Seagate ST8000VN004 8TB IronWolf NAS 3.5" HDD

Ordered Friday 04/03/22 at 10:04am, arrived by Royal Mail on Saturday 05/02/22 before 12pm – thank you CCL & Royal Mail. Paid a little extra over a global online retailer, being put off them for computer components as I’ve had a retail boxed HDD from them in the past which had some shoddy outer packaging. Also their recent reviews for HDDs showed it’s a bit of a lottery as to how they package their HDDs for shipping. Some customers receiving very poorly packaged drives, dented and broken. My Seagate Iron Wolf 4TB arrived in it’s sealed anti-static bag, inside a thick tubular bubble rap envelope, inside a double thick, snug fitting cardboard box with a grey courier pouch bound tight outer layer. Installed and working perfectly as anticipated. A further 4 weeks later ... MoreOrdered Friday 04/03/22 at 10:04am, arrived by Royal Mail on Saturday 05/02/22 before 12pm – thank you CCL & Royal Mail. Paid a little extra over a global online retailer, being put off them for computer components as I’ve had a retail boxed HDD from them in the past which had some shoddy outer packaging. Also their recent reviews for HDDs showed it’s a bit of a lottery as to how they package their HDDs for shipping. Some customers receiving very poorly packaged drives, dented and broken. My Seagate Iron Wolf 4TB arrived in it’s sealed anti-static bag, inside a thick tubular bubble rap envelope, inside a double thick, snug fitting cardboard box with a grey courier pouch bound tight outer layer. Installed and working perfectly as anticipated. A further 4 weeks later and drive working just fine. I had thought this would be replacing a 4 year old 3TB Western Digital WD30EZRZ (CMR) as my main backup drive in my gaming PC as I was getting errors on that while doing drive image backups. Long story short, the WD drive subsequently proved not to be the culprit (memory/mobo) so I did not really need this new drive. It's quick and quiet enough while still using CMR (not that problematical shingle / SMR) recording method along with other tech alluding to reliability. It has a reasonable 3 year warranty and additional rescue / data recovery service - wouldn't expect to use it but it might show Seagate has some faith in their product. Happy so far.

1st one failed, B&H replaced quickly.

After 46 hours to back all my videos to this, I then copied recent day folders and then went to back them up. There was a disturbing loud clattering noise that I recorded on my phone. I called Seagate, and they said to install Seatools but it wouldn't install and they had no further suggestions but to send to them for data recovery or replacement. Replacement would take 6 weeks they said. I'd only had it for 3 days, so B&H was excellent about replacing it, sending me the new one so I could compare files, before returning the other. The replacement seems fine so far and I've copied all my videos and photos to it. I did have a different Ironwolf external archive drive fail before, and got back from Seagate after attempted recovery with files missing everywhere in ... MoreAfter 46 hours to back all my videos to this, I then copied recent day folders and then went to back them up. There was a disturbing loud clattering noise that I recorded on my phone. I called Seagate, and they said to install Seatools but it wouldn't install and they had no further suggestions but to send to them for data recovery or replacement. Replacement would take 6 weeks they said. I'd only had it for 3 days, so B&H was excellent about replacing it, sending me the new one so I could compare files, before returning the other. The replacement seems fine so far and I've copied all my videos and photos to it. I did have a different Ironwolf external archive drive fail before, and got back from Seagate after attempted recovery with files missing everywhere in great gaps, so caution. But 16T Dell costs about $2500.

A top quality hard drive for those storage needs…

A great drive for the cost. Approximately $35 per TB. The drive is a nice quiet one to sit next to while you have lots of data to copy to it. It takes approximately 1/2 day - a full day to copy it full. A 2 TB folder takes approximately 2-3 hours. Timing I guess depends on files, more than totals though as every time you copy a new file/folder it pre-makes the room for it’s storage. If you only had a few large files though, thus 500GB+ each they’ll copy much quicker than if you had say 2000 files in one copy task.Once your files are on this drive too, I’ve noticed that when you access them they load ready for you very quick. After all it’s supposed to be a drive for NAS units, but works excellent on it’s own. You should have no trouble RAIDing if you like. I’ve ... MoreA great drive for the cost. Approximately $35 per TB. The drive is a nice quiet one to sit next to while you have lots of data to copy to it. It takes approximately 1/2 day - a full day to copy it full. A 2 TB folder takes approximately 2-3 hours. Timing I guess depends on files, more than totals though as every time you copy a new file/folder it pre-makes the room for it’s storage. If you only had a few large files though, thus 500GB+ each they’ll copy much quicker than if you had say 2000 files in one copy task.Once your files are on this drive too, I’ve noticed that when you access them they load ready for you very quick. After all it’s supposed to be a drive for NAS units, but works excellent on it’s own. You should have no trouble RAIDing if you like. I’ve always maintained that your data is best backed up as 3 backups - 2 Local - different drives and 1 offsite. If or when one of your drives comes to its knees, you at least know you’ve still got a workable backup to buy a replacement and re-copy your data safely. Hope this helps.

