos, or 250,000 songs
  • 7200 RPM
  • Store data faster with SATA 6GB/s interface
  • 2 year warranty; 64MB cache
Successful Install!

Actually the install was relatively easy. There are a few youtube videos that can help if you need them. My wife had downloaded Windows 10 when it was free for the asking, so I had no disc to reload when I rebooted the computer. (unfortunately the old hard drive crashed out of the blue so there was no retrieving anything). There is a way to do the Win 10 download again but I had no evidence of the original install. I did however have the original Windows 7 discs so I loaded those and then did a series of online updates and she was back in business. She never liked Windows 10 so this was a great upgrade for her. Hard drive works great. The computer is faster than ever because all the bloatware is gone. And best of all it was done for $40+. What did we do before the internet and Amazon!!!!

It's New. Guess I got lucky.

After reading some of the other reviews where people said they received used drive (sometimes up to 4-years-old!), I was a bit hesitant to order these, despite being listed as "New". But the price was too good to pass up. At the time, it was literally half the price of any similar drive. So I bought 2. They arrived today. Crystal Disk Info shows that they're new. Yay! The packaging was sparse, so I'm glad they weren't damaged in shipping. Just a sealed, anti-static bag inside a lightly padded paper envelope, loose in the box with some large packing bubbles. These are bare drives and come with no screws. I had kept the extra screws and drive trays that came with my case, so that wasn't a problem. They're kind of loud. I have a 5-year-old 2TB, 7200 rpm Toshiba drive that has never really been audible. Compared to that, these drives are quite chatty. However, they're ~50% faster as well than the older drive. I've attached some Crystal Disk Mark screenshots with the performance of both a single drive as well as a striped (RAID 0) configuration.

Love these

I love these drives, I have used most of the major manufacturers over the years and seagate has never let me down. I currently have 2 of this model, a 4tb hybrid and an 8tb model in my main rig. I bought my first ST4000DM000 years ago and added another about a year later. They have been used hard, very hard, I had a bad SATA cable I was diagnosing and ran the hard drives stats looking for relevant info and noticed my oldest of these had a ridiculous amount of operating hours on it and no problems. Drives are quiet and operate smoothly through the toughest of abuse. My original nowadays acts as kind of a pseudo loading dock for downloads before I relocate them to a more permanent location. That drive has had many times it's capacity written and overwritten over and over. I keep expecting that eventually, like an old car with insane mileage, it will eventually develop issues but it just keeps chugging away.

Solid Drive

Easy to install right out of the box. Plug and Play, was recognized right away. haven't had any problems in the time I've had this drive in operation. Very pleased so far. Seagate was the going drive even in the early 1980's. Long before Western Digital came along. I prefer Seagate over WD because of their long years of experience with Hard Drives and reliability. I have had too many WD drive fail on me. Fast Writes & Reads (176mb/184mb) - 2X1TB Raid 0 Performance (340mb/380mb) - Affordable - Reliable Brand Other Thoughts: Very impressed with the performance of this drives. It's amazing how much hard drives have improved over the years. I ran this on Raid 0 on a Mac Pro with a SATA II Interface and was surprised at the read and write performance. Now obviously an SSD is still going to be faster in many respects, but I honesty, I'm super happy I chose this over an SSD simply because of the storage space. I've owned an SSD, just so everyone knows. So I'm aware of the amazing speeds, but for those who are price conscious and need more storage this is a great alternative.

Compatible with Mac Pro Early 2008 running Yosemite. Combine with an SSD PCIe drive for excellent value internal drive backups

