(Old Model) Seagate 8TB Desktop HDD SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 256MB Cache 7200 RPM 3.5" Internal Bare Drive ST8000DM002

A massive 8 (EIGHT) terabytes of SATA storage, currently the most available on a single spindle. Performance seems top-notch, though you'll need a modern SATA3.0 (6Gb/s) controller with proper cabling to take full advantage. On my slower USB3 and SATA2.0 (3Gb/s) interfaces, the drive was pegging the controller. Pleasingly, the drive is 7200RPM instead of the "variable rate" that was popular a couple of years back, and the 256MB cache is the largest I've seen on an individual drive. As with all spinning disks, performance will vary by whether you are writing to the inside or outside of the platters, as well as OS load and caching practices. One caveat with all the capacity and performance: the drive runs hot. Upright in an open USB3 dock (writing continuously for 16 hours), smartmontools reported its internal temp at 50C (ambient was around 70F). That's not exactly a fair test, since when will you normally write 8TB in one stretch? But that measured much higher than my enclosed 3TB drives. Try to install this drive in a well-ventilated location with adequate airflow. Another caveat would be applicable to using any large single-spindle storage; performance suffers under a load of mixed read-write or random-access requests. A well-tuned operating system or performance controller can offset that degradation, but in the end it's the physical limits of a single drive. Thus very large drives are better suited for: archival storage, large-file access (sustained sequential reads/writes), or single-user access. Keep your OS, web browser caches, and the like on small, fast SSD drives. Other thoughts: the drive runs quiet (slight clicks as it seeks, nothing loud, no vibration). There's even less visible circuit board than usual for SATA drives. The drive takes a while to physically spin down after being powered off, if you use an external dock like I do, give it 15-30 seconds before removing the drive. FreeBSD shows this drive as: 7630885MB (15628053168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 972801C) The two-year warranty is a steep drop from the 5 years offered on enterprise drives (see the Seagate ST8000NM0055 for the enterprise 8TB version), but is still superior to the 1-year (and shorter) warranties that thankfully didn't catch when vendors tried them a couple of years back. This is a bare drive (ships with nothing, not even screws), but hopefully somebody buying this sort of tech already knows what to expect. Amazon shipped it wrapped tightly in heavy bubble wrap, inside a small sealed box, inside a larger box with air-filled padding. I was pleased with the packaging. A high-capacity, high-performance drive from the market leader. If you need gobs of storage space, this is the drive you want to be buying. Recommended.

I purchased the 8TB hard drive during a sale on Prime Day. This purchase was intended to help allow me to store more photographs without having to disperse my files across different hard drives. However, the amount of audible clicks and wines that this hard drive produces (especially while it isn't actively copying files) has me quite worried that I may have purchased a defective unit or it was damaged during shipping.

The drive was delivered as advertised, has a tremendous amount of storage, it's fast at 7200 rpm, and it was easy to install. So far so good. That said, once you start using it your realize there's a problem that can't be fixed or corrected: this drive produces an insanely loud amount of noise both when operating and in idle, which is more puzzling. It's loud enough to become a problem beyond a nuisance, as it's so distracting it makes using it with your computer just impossible past 10 minutes. Apparently it's not just my drive, as many users are reporting the exact same loud and annoying noise with this very Seagate model. I ended up returning it; I just couldn't deal with such loud noise constantly in the background while working with my computer. There's something seriously wrong with this hard drive model.

Very nice drive and works as expected once spun up. Docking it one star because the comparable 4gb drives seem quicker. It feels like a longer latency.

Extremely noisy, sounds very sick and not like a normal hard drive. Too noisy and and annoying to be anywhere it can be heard. I swore off Seagates due to very bad experience with crashes, i'm regretting having given them another try.

The Seagate 8TB HDD being reviewed is sold as a 'bare drive'. This means that all you get is the drive in a clear plastic clamshell package. Nothing else. No instructions, no warranty card, no power cable, no SATA cable, no screws. If you need something more than the bare drive, be sure to order the retail package. The physical installation of the drive went as expected, with no problems (I had an extra SATA cable, HDD screws, and a power connector adapter). The drive was instantly recognized my the Windows 8 computer I installed it in, but was not assigned a drive letter until I wen into disk manager, and initialized the disk. This is standard, but I had to look up the instructions online, as I rarely do this, and had never done it using Win8. So far, the drive is stable, fast, and reliable. Great desktop replacement drive or additional drive. I'm a little bit hesitant to have so much data on one drive. Would highly recommend a backup drive to this one as in a mirrored RAID configuration.

Fair dealing

This drive was poorly constructed. I am seeing a pattern with Seagate drives of hardware failure and data loss. This is the 4th drive I have had that has gone bad under warranty. This drive stopped working and started clicking. Drive failure. Replacement process with Seagate is anything but easy and they make you pay to ship back a drive that is clearly defective having talked through with support. The website to return is poorly written as well. I suggest looking at other HDD manufacturers as Seagate is loosing it's stellar rep in the market.