Building a New Computer for a Friend

Had Parts laying around after building my son a new gaming computer and after finding out an old friend who had been retired for a number of years did not have a computer, I decided to buy this drive as a "data" drive and build a computer for him. The drive is fast and reliable and because the "C" drive is an M2 drive the computer will be adequate for most tasks even though it only has an AMD Athlon 3000G Picasso 3.5GHz Dual-Core AM4 Boxed Processor installed. The motherboard has the capability to use a more advanced Ryzen processor and of course a dedicated graphics card but because a decent graphics card is almost impossible to get right now I decided to go with the Athlon which has onboard graphics. So in the future, if things change, the computer will be able to ... MoreHad Parts laying around after building my son a new gaming computer and after finding out an old friend who had been retired for a number of years did not have a computer, I decided to buy this drive as a "data" drive and build a computer for him. The drive is fast and reliable and because the "C" drive is an M2 drive the computer will be adequate for most tasks even though it only has an AMD Athlon 3000G Picasso 3.5GHz Dual-Core AM4 Boxed Processor installed. The motherboard has the capability to use a more advanced Ryzen processor and of course a dedicated graphics card but because a decent graphics card is almost impossible to get right now I decided to go with the Athlon which has onboard graphics. So in the future, if things change, the computer will be able to be upgraded. I have found in the past that the Seagate Ironwolf drives are reliable, I have bought several 10 TB drives, and this 8 TB comes in at a little better price point than the 10 TB but it is also important to realize that you should look at your present and future data needs before you buy a "data drive" because you need about 10 percent of this drive empty or when you go to Explorer in Windows and select "This PC" the drive bar will show up "red", so getting back to the calculations of how large a drive do you need, an 8TB drive will format to about 7.2TB and if you need about 10 percent empty before the dreaded "red bar", so you will only have about 6.5TB of useable space. These are only rough estimates. The main thing to take away is that I have been building computers many years and I am always running out of storage room on my hard drives. Your mileage may vary.

Great drives... as long as they arrive in working condition

I ordered a pair of these recently due to them being on sale.I had to return the first pair as they were completely DOA on arrival. And we're not talking "I stuck them in once, and that was it" kind of testing.I seated and re-seated each one in a test slot and neither would even start spinning. I took my NAS offline and cleaned it thoroughly and even tried wiping contacts down with rubbing alcohol.I tried both new IronWolf Pro drives in multiple other computers and even tested additional drives I had lying around to make sure it wasn't maybe the hot-swap drive bays malfunctioning somehow.Every single test failed.So I started a return. After a short call to make sure I wasn't messing up somehow, the process to ship them back and have new ones come replace ... MoreI ordered a pair of these recently due to them being on sale.I had to return the first pair as they were completely DOA on arrival. And we're not talking "I stuck them in once, and that was it" kind of testing.I seated and re-seated each one in a test slot and neither would even start spinning. I took my NAS offline and cleaned it thoroughly and even tried wiping contacts down with rubbing alcohol.I tried both new IronWolf Pro drives in multiple other computers and even tested additional drives I had lying around to make sure it wasn't maybe the hot-swap drive bays malfunctioning somehow.Every single test failed.So I started a return. After a short call to make sure I wasn't messing up somehow, the process to ship them back and have new ones come replace was relatively easy.The 2nd pair shipped to me worked no problem.I have a Synology DS1520+ that I've been slowly replacing the 5 original 6TB WD Red Pro drives with upgrades as they fail (or run out of space).The features the iron wolf pro drives have are much better than the WD drives. The IronWolf Pro drives are recognized with more useful information by the Synology system. The WDs came up as "generic" in the drive inspector application. There are special testing features that do not exist for the WD drives.Overall the IronWolf Pro drives themselves are 5 stars. The only reason I took a star off was for the hassle of having to do the return as a result (I'm assuming due to the absurdly rare instance of 2 brand new drives being completely DOA) of shipping probably handling them really roughly, causing some sort of failure - even when the drives come packed in bubble wrap, anti-static bag, and other protective packaging.Thanks B&H for making it as easy as realistically possible to return the bad drives and replace them! I continue to come more and more to your business as opposed to many other electronics retailers due to the great level of customer service you maintain!