Compatible with Mac Pro Early 2008 running Yosemite. Combine with an SSD PCIe drive for excellent value internal drive backups With 5000 favorable review, there is isn't a strong reason for posting another review; however, I wanted to make sure that any one considering this drive for a Mac Pro Early 2008 would know it is compatible if they did a google search and found this review. Key points for anyone who is interested in the Mac Pro Early 2008. The Mac Pro Early 2008 is limited to SATA-II (3 Gbps) for the 4 bays in the enclosure. When combined with a PCI-e SSD card for fast performance, inexpensive drives like this Seagate 4TB, make an ideal backup or scratch storage solution, and the sacrifice in performance isn't noticeable in that application. The configuration I am running now is surprisingly affordable and very powerful: 1) 32 GB RAM, 2) Sonnet Tempo Pro PCIe-SSD Card Controller with 2 SSD Slots - loaded with 2 - 1 TB SSD Transcend SSD370 cards, - I use these SSD drives for photo and video editing, 3) 4 Internal HDD bays -- Bay1: 1TB HDD, Bay2: 1TB: HDD, Bay3: 4TB, Bay4, 4TB Bay 1 and Bay 2 are "scratch drives" Bay 3 is online storage and Bay 4 is a backup of Bay 3. Older External Enclosures: Not compatible unless marked "4T" or higher I did discover that some of my earlier external enclosures ( I have 2 older ICY Dock Firewire-800, eSata Sata-II, and USB 2.0 MB559UEB-1SMB units) that worked well with a 2T drive, do not work this 4T drive. After reviewing the ICY Dock website, that problem seems to be limited to the older, discontinued models like I have.

4TB: Good, reliable drives.

[This review is for the 4TB model. I bought three of them and have used them for a year and a half at the time of writing this review. TL;DR: Good, reliable drives.] I've hated Seagate and Western Digital for years -- horrible results from both, including all but one of the Seagates I ever tried not only failing to work, but one even took out my system drive with it when I first tried to boot with it installed. (Plenty of experience and good results from other drive, so no, I wasn't doing anything wrong.) However, those two companies have bought up all the others over the years, so I finally had no remaining alternatives. I researched the reviews here and on newegg, and like some of the drives I chose in the past from other brands, the drive had mostly good reviews, and the large majority of the bad reviews were DOAs. I don't care if a DOA is the manufacturer's fault or the shipping company's fault; they don't bother me as much, because despite the inconvenience, at least you don't lose any data. So if a drive is going to be either DOA or reliable, that's good enough for me. As I mentioned at the top, I bought three of these. I put one in each of my three external usb3 drive arrays (using software RAID). One is my actual data volume, and the other two are Time Machine backups (using Mac Minis). I rotate the backups off-site every week. So one of the drives is running all the time, and the other two are running half the time each, a week on and a week off. No problems at all from any of the drives so far; they're all running perfectly so far. Noise is average for a desktop drive -- not loud, but not silent. Personally, I keep mine in the closet, simply because the external cases I use have fan mounts that rattle; that's louder than the hard drive (and somewhat annoying). I think most fans are louder than the hard drives even if they're not rattling against their mounts. I can't really say much one way or the other about speed. Until recently, although the external case is usb3, I was using it on a machine that only had usb2. I recently upgraded, and of course accessing them is much faster now, but I haven't clocked them or anything. (And since they're RAIDed, I wouldn't be clocking just these drives alone anyway.) I'm not ready to say Seagate is a good company based on one good drive model, but these drives have been great for the last year and a half. Because of that, I'm more open to using their drives in the future.

... hard drives from Amazon over the years with very good results. I ordered one of these drives and ...

I have ordered many hard drives from Amazon over the years with very good results. I ordered one of these drives and once it arrived put it through my normal test routine and then eventually put the drive into use. I was so impressed with it I ordered another one within a week. Hence the 5 stars. The second drive was a dud, the first dud I have ever received from Amazon, or indeed any online purchase. I opened the box, put it in my drive dock and went to format the drive - and it was immediately wonky. The initialization using Apple's Disk Utility stopped half way through and then froze for a long time. Not a good sign. Eventually it DID complete the process, so I switched over to BlackMagic Disc Speed Test. (The week before I had run the test on about 15 drives and catalogued the results). I used a 5 GB stress test. These are supposed to cycle between writing and reading tests every 8 seconds. Right away the performance was unusual - the write portion of the test would hang for long periods of time but would eventually complete, move to the read test and do the same. I tried copying some data and the performance was quite unusual - It was clear that something was wrong with the drive. I decided to return the drive, so I went back to re-initialize the disk using Apple's Disk Utility - again it froze half way through. And then Disk Utility CRASHED, not once but twice!! Second time my computer rebooted itself. I contacted Amazon and asked for a replacement. I will update this post after I test that one. --------- The replacement drive arrived, was initialized, tested,,partitioned and about 2 TB transferred to it successfully. Have even run some very dense multi-track audio sessions from the drive. It's been less than a week, but the drive is performing well so far.

