Seagate Desktop Drive 8000 GB 8TB external Hard Drive, 3.5 Inch, USB 3.0

I bought this drive (10TB version) to use as a media storage device for my Plex server. I run my Plex server on an older (2013) apple iMac that is running MacOS Catalina. When I first unboxed the drive, it looked nice, but when I plugged it into the power and then the USB on the back of my computer, it wouldn't show up. I couldn't get it to show up in my Finder window, on my desktop, or even in Disk Utility. I did all the tricks to show all drives and all volumes, but it just didn't even recognize that it was plugged in at all. I read some of the other reviews, lots of people complaining about how it wouldn't work on their mac etc..., I thought that maybe I was going to have to return the drive and figure out something else (it comes preformatted in exFAT, but as I said, MacOS Catalina wouldn't even acknowledge it was plugged in at all, so there was no way for me to reformat into the the system I wanted). Luckily I had a Mac Laptop with BigSur installed. On my laptop, it didn't show up in Finder or the desktop at first, but it did recognize it in Disk Utility (again, you have to set it to show all drives and volumes in the view). There I was able to select it, then reformat it as MacOS Journaled (or whatever file system you wanted, but that is what I use on my older Mac). Once I did that, I was able to plug it into my older Mac, and it showed up in Finder, Desktop, and Disk Utility. I actually reformatted again on the old mac (just to be safe, but probably not really needed as it was reading, I just wanted to make sure it would work on the old mac the way I wanted it to). As I'm typing this, it's just finishing backing up the 4TB of media from my old drive, it's been whirring away for about 24 hours now, no problems so far. So as long as you are willing (and have the newer macOS available), then this is a great external hard drive for Macs, just don't expect it to work natively right out of the box (but external hard drives rarely do). That being said, I am happy with the price and performance so far, hoping 10TB will last me quite a while (my old drive was 6TB and I thought I would never even come close to filling that up, but I don't like to run my drives too full, so using 4TB out of 6TB was more than I liked, so this 10TB should fit the bill nicely for a while anyway).

M. Stevenson · 2022-11-19 · via amazon

First off this drive is right in the sweet spot of having enough storage but not being too expensive. I got it for a bit over 120 but considering the 10tb was over 60 more, I think I got a great deal. I will say this though, throw the cable that comes with it away and get yourself a quality 24ga or better one. The USB B to A cable that is roughly about 2 feet long IS JUNK!!! I couldn't get it to get any higher than 50 MB/s and I was like uhm, my backup plus drive which completely utilizes the bus to power it was getting 120-150MB/s so this should be WAY Faster... And I was right. I disconnected the cable after cancelling a backup of Acronis, and ejected it, removed power cord then USB and replaced it with the one that came with my Seagate Backup Plus and it immediately jumped to 200MB/s and kept going, dropping only to about 190MB/s So I can testify this drive is completely bottleknecked by the darn cable it comes with. I saw others with similar problem, and I was certain it was what indeed it was, an inferiour costcutting measure that sucks for the customer especially when they don't know why it's so slow. For me, who has several cables lying around, including some from monoprice, I dropped a 3 footer that is now making life a lot easier, as the BUP had only a 18" cable. Drive is humming along, and I have a little fan near it for temp sake, as I am now backing up my server which has a raid 5 consisting of 3-4TB SAS Seagate constellations ES.3 drives. It took a while since it was about half full lol, but at ~200MB/s it didn't take as long as the BUP did. Really nice drive and very sparkly lol. I will say I hate having to plug in a backup drive but for my server I had to since it's kinda difficult to find any 8-10TB external drives that only use USB 3.0 Power. This will do fine though as it will see minimal use only around once a month or more...

Riboild · 2019-12-04 · via amazon

Purchased in December 2020. Has run 24/7 for five years with little heat issue. Yes, I know why 24/7, I have my reasons. Stopped working intermittently then completely would not start when powered off then back on. So I decided to disassemble it as the warranty was long out of date. Here is what I found: A SG Barracuda HDD ST8000DM004, you are still able to purchase this SMR HDD as bare drive. Good if not reading and writing large files constantly. I still prefer CMR overall. The HDD is still good and loads up in a docking station. Good News files were recovered. Better News I now have a large drive I can use in my server for continued storage. Time to pull out the meter... As it turns out the control board in the enclosure has bit the dust. Figures the control board would fail first! The power supply is still good. Overall if you are buying for a backup drive it is worth it depending on price fluctuations. If you are not computer savvy you may have issues down the road when the control board fails. Look fo rthe videos pulling the internal drive out is easy. Suggestions here for the less informed: Back up your backup. If its electronic save it in several places IF it is an important file!

Bob · 2026-01-04 · via amazon

About me: 25+ years in the IT industry covering enterprise storage and among other things. Only saying this because I understand the product I'm reviewing. That said: Great price on a gob of external storage. Reasonably quick access times for desktop use, I wasn't looking for a barn-burner, just something to hold digital media and backups. This does the job nicely. However... Out of the box, the thing goes into sleep mode. A *lot*. The net result is that it makes your Windows PC slower, because it has to spin up EVERY TIME you access the file system. Downloading something? The "Save As" box takes a lot longer to appear, because the drive has to spin up. Looking for that picture of your kids and you on a holiday to upload to social media? Wait a few seconds, because the drive has to spin up when Explorer gets activated. Over time, this adds up and it's frankly unacceptable. This problem has a resolution, though. Download the Seagate Dashboard software and set sleep time to "never." I really think this is a crap solution though, I have to download a 150MB+ application to simply make the drive behave like almost every other external drive I've ever used? Dumb, Seagate, just dumb. It takes a star away from an otherwise solid product.

Mark Broge · 2023-06-23 · via amazon

First, we should all know by now that with a few exceptions, there is no way to play Series games from any external drive, not even from an SSD for those wondering, but we CAN play games from all previous Xbox consoles from an external drive. I read so many reviews on so many drives prior to purchasing this one. Did I purchase this one because it has the best performance? No. I could’ve purchased an SSD with a much higher write/read speed but I would’ve gotten a fraction of the storage at a much higher price. I decided on this HDD because at $164, the dollar per TB is almost impossible to beat and with how I intend to use this HDD, the performance is more than adequate. So, I write this review in hopes that it’ll help someone else decide whether this drive is for them. I read so much about read/write speeds when researching HHDs and I got to thinking, the read speed for a lot of us will be more important than the write speed. Why? Because our internet’s download speeds will max out way before the HDDs write speed capability is maxed out. So here is where the read speed comes into play. If you use this drive to store all your games, including Series games, and copy rather than move the games to the internal drive, then you’re only “moving” your games in one direction, and it just so happens that copying from this HDD to the internal drive is very fast. I copied Jedi: Fallen Order, Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 from the HDD to the internal and they copied at a pretty much sustained 1.5Gbps (187 MBps). At 103GB FH5 took no longer than 15 or so minutes to copy. To me, a 15 minute wait is totally worth the savings/storage you get vs an SSD or dare I say the $400 2TB expansion card!!! At this price point I think it’s hard to make an argument against this HDD. I don’t know if the read speeds will be impacted as the HDD fills up so I will update the review once I’ve had more time with it. On a side note, the drive came in a generic cardboard box which I was not expecting. Don’t know if that means anything but nonetheless that’s the way it was shipped.

gt2quick · 2022-08-31 · via amazon

Best Buy

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MSI

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Newegg

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Newegg (Open Box)

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VALUE SCORE

Cap

128

Read

550MB/s

Type

NVMe

Cap

128

Read

550MB/s

Type

NVMe