Seagate BarraCuda Pro Performance Internal Hard Drive SATA HDD 6TB 6GB/s 128MB Cache 3.5-Inch (ST6000DM004)

The drive is a bit price, but with 2 years data and 5 years hardware warranty it is somewhat justified. I have a six years old ASUS P6T Deluxe MB with SATA II only. It was plugged as a second drive with the boot through a SSD with WIN 7 64bit OS and it was recognized at once. To initialize, as with any new drive, one should go: Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Disk Management. In my case it showed as Disk 01 (disk 0 was the SSD - but it will depend on each port you are plugged and how many drives you have plugged). I chose to create an GPT partition that I didn't know would create an system MBR partition of some 264 Mb to manage the allocation units on the drive, no problem there, but be aware of it. About the marketing size of drives with more than 2Tb: Because one Byte is 8 bits and one KByte is 1024 bits (not 1000 bits). Nevertheless, the drive market kinda "steal" from us those 24 bits per Kb, thus when you have advertised a drive as having 6Tb it actually shows on the explorer and alike as having less than that, for the market counts ALL the bits that are there, including those 24 bits per Kb, but the OS (and the all the software that are) consider it not. In fact the drive has six thousand trillion BITS that are less than 6Tb as the unit goes. Thus with larger drives the difference grows accordingly and It is starting to let some people "mad" about it. I saw one review complaining about the 10Tb having only 9Tb. Perhaps it is time for the manufactures, at least with the larger than 2Tb drives, to star to market is with the actual system Kb and not the total bits. All and all it is a GREAT drive and I recommend it. Lets hope the price will go down as the new year arrives.

I have an M.2 boot drive in my Windows 10 PC but it only has 500GB of storage. I bought the 6TB BarraCuda drive to replace a nearly full 2TB hybrid drive that was almost full and starting to run poorly. I was worried that the BarraCuda would have a hard time keeping up with my Steam games but it works just as well and in some cases better than my old hybrid drive.

Just purchased the 6TB drive for photographic and cinematic files. Each year's worth of data now in the TB range. This one is fast and super quiet. Seagate still makes great drives. The rule is simple. You never ever have too much memory, speed or storage.

Since these are not bought from Seagate or one of their trusted venders then Seagate will not warranty these. Seller said they will warranty them, but only for a single year, not the 5 years as was advertised. You won't get access to the data recovery from seagate either. To get access to seagate warranty you have to purchase them directly from amazon, not a market place seller. Amazon won't do anything about it, seagate won't do anything about it, and seller won't do much either. other info. These are new old stock drives in open box. Mine had a manufacture date from few years ago. Good news at least is they perform great and were cheap, but if I was to do this all over again I would rather buy a reman 12GB drive instead for the same price. I get the same 1 year warranty and it's an enterprise drive vs these drives being 6gb with unknown seller support Would not recommend

I've used Seagate Barracuda's consistently... but this one was a disappointment. Unfortunately, I can't speak to it's function (like transfer speed/reads/writes) because the intermittent noise is so annoying. Upon first powering the the drive, there was this hum - like a scanner makes. I figured, okay - maybe it's scanning the disks as part of its data recovery feature. But, it wouldn't stop. It would cycle over and over. Completely repartitioning & erasing the drive seemed to solve it. I dumped over 5TB of data onto the drive as a backup. Drive has been a quiet champ for almost a month. But now, suddenly, the scanner-hum is back. It'll sit there quietly until the drive is accessed, and then the humming starts. How loud is it? Well, if you have lots of ambient noise in your environment, you may be able to overlook it. Or maybe stick it off in a closet or a corner. But, if you're in a sound-treated small sound studio, the hum renders the drive unusable. It can be heard - distractingly so. Oddly, I have a 3TB Seagate sitting right next to this one and not a peep. Quiet as can be. So, the 6TB is going back to Seagate. The warranty will provide me with a refurbished unit - not a new one. Also a disappointment. But, if the replacement works well and is quiet, I'll post an update. ------------------------------ RETURN UPDATE #1: ------------------------------ While I normally retain all packaging for electronics, the original materials for this device apparently got caught up in the Christmas chaos - and went to trash with a bunch of other empty boxes. Trouble is, Seagate has very specific packing *requirements* for Returns To Vendor (RTV). Failure to follow those can void the warranty and be cause to reject your replacement claim. So, I had to purchase vendor-approved packaging ($10.58 plus another $10 shipping from ReflexPackaging). That's 20-bucks on top of what it will cost to ship the drive back. Hang on to that packaging! ---------------------------- RETURN UPDATE #2: ----------------------------- It was about a week and a half turnaround, but the warranty replacement drive arrived - and did not have the noise problem. (This is the 6TB model.) Formatted and installed without trouble. Now, 3 months in, all is well. She's quiet and responsive. But she does generate some heat! If I'm doing audio or video production, I blow a small fan over my drives to keep them cool. My externals are in OWC fanless aluminum enclosures. I don't think these dissipate heat very well. Going to look for a fan-cooled enclosure. Anyway, I've bumped my rating up to 4 stars.

I honestly felt like I was taking a gamble with this hard drive since there were some reported QC issues. Luckily, my hard drive appears to be working fine. No funky noises or vibrations. Hard drive runs cool and quiet as far as HDDs go (it's not an SSD). I'm mostly including this review as another data point so people know that some of the hard drives do actually work! Attached is a benchmark for added substance.

Installed this in a new Dell 8920, as the secondary data drive. Using an SSD as the main system/boot because starts up very fast, from off to windows desktop in less than 30 seconds. Highly recommend using an SSD as your system drive, and then a regular (non-SSD) as your secondary and data drive.

After installing two of these drives in my freshly built Windows 10 PC, they clicked obnoxiously every 30 seconds or so, just like several other reviewers reported. I switched the HDD controller on my motherboard from AHCI to RAID. This fixed the clicking issue. Now I only hear the clicking sound when the drive initializes on boot and when the drive re-initializes after sitting idle. I set the drives to mirror each other in a RAID 1 array, still no clicking. The drives passed the SeaTools tests, so it seems like the clicking is due to the drive initializing over and over, not from a mechanical malfunction. Even without the clicking, the drives aren't exactly quiet. Since I'm using the drive for storage, I don't need frequent access to the drives. In the Windows 10 power settings, I set the drives to turn off after being idle for 10 minutes, so they are now silent unless I'm actively using them. There were reports of bad warranties, so I also called Seagate to verify that the warranty is valid. They gave me a date 5 years out, so the warranty looks good. These Barracuda Pro drives come with free data recovery if they crash, so that's a bonus. (Of course, redundant backups are the way to go--data recovery is a last resort option.) In short: if your motherboard supports RAID and you're comfortable switching from AHCI, these drives should do the job. Otherwise, buyer beware. PSA - If you switch your HDD controller to RAID when Windows is already installed in AHCI mode, your pc may not boot. I had to reinstall Windows after the switch. It's possible to install the necessary RAID drivers before the switch if you don't want to reinstall--ask Google for details.