Last updated at 24/07/2024 21:27:45
originally posted on pccasegear.com
I bought 4 Seagate 8TB "Archive" SMR drives in years previously (these are marketed as shingled [multiple tracks are read/re-written with a slight overlap to gain capacity] but with the knowledge they will be quite a bit slower to write) and I saw fairly terrible performance (USB 2.0 sort of transfer speeds). Having told myself never again, I bought one of these new Barracuda 8TB drives not knowing they are now the same, and have now seen the same sort of poor performance... 20MB/s on average for writing (or backup) operations. A quick research of the 'net shows Seagate have quietly moved this terrible tech into these branded drives now. They say they also now contain a bunch of "smarts" to speed up this poor performance for desktop usage, but it hasn't helped me at ... MoreI bought 4 Seagate 8TB "Archive" SMR drives in years previously (these are marketed as shingled [multiple tracks are read/re-written with a slight overlap to gain capacity] but with the knowledge they will be quite a bit slower to write) and I saw fairly terrible performance (USB 2.0 sort of transfer speeds). Having told myself never again, I bought one of these new Barracuda 8TB drives not knowing they are now the same, and have now seen the same sort of poor performance... 20MB/s on average for writing (or backup) operations. A quick research of the 'net shows Seagate have quietly moved this terrible tech into these branded drives now. They say they also now contain a bunch of "smarts" to speed up this poor performance for desktop usage, but it hasn't helped me at all - the HDD is a slow POS to save to. I can't believe I now have a 5th unit that can only be used for "archive" purposes, where you wait forever to save things, but then get sort of OK performance on reading back the data.
originally posted on ebay.com
haven't had enough time to judge the drive. That takes years. I am writing the review to make buyers aware of the fact that if they buy a Seagate drive they should download Seagate toolkit from Seagate support. I had trouble getting my computer to see the drive and later had trouble getting the drive to partition at the full 4TB. The toolkit solved all my questions very quickly and the drive is working fine. Frankly the drive was more of a pain than I expected. One would expect a SATA drive to be plug and play. It wasn't but all is well that ends well. Seagate support was willing to help even in the hours near the holiday, very friendly. The toolkit is very easy to use and covers all bases although Seagate has additional drive utilities that look interesting. ... Morehaven't had enough time to judge the drive. That takes years. I am writing the review to make buyers aware of the fact that if they buy a Seagate drive they should download Seagate toolkit from Seagate support. I had trouble getting my computer to see the drive and later had trouble getting the drive to partition at the full 4TB. The toolkit solved all my questions very quickly and the drive is working fine. Frankly the drive was more of a pain than I expected. One would expect a SATA drive to be plug and play. It wasn't but all is well that ends well. Seagate support was willing to help even in the hours near the holiday, very friendly. The toolkit is very easy to use and covers all bases although Seagate has additional drive utilities that look interesting. Downloaded them but haven't used them yet .If you have the toolkit then installation is a snap. Bottom line is that Seagate is a good company to deal with and Seagate drives are legendary. Well worth the few extra minutes to change the format to use the entire 4TB.
