Seagate Backup Plus Hub 4TB External Hard Drive Desktop HDD – USB 3.0, for Computer Desktop Workstation PC Laptop Mac, 2 USB Ports, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography (STEL4000100), Model:STEL4000100

I've only had the drive for a few days but so far I really like it. I'm using it for backups and for that role it's ideal.The information below is intended for people who really want to understand this device. If you want it to "just work", you are likely using Windows and you won't have to do very much - it comes pre-formatted with an NTFS partition that has good defaults. If you are using it that way, you will enjoy the full performance capabilities of this device.I run a 64-bit Gentoo Linux system that, among other roles, runs a Samba server (compatible with Windows File & Printer Sharing) on the LAN. You might be begging for trouble if you make a Samba server Internet-accessible (use SSH/SFTP instead), but on the local network it's great. All of my machines can easily back up files to this drive. This can be automated which is even more convenient.While the USB spec is backwards compatible (so you COULD connect this via USB2), I use USB3. I observe an average ~115-120 MB/sec speed when writing files to this drive. This is measured using the utility "iotop" while copying data several times larger than my RAM to reduce the influence of kernel caching. Read speeds from the disk as measured using "hdparm" are ~190 MB/sec (buffered) and still ~ 189-190 MB/sec using direct I/O. Read speeds just from the drive's on-board cache memory (i.e. not the spinning rust and not from buffers in RAM) are about 258 MB/sec. The spec for USB 3.0 lists a max total speed of around 625 MB/sec, though that is a raw signaling rate - accounting for protocol overhead, USB 3.0 has a real-world max of around 450 MB/sec. That's very good for an external drive designed for large capacity, not raw performance.I believe that inside the enclosure is a Seagate Archival Drive. This is an Advanced Format disk - it has a physical sector size of 4k (4096 bytes). Until recently, all (or nearly all) hard drives had a physical sector size of 512 bytes. This allows the device to transfer more data with each operation and makes sense for such a large disk. The disk will report a logical sector size of 512 bytes -- systems that don't understand Advanced Format can just treat it like any prior device and the drive's internal firmware will translate. This is known as a 512e Advanced Format device, but if your OS is modern enough, it will know the difference between the physical and logical sectors. Linux is Advanced Format aware and has been since 2009-2010.This is also an SMR drive. That's an entire research topic if you want to really understand it, but the bottom line is that there will be some write amplification. That is, if you write X MB to the drive, then internally (not visible to the system) the drive may (depending on where other data is stored) physically have to write X + Y MB. This is the trade-off of using SMR to increase storage density. So all things considered, this drive is a great balance between affordable low price-per-GB and performance, with emphasis on the former but not totally neglecting the latter by any means.To get the best performance with this disk, your filesystem (ext4 in my case) should use a 4k block size to match the physical sector size. Any partition should also begin on a sector number that is a multiple of 8 (512b * 8 = 4k). That way the drive won't have to perform extra physical operations (which would slow it down) to deal with writing data that does not correspond to its physical layout.All things considered, this drive was a bargain and I really like it. I hope that in time, I can come back here and tell everyone how incredibly reliable it is.

I have 2 of these, it's now 3 years, they store all my video entertainment. Beyond Backup; the drives are used as primary storage for many thousands of Gigs. I'm a collector of old football games. I store seasons of shows, movies, whether moved from DVD or blu-ray; shared with me, etc. I use this drive with its plug in power and speed to watch seamlessly 720, 1080 and higher resolutions. The higher take up more space, and so external drives are the only way to go. I used to install internal drives but that's gotten more difficult to do on PCs. And the USB only drives might not have the required speed to be able to handle direct from drive viewing. The 2 extra ports are great for moving files to other drives which must be going on when you're someone who needs 8 TB of storage here. You must have smaller drives, and you want to compact things a bit, put from many places into one place, and vice versa, for sharing.It does what you expect it to do. It's a little slow on the copying; 3-4 TB might take 13+ hours, you'll have to let it run with some Air conditioner while you head to work or sleep. Since I see it doesn't have a fan. I had one fall over and damaged, but Windows Checkdisk repaired it. Be delicate with these things.Full disclosure, its been purchased 3x, once was a noisy 'lemon' I got replaced, quickly and efficiently by Amazon. Once I heard a lot of grinding as I moved the data I realized I'd better replace it.Lemons HAPPEN; with every product. Apple supposedly has the best reputation but they had IPODs bursting into flames. If you're lucky you recognize it early, before putting precious data on it.

Works great!

I've bought 3 of them, so far.Two of them have been working great since around December of last year. It's really hard to beat the price on these things, when they go on sale. I wouldn't try to play games off of them or anything that requires a lot of random reading/writing to the disk. However, it's great as an archive drive, seeing how that's literally what these things are made for. I store most of my Plex library on one of these and haven't had any issues with streaming stuff off of it. Technically, random reading isn't usually too big a deal, I just wouldn't do anything that involves a lot of random writes to the disk. The one likely exception that comes to mind would be a game like Diablo 3 that rapidly loads assets from the hard drive as you play. So, some games might actually run just fine off of one. Either way, I didn't really test playing games off of one but I wouldn't recommend trying it and I think most people have moved to SSDs for installed apps like games at this point anyways.The third one makes an annoying buzzing noise while idle. I'm guessing there's something wrong with its ability to park the drive heads. So, I already setup a replacement for it.The built in USB hub is convenient but it also makes the drive incompatible with devices like the PS4, even though you can use the hub free Expansion version of the drive just fine with it. Keep in mind, the PS4 only supports up to 4 TB, currently.It's worth noting these things do not have on/off switches and they will not power up until the USB cable is connected. I had long stuck solely to internal drives, so I was a little surprised to find out you can't even get them to power on with just the AC adapter plugged in. This seems to be common functionality for external hard drives because most of them don't even have power adapters and the ones that do typically only power up when connected by USB. It's also worth mentioning that while it's generally safe to connect an external drive while your PC/console/whatever is turn on, disconnecting it isn't generally considered safe. In other words, the only safe way to disconnect an external drive is after powering off whatever device you connect it to. Technically, you should be okay as long as nothing is being actively written to it but with background processes accessing drives without giving any form of notice, it can be a gamble.Since Seagate drives go on sale more often, I have 7 Seagate external drives compared to 2 Western Digital ones. All were bought online. Out of all of them, only the one 8 TB Backup Plus has had any problems. Normally, I'm a strictly WD person, since all of my internal drives are WD and have been for over a decade. It's simply because I've always had better luck with them. 100% of my internal Seagate drives since 1996, have had issues and 100% of my WD drives have lasted long enough to be retired due to being obsolete. That said, I've only owned 2 Seagate internal drives and probably over a dozen WD drives, neither of which is enough to really say anything about either brand. Also, bad drives tend to happen either in batches or to specific models. Sometimes the problem is with the model itself and sometimes its as simple as bad handling during shipping.I average about 80-85 MB/s transfer speeds, even on the one I'm sending back. Transfer speeds can be affected by any number of things, from drivers to the USB controller chip on your motherboard to any cable or hub connected in-between. So, if you're getting significantly worse speeds than others are