Seagate One Touch 8TB External Hard Drive Desktop HDD - USB-C Compatible with Most Windows and macOS, Rescue Recovery (STNB8000400)

As a music producer, my last external drive was much smaller and it began to fill up quickly. I bought this Seagate because of the known quality, and the size. I understand that with a Windows computer, it’s plug and play. If you use a MacBook Pro, it is a simple task to prepare it. I’ll copy instructions for Mac preparation. It was ready to go in about a minute. It’s not something to worry about. Here are the instructions: First an easy installation, you’ll use Disk Utility on the Mac to erase and reformat the drive; it’s straightforward and only needs to be done once before you start using it. 1. Decide on a format For a drive used only with your MacBook Pro for plugins/projects: APFS (best for SSDs, modern macOS, fast and robust). If you also want to plug the same drive into Windows regularly: ExFAT (works read/write on both Mac and Windows, fine for large audio files). 2. Erase and format the drive Connect the new external drive to your Mac. Open Disk Utility (Applications → Utilities → Disk Utility). In the menu bar, choose View → Show All Devices so you see the whole physical disk, not just volumes. In the left sidebar, select the top-level entry for that external drive (it will usually show the manufacturer’s name and “Media”). Click the Erase button at the top. In the dialog: Name: Something like “Audio Plugins” or “Samples”. Format: Choose APFS (or ExFAT if you need Mac/Windows). Scheme: Choose GUID Partition Map if offered. Click Erase and wait for it to complete, then click Done. After this, the drive will mount on the desktop in the new format and you can start moving plugin content or sample libraries to it. It took time to move data off the old drive and load onto the new drive. That’s natural. With this new Seagate drive, I store all my music plug-ins and virtual instrument files along with a large collection of audio and midi files. When producing music, there’s no delay and everything works fine. With that said, I have the new M4 chip and 48GB of Ram. With that, the computer works fine, but the Seagate also keeps up just fine. This Seagate external drive was a good purchase. It is reliable, portable and built well with a good appearance.

Anthony M. Davis · 2026-04-12 · via amazon

I’ve been using the Seagate Portable 4TB External Hard Drive for a few weeks now and honestly it’s been exactly what I needed. Setup was super simple — literally plug it in and it works. No complicated software, no weird formatting issues. I’m using it mainly with my PC but I’ve also tested it on my PlayStation and it worked without any problems. The 4TB storage is a huge plus. I backed up my entire system image, stored a ton of video files, and still have plenty of space left. Transfer speeds over USB 3.0 are solid — not lightning fast like an SSD obviously, but for a traditional HDD it’s more than fast enough for backups, media storage, and games. It’s lightweight and small, which surprised me. I expected something bulkier for 4TB. It doesn’t get hot and it runs quietly. I just leave it connected most of the time. If you need reliable, large storage for backups, gaming, or just extra space, this is a great value for the price. No complaints so far. Would definitely buy again.

June · 2026-03-01 · via amazon

Fast, fairly rugged, and reliable. It came formatted and also comes with the interface cable in the box. I'm very pleased! These drives are a nice piece of mind and an insurance policy knowing your system is backed up just in case it crashes. Some data cannot be replaced so it's good to have a copy!

Ohio guy · 2026-05-04 · via amazon

When I finally got it to work, it was very good. It has a decent amount of capacity. It isn't as fast as the LaCie d2 Pro, but it got the job done. I had originally decided to return it as my computer, A Mac Studio, did not 'see' it as an available drive, but noted it was out there - just grayed out. This turned out to be caused by my antivirus software (ESET). The software was doing its job, it was just quietly blocking disk access. I fixed that by uninstalling and then reinstalling the AV software. Then it worked fine.

WM173 · 2026-05-08 · via amazon

I use 16 such drives, a mix of Seagates and competitive drives, for my backup solution (two sets of backups of two machines, each of which requires four drives -- I have quite a bit of data -- with one volume set stored offsite at all times). This kind of drive is certainly the most cost-effective solution for 5 TB of bus-powered storage, but it has some limitations. Unfortunately, 4 TB SSDs are still prohibitively expensive for this application, costing about 4x per byte more. 1) It's a shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive. That may be needed to achieve this kind of storage density on platters this small, but it does mean that if you're trying to write multiple terabytes of data to this drive, it will typically slow down drastically after the first 100 GB or so. That may well depend upon the filesystem used on the disk. I'm using ext4fs in a LUKS-encrypted container on Linux; writing 4.5 TB of average 10 MB files took me well over a day. Write throughput frequently dropped under 10 MB/sec for extended period of times, interspersed with short periods of 70-100 MB/sec and averaging about 25 MB/sec. The same applies to drives made by competing manufacturers. This is much less of a problem with incremental backups, which are much smaller and which the drive can handle within CMR cache. 2) If I create an encrypted LUKS container spanning the entire drive, I've found that I get I/O errors when creating the filesystem (mkfs.ext4) or checking the filesystem (with fsck). This does not happen with ordinary filesystem operations. Via a long story related to a single drive that had genuinely gone bad, it led me to believe that all of the Seagate drives in my fleet were bad. There turned out to be a simple enough solution to this: rather than using the entire disk, creating a partition starting 1 MB in. Once I figured that out, I had no further difficulty. This was not an issue with drives made by another vendor. It's not something most people will run into at all (if you use the drive as partitioned from the factory, you'll be fine), and losing 1 MB out of 5 TB is not significant. I suspect it's likely a firmware problem/limitation of some kind interacting with the LUKS container (it did not happen if I did not LUKS-format the drive). It's not a reason not to use this drive, just something to be aware of if you want to use these drives for cheap encrypted backups under Linux. 3) When writing large amounts of data to SMR drives, it's first written to CMR (conventional) cache space on the drive, which is fast (100-140 MB/sec). After writing is complete, the drive will spend some time reorganizing the data on the drive. As such, it is probably a good idea to leave the drive plugged in for some time after writing a large amount of data (I usually leave it for 30 minutes after writing an initial backup to one of these disks).

Robert K · 2025-08-10 · via amazon

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