originally posted on bestbuy.ca
Understand this is a SMR technology "storage drive" and priced at a couple cents per GB it's good value. I had an unusual experience when I first installed ST4000DMA04 in my AMD Ryzen 2600 (2018)PC. The video files on this drive would play but stutter and lag while the drive would make strange tick sounds. I ran a PC test utility and got 130MB read speed and 10MB write speed (yes 10MB!). Something wrong so I downloaded Seagate's "Seatools" troubleshooting app and it scanned the entire drive and found no errors, dead sectors, and firmware was up to date. Since diagnostic report was good and I needed a large hard drive for my other PC which is an Intel 4670K (2015)PC I installed this new drive in it and it works flawlessly with no stutter, lag, or strange tick noises. ... MoreUnderstand this is a SMR technology "storage drive" and priced at a couple cents per GB it's good value. I had an unusual experience when I first installed ST4000DMA04 in my AMD Ryzen 2600 (2018)PC. The video files on this drive would play but stutter and lag while the drive would make strange tick sounds. I ran a PC test utility and got 130MB read speed and 10MB write speed (yes 10MB!). Something wrong so I downloaded Seagate's "Seatools" troubleshooting app and it scanned the entire drive and found no errors, dead sectors, and firmware was up to date. Since diagnostic report was good and I needed a large hard drive for my other PC which is an Intel 4670K (2015)PC I installed this new drive in it and it works flawlessly with no stutter, lag, or strange tick noises. I ran a PC test utility and got 180MB read speed and 160MB write speed(Awesome!). Happy I got it working I swapped it back to the AMD PC but then PC wouldn't even boot up (What! Windows is on seperate 1TB WD NVME drive) and just make tick sounds. Not wanting to press my luck with this horror show I reinstalled back to Intel PC and all was good so I called it a day. Hope this helps someone
| General | |
| Device Type | Hard drive - internal |
| Capacity | 4 TB |
| Form Factor | 3.5" |
| Interface | SATA 6Gb/s |
I bought 4 Seagate 8TB "Archive" SMR drives in years previously (these are marketed as shingled [multiple tracks are read/re-written with a slight overlap to gain capacity] but with the knowledge they will be quite a bit slower to write) and I saw fairly terrible performance (USB 2.0 sort of transfer speeds). Having told myself never again, I bought one of these new Barracuda 8TB drives not knowing they are now the same, and have now seen the same sort of poor performance... 20MB/s on average for writing (or backup) operations. A quick research of the 'net shows Seagate have quietly moved this terrible tech into these branded drives now. They say they also now contain a bunch of "smarts" to speed up this poor performance for desktop usage, but it hasn't helped me at ... MoreI bought 4 Seagate 8TB "Archive" SMR drives in years previously (these are marketed as shingled [multiple tracks are read/re-written with a slight overlap to gain capacity] but with the knowledge they will be quite a bit slower to write) and I saw fairly terrible performance (USB 2.0 sort of transfer speeds). Having told myself never again, I bought one of these new Barracuda 8TB drives not knowing they are now the same, and have now seen the same sort of poor performance... 20MB/s on average for writing (or backup) operations. A quick research of the 'net shows Seagate have quietly moved this terrible tech into these branded drives now. They say they also now contain a bunch of "smarts" to speed up this poor performance for desktop usage, but it hasn't helped me at all - the HDD is a slow POS to save to. I can't believe I now have a 5th unit that can only be used for "archive" purposes, where you wait forever to save things, but then get sort of OK performance on reading back the data.
haven't had enough time to judge the drive. That takes years. I am writing the review to make buyers aware of the fact that if they buy a Seagate drive they should download Seagate toolkit from Seagate support. I had trouble getting my computer to see the drive and later had trouble getting the drive to partition at the full 4TB. The toolkit solved all my questions very quickly and the drive is working fine. Frankly the drive was more of a pain than I expected. One would expect a SATA drive to be plug and play. It wasn't but all is well that ends well. Seagate support was willing to help even in the hours near the holiday, very friendly. The toolkit is very easy to use and covers all bases although Seagate has additional drive utilities that look interesting. ... Morehaven't had enough time to judge the drive. That takes years. I am writing the review to make buyers aware of the fact that if they buy a Seagate drive they should download Seagate toolkit from Seagate support. I had trouble getting my computer to see the drive and later had trouble getting the drive to partition at the full 4TB. The toolkit solved all my questions very quickly and the drive is working fine. Frankly the drive was more of a pain than I expected. One would expect a SATA drive to be plug and play. It wasn't but all is well that ends well. Seagate support was willing to help even in the hours near the holiday, very friendly. The toolkit is very easy to use and covers all bases although Seagate has additional drive utilities that look interesting. Downloaded them but haven't used them yet .If you have the toolkit then installation is a snap. Bottom line is that Seagate is a good company to deal with and Seagate drives are legendary. Well worth the few extra minutes to change the format to use the entire 4TB.