Nicely packaged great looking drives

I bought 2 of these drives to replace 2 4 year old 3TB drives which I run in RAID. So far I have had no issues and have ran a few tests.1. The new 8TB drives seem to be faster by a small margin.2. The new drives operate at about 5-10°F hotter than my old drives.3. The drives had significantly less storage than claimed. After formating about 7.2GB instead of the advertised 8GB.The original drives never had a hiccup and these drives so far are following in the same path. Installed them and they just work, to me that's the way any product should be. Would recommend!!

Quieter than expected.

I don't have an ultra-quiet setup, but have not heard a peep from these drives (ordered 2). I was disappointed to see they have 2TB less than advertised available to use, so expect to only have 14.5TB available to start with. I feel like they should advertise the capacity based on what's available to the end user to use. It's definitely misleading. I did hear a few clicks when first fired up, but quiet since. It seems under certain rare conditions, these will make noise when they want to, but have not had an issue with noise otherwise; I only hear my fans. I use them in a RAID 0 config as Plex movie storage. B&H shipped quickly and the drives were packaged well. I will definitely order from B&H again.

Reliable. Rock Solid a performance.

We run a Synology 2 bay station for our network server and another off site 2 bay station for backup & redundancy. We started getting warnings of disc degradation. After all, these discs are running 24/7/365. Our IT guy recommended these specific NAS drives to replace our aging drives. They just popped in and started copying our files. Now, we’re good for another 5+ years if reliable service. A little noisier than our previous drives, but we also upgraded from 3tb to 8tb. Larger drive. Larger fan needed.

So far-so-good - 26 days in

So far this drive has given me no problems. Quickly loaded in data from a backup and intend to use this as a live bulk data drive behind smaller NVMe storage. I have only had it up for 26 days - so there's not too much to say about it. Since IronWolf Health is still proprietary (please make it open-source ASAP) I can only go by the SMART stats of my custom setup. These show mostly good, besides the temperature. The measurement seems accurate (running between 29-35 degrees Celsius) however the max "recommended" temperature seems exceedingly small - 25 degrees Celsius. This is resulting in the over-temperature limit count to be constantly increasing (at 642). The lifetime temp range is 22-36, so it never it the "real" temp limit range boundaries of 0-70. If there's ... MoreSo far this drive has given me no problems. Quickly loaded in data from a backup and intend to use this as a live bulk data drive behind smaller NVMe storage. I have only had it up for 26 days - so there's not too much to say about it. Since IronWolf Health is still proprietary (please make it open-source ASAP) I can only go by the SMART stats of my custom setup. These show mostly good, besides the temperature. The measurement seems accurate (running between 29-35 degrees Celsius) however the max "recommended" temperature seems exceedingly small - 25 degrees Celsius. This is resulting in the over-temperature limit count to be constantly increasing (at 642). The lifetime temp range is 22-36, so it never it the "real" temp limit range boundaries of 0-70. If there's any issues that arise, I'll be sure to amend this. Previous experience with Seagate has been great, having a 7200.10 drive still running strong from its ~2007 release moving between multiple systems w/o any issues showing up.

The Drives are great, BUT....

NewEgg packaging SUCKS! My Drives arrived in a large box, the drives were individually packed in a plastic bubble sleeve that was not securely closed and the drives were bouncing around loose in the box with ZERO protection! The sleeves were simply laying in the box. The drives were obviously purchased in bulk but were not packaged properly. I have one that reported UNC error immediately, and all are being tested/scrubbed by my NAS to insure that they were not damaged in shipping. I purchased additional drives from another source that were packaged properly. This problem has caused me enough concern to consider carefully what I purchase from NewEgg in the future.