Need A Spacious Harddrive? C'mon Right Up!

I've had this 4TB drive since September of last year. So far it's been pretty friggin' great. It's had virtually no issues. It does have that "sound issue" like other Seagate drives have but it's really a non-issue since it doesn't adversely affect the drive's reliablity. Sure I might of been one of the few people who got a winning 4TB Seagate, but I do strongly suggest you get this drive if you're in need or desire a huge drive capacity. My USB 3.0 drive has been able to copy stuff to this drive at roughly 100MBs. That's sustained transfer rates too. Also what you NEED to know about this drive is it does NOT come pre-formatted. Which means you'll need to have Windows or whatever OS you're using to manually access the drive through it's Drive Manager software, and manually format this drive however you want. I chose to make the entire drive one giant partition. Oh yeah! I think you need a 64bit OS to be able to use the entire drive as a single partition. This drive also handles HD movies quite well. No stuttering..

Absolutely love this drive! 160 MB/s in single mode and extremely silent

With all the current fad of SSDs you might think that mechanical hard drives like this Barracuda are becoming obsolete. Nothing further from the truth. This thing in stand-alone mode blazes at 160 MB/s (for hours if needed). Pair it with another 'Cuda in RAID-0 (most boards do it for free) and you will have past 300 MB/s speeds for years to come and will not degrade like all SSDs do, specially in write mode. They're silent, have very high seek speeds and cost about $0.03 per GB. I bought mine during Black Friday at a mere $109. For that money, an SSD would give barely 128 GB or 23X costlier per byte(!). Just to briefly hit 500 MB/s occasionally on a good day and only when the NAND chips are still brand-new? I'm not THAT hurried. Suggestion: If you can afford it, buy an additional couple of 'Cudas, pair them in RAID-5 and you will have a 6TB, redundant, super-fast rig with nearly enterprise-level data security. For pennies per Gigabyte! The end results are more evident than any current CPU or RAM upgrade for the same amount of money. P.S. This is maybe my 6th consecutive Seagate Barracuda that I owned in the past couple of years. I still have plugged a 160 GB PATA (ribbon cable) drive that chugs at 45 MB/s when called (I keep it for Windows XP 32-bit compatibility). WDs *look* fancier, but the Green Caviars could NEVER work in RAID-0 as my trusted and cheaper 1.0TB x 2 Barracudas had for years. Today they keep putting out 250 MB/s without tricked-out caches that wear out in microseconds. P.S.S. I first bought a 3TB 'Cuda that was DOA (dead on arrival), and Amazon Prime immediately sent me a replacement while I returned the damaged unit. Talk about service!

Works great after the driver is installed.

I bought this as a storage drive, not a boot drive. My BIOS is a couple of years old and does not support drives larger than 2 TB so I wasn't sure how well this would work out for me. After reading some reviews, I was a bit concerned that it would interfere with my Acronis True Image Home 2012. When I first installed the drive, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit did not recognize the full 3 TB in Disk Management from the Computer Management window. In fact it only recognized 746 GB! I thought I was in trouble. But after going to Seagate's web site and downloading and installing the DiscWizard driver (v13.0.14387), I was set. DiscWizard is an Acronis product taylored for the Seagate drive. So I tried a little experiment with Acronis True Image Home 2012. First of all I need to explain that I have never installed True image on my HDD. I only use it to boot up in Acronis' operating system from the DVD drive to make full images of my boot drives (two WD3200AAJS 320 GB drives in RAID 0) to another internal drive or external USB disk. Step 1) Created an image before installing the drive and the DiscWizard software. Step 2) Installed the new 3 TB drive and the Seagate DiscWizard software. Step 3) Using Disk Management, I saw that I now had a one volume Basic Disk. Step 4) Began using the new drive for storage to make sure I could read/write to it OK. Step 5) Rebooted Windows a couple of times to make sure the drive was still recognized by the op system. (no problems encountered) Step 6) Using Acronis True Image Home 2012, I restored the RAID 0 array to the image I created before installing the DiscWizard software. Step 7) Rebooted into Windows to make sure the drive was still recognized. It was! I concluded that the Seagate driver must be installed on the 3 TB drive, and not the boot drive. Bottom line, the drive works great with my system and now I have lots of storage space!

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