Understand this is a SMR technology "storage drive" and priced at a couple cents per GB it's good value. I had an unusual experience when I first installed ST4000DMA04 in my AMD Ryzen 2600 (2018)PC. The video files on this drive would play but stutter and lag while the drive would make strange tick sounds. I ran a PC test utility and got 130MB read speed and 10MB write speed (yes 10MB!). Something wrong so I downloaded Seagate's "Seatools" troubleshooting app and it scanned the entire drive and found no errors, dead sectors, and firmware was up to date. Since diagnostic report was good and I needed a large hard drive for my other PC which is an Intel 4670K (2015)PC I installed this new drive in it and it works flawlessly with no stutter, lag, or strange tick noises. ... MoreUnderstand this is a SMR technology "storage drive" and priced at a couple cents per GB it's good value. I had an unusual experience when I first installed ST4000DMA04 in my AMD Ryzen 2600 (2018)PC. The video files on this drive would play but stutter and lag while the drive would make strange tick sounds. I ran a PC test utility and got 130MB read speed and 10MB write speed (yes 10MB!). Something wrong so I downloaded Seagate's "Seatools" troubleshooting app and it scanned the entire drive and found no errors, dead sectors, and firmware was up to date. Since diagnostic report was good and I needed a large hard drive for my other PC which is an Intel 4670K (2015)PC I installed this new drive in it and it works flawlessly with no stutter, lag, or strange tick noises. I ran a PC test utility and got 180MB read speed and 160MB write speed(Awesome!). Happy I got it working I swapped it back to the AMD PC but then PC wouldn't even boot up (What! Windows is on seperate 1TB WD NVME drive) and just make tick sounds. Not wanting to press my luck with this horror show I reinstalled back to Intel PC and all was good so I called it a day. Hope this helps someone
I've used Synology NAS since around 2003 and pretty much found every drive maker has good and bad runs. HGST was the only drive I could say I had trust in. I've had three of this model (6GB ST6000NE000-2KR101) and so far they made it over 18 mo just fine. I like the extended SMART data branded under Ironwolf on this drive, but I'm holding off judgment, since every failed drive on my Synology I detected due to performance issues (freezing while copying files etc). I look at the SMART diagnostics and always states the drive was healthy. Um, yeah... Maybe the Ironwolf will do better. Bottom line, I just manage risk by only buying my hot spare when my performance tanks so I am not burning a warranty down just to have a hot spare. (I pay expedite costs if urgent.) ... MoreI've used Synology NAS since around 2003 and pretty much found every drive maker has good and bad runs. HGST was the only drive I could say I had trust in. I've had three of this model (6GB ST6000NE000-2KR101) and so far they made it over 18 mo just fine. I like the extended SMART data branded under Ironwolf on this drive, but I'm holding off judgment, since every failed drive on my Synology I detected due to performance issues (freezing while copying files etc). I look at the SMART diagnostics and always states the drive was healthy. Um, yeah... Maybe the Ironwolf will do better. Bottom line, I just manage risk by only buying my hot spare when my performance tanks so I am not burning a warranty down just to have a hot spare. (I pay expedite costs if urgent.) Second, I only buy drives that have 5 year warranties (more if I can find them) as three year warranties seem to crap out at 3 years, while 5 year warranty drives usually make it to five years. It's worth the up-charge since it reduces the risk to the data. It's a three star drive, while WD, Seagate are all 2 stars. Ironwolf version earns and extra star for at least attempting to provide something better than the useless SMART data.
The disk was purchased on February 28th, 2019 and failed on November 11th, 2021, about eight months after its two-year warranty expired. Environment: Full-tower PC case, SATAIII bus, tested good EVGA 650w PSU, used as primary hard disk for work, school, media files (video, images, documents). Failure Narrative: User opens file manager in search of an image which resides on the disk. No files are locatable in any directory on the disk. On reboot, fsck takes far longer than normal but completes. SMART shows eight consecutive "uncorrectable errors in data" events logged at 9751 power-on hours. SMART shows very nonzero "offline uncorrectable" and "current pending sector" counts. DMESG displays a repeating pattern of I/O errors. Disk does not appear writable. Files and ... MoreThe disk was purchased on February 28th, 2019 and failed on November 11th, 2021, about eight months after its two-year warranty expired. Environment: Full-tower PC case, SATAIII bus, tested good EVGA 650w PSU, used as primary hard disk for work, school, media files (video, images, documents). Failure Narrative: User opens file manager in search of an image which resides on the disk. No files are locatable in any directory on the disk. On reboot, fsck takes far longer than normal but completes. SMART shows eight consecutive "uncorrectable errors in data" events logged at 9751 power-on hours. SMART shows very nonzero "offline uncorrectable" and "current pending sector" counts. DMESG displays a repeating pattern of I/O errors. Disk does not appear writable. Files and directories on disk enumerate properly, but attempts to copy any information off the disk results in a continuous stream of I/O errors. Each click of the "retry" button in file manager results in the MiB copied tally increasing slightly before the next I/O error. Conclusion: The failure is most likely on the controller board as opposed to inside the physical hard disk. I'll keep my eye out for another ST3000DM008 PCB to see if I can further isolate the failure.
It's not secret that covid stop production of all thing. Once of those things are the hardware for computers. Seagate is a good brand that I trust for years due to it's durability based on my experience. I can't say the same for others, but I had no issue. I took advantage of the sale and installed it on my computer ASAP since it's prebuilt that came with 500GB SSD. Currently using this 8TB as a secondary, to install video games, project files for Unreal Engine, Unity, or coding files from Microsoft Visual Studio. There is a reason on my title say Purchase during Covid Pandemic. Apparently there is 30% defect among Seagate products and where I work, IT department confirmed Seagate Exos are among that 30% defects. I did mentioned that I have the Barracuda from ... MoreIt's not secret that covid stop production of all thing. Once of those things are the hardware for computers. Seagate is a good brand that I trust for years due to it's durability based on my experience. I can't say the same for others, but I had no issue. I took advantage of the sale and installed it on my computer ASAP since it's prebuilt that came with 500GB SSD. Currently using this 8TB as a secondary, to install video games, project files for Unreal Engine, Unity, or coding files from Microsoft Visual Studio. There is a reason on my title say Purchase during Covid Pandemic. Apparently there is 30% defect among Seagate products and where I work, IT department confirmed Seagate Exos are among that 30% defects. I did mentioned that I have the Barracuda from Seagate but from his research I should be fine. Hopefully! Seagate factories have been shut for god knows how long due to covid, so imagine rushing and meeting the supply due to the demand. Fingers crossed!
DON"T BUY THIS DRIVE TO USE AS A WINDOWS 10 OR WINDOWS 11 SYSTEM DISK. These SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives can't write a single sector at a time to the disk because of the overlapped magnetic recording technology they use. The drive ends up writing the sector you try to write to a small temporary storage location on the drive and that is pretty fast, but later it has to go back and rewrite the data to another higher density location on the drive where it will have to rewrite adjacent sectors at the same time because their data overlaps unlike the data on traditional CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives. As a result of having to write sectors more than one time the drive will thrash (move the recording head around making seeking noises) more than ... MoreDON"T BUY THIS DRIVE TO USE AS A WINDOWS 10 OR WINDOWS 11 SYSTEM DISK. These SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives can't write a single sector at a time to the disk because of the overlapped magnetic recording technology they use. The drive ends up writing the sector you try to write to a small temporary storage location on the drive and that is pretty fast, but later it has to go back and rewrite the data to another higher density location on the drive where it will have to rewrite adjacent sectors at the same time because their data overlaps unlike the data on traditional CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives. As a result of having to write sectors more than one time the drive will thrash (move the recording head around making seeking noises) more than normal, but if the data is written in small bursts and not too often then aside from the extra disk operation that you will hear it will work like a regular drive. The performance problem with this drive occurs when you write too many small bursts of data at the same time as you are trying to read data or you write a large amount of data for a sustained period of time and that temporary fast storage area becomes full. When that happens you have to wait for the drive to write the overlapped data before it can process your next bit of data and the sustained transfer rate of the drive plummets due to jumping back and forth between the fast and the slow part of the disk. I will get sustained transfer rates under 20 MB / sec sometimes when transferring a large number of files. That's almost as bad as a USB 2.0 flash drive. The latest versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11 seem to do a lot of logging. They read and write event log and NTFS filesystem log data to the drive constantly. In Windows 11 my computer was reading over 1 MB/sec of data constantly so this drive keeps jumping around writing sector, read sector, rewriting sector to higher density area, reading sector and latency of all these small operations just crushes the performance of the drive. It takes the latest versions of Windows 10 or 11 a few minutes just to boot up and the disk operations just never end. Its constantly thrashing the drive every second of the day and since its always in the middle of some disk operation, the latency of any disk operation you want to perform is greater because it has to wait for its current operation to end first. Its very unpleasant and completely unacceptable both performance-wise and noise-wise and I'm sure the life of this drive will be shorter than a CMR drive due to the extra operations the drive is having to perform. The drive does hold a lot of data. If you don't use it as your Windows system drive which will be constantly reading and writing log files and you mostly read data from it and not write to it then its decent enough as an archival drive for movie, music, picture, or game storage. It has a lot of capacity and is cheaper than equivalently sized CMR drives. Writing performance of the drive is terrible, but reading is just as fast as other drives provided you haven't written a lot of data recently to the drive causing it to need to rewrite data possibly at the same moment you are wanting to read from it. You really need a SSD for your system drive in Windows 10 and 11 now due to the excessive reading and writing of small event log files. This drive isn't suitable for that purpose. SSDs don't have the seeking latency or noise production of magnetic drives so you won't notice that your SSD is operating all the time. You will regret it if you buy this drive and attempt to use it as your system drive in Windows 10 or 11. You've been warned.
Similar to a previous reviewer this drive is not built for any type of mass data storage. Here's my story: First drive purchased, worked fine out of the box, then proceeded to copy all my data storage files to it, after an overnight copy, still wasn't done. Was sluggish slow, and hung my computer. Rebooted, and bench tested the drive, with abysmal specs. Took it back, and Best Buy was good enough to exchange the drive, no questions asked. Second drive, worked out of the box, this time a full bench mark, and drive appeared to be meeting online specs. Began the full copy. Stopped it after 6 hours, and did another benchmark, and stats were similar, but about 10% worse than originally. Restarted the copy overnight, next morning, same sluggish behavior as the first. Re ... MoreSimilar to a previous reviewer this drive is not built for any type of mass data storage. Here's my story: First drive purchased, worked fine out of the box, then proceeded to copy all my data storage files to it, after an overnight copy, still wasn't done. Was sluggish slow, and hung my computer. Rebooted, and bench tested the drive, with abysmal specs. Took it back, and Best Buy was good enough to exchange the drive, no questions asked. Second drive, worked out of the box, this time a full bench mark, and drive appeared to be meeting online specs. Began the full copy. Stopped it after 6 hours, and did another benchmark, and stats were similar, but about 10% worse than originally. Restarted the copy overnight, next morning, same sluggish behavior as the first. Re bench tested, and drive sluggish and slow, performed like the first defective one. I don't know what the intent of these drives are, but they are certainly not for data storage. I don't know if they are overheating, or weren't meant for multiples files or what. But I've never witnessed such a horrendous product right out of the box. My 10 year old WD 1TB drive is faster, after all these years, and still benchmarks as good as new. This Seagate drive is total garbage. Avoid at all opportunity.
I used this drive to store my Steam/Epic/Blizzard libraries. Game updates/installs can perform 10s of GBs of writes (ARK is over 100 GB). - Original drive started showing significant slow downs after about a year, and then Steam started reporting "Disk Write Error"s for most game updates, especially for larger 10+ GB updates. I noticed that on these updates the drive write speed would start off fine but then shortly plummet to mere 10s KB/sec then to zero. - Early on the drive did not show any errors. It passed the short tests in SeaTools. However, it was very common for MS Windows to report errors in the file system. Requiring me to periodically run chkdsk to fix. - The drive eventually showed errors in the short/long tests in SeaTools and the drive was replaced ... MoreI used this drive to store my Steam/Epic/Blizzard libraries. Game updates/installs can perform 10s of GBs of writes (ARK is over 100 GB). - Original drive started showing significant slow downs after about a year, and then Steam started reporting "Disk Write Error"s for most game updates, especially for larger 10+ GB updates. I noticed that on these updates the drive write speed would start off fine but then shortly plummet to mere 10s KB/sec then to zero. - Early on the drive did not show any errors. It passed the short tests in SeaTools. However, it was very common for MS Windows to report errors in the file system. Requiring me to periodically run chkdsk to fix. - The drive eventually showed errors in the short/long tests in SeaTools and the drive was replaced under warranty. - The replacement I received was a slightly different model: ST2000DM005 - This drive failed within two months of being used. Same symptoms. Read/write speeds dropped to 3/67 MB/s (yes, that is 3 MB/s read speed) as measured by CrystalDiskMark. Both of the drives which failed were SMR. I have 2 other Seagate Barracuda HDD drives in my system which are 4 and 6 years old, but still going strong. These drives are the older CMR technology. I do not think SMR is up to task for handling game libraries. Final note: I had originally given this product a 2 egg rating because it was being replaced under warranty. I would rate it at 1 egg since the warranty replacement also failed. However, the site will not allow me to change the egg rating.
If you enjoy having your entire OS corrupt every 3-5 days this is the HDD for you! I never thought that such a poor quality HDD could be released on the market legally but here we are. To start the read/write speeds are atrocious on a good day, even for a mechanical HDD. Transfering anything even slightly large will require you to have to leave your PC idle because if you try to load anything up during the process your whole OS will freeze. Secondly and as I mentioned before, the amount that this drive has corrupted files (particularly OS files) in the 2 months I've owned it is astounding. So ultimately if you get this HDD you should also get real used to seeing "setting up automatic repair" a good chunk of the times you decide to restart your machine. But ... MoreIf you enjoy having your entire OS corrupt every 3-5 days this is the HDD for you! I never thought that such a poor quality HDD could be released on the market legally but here we are. To start the read/write speeds are atrocious on a good day, even for a mechanical HDD. Transfering anything even slightly large will require you to have to leave your PC idle because if you try to load anything up during the process your whole OS will freeze. Secondly and as I mentioned before, the amount that this drive has corrupted files (particularly OS files) in the 2 months I've owned it is astounding. So ultimately if you get this HDD you should also get real used to seeing "setting up automatic repair" a good chunk of the times you decide to restart your machine. But seriously, just save the headache and get a more quality HDD from a more reputable company. I truly wish that I had.
| General | |
| Device Type | Hard drive - internal |
| Capacity | 4 TB |
| Form Factor | 3.5" |
| Interface | SATA 6Gb/s |
Rock-solid reliability built on over 20 years of BarraCuda innovation. Versatile mix of capacity and price point options to fit any budget. Multi-Tier Caching Technology for excellent hard drive performance.
Rock-solid reliability built on over 20 years of BarraCuda innovation. Versatile mix of capacity and price point options to fit any budget. Multi-Tier Caching Technology for excellent hard drive performance.
in 1 offers
Rock-solid reliability built on over 20 years of BarraCuda innovation. Versatile mix of capacity and price point options to fit any budget. Multi-Tier Caching Technology for excellent hard drive performance.
Rock-solid reliability built on over 20 years of BarraCuda innovation. Versatile mix of capacity and price point options to fit any budget. Multi-Tier Caching Technology for excellent hard drive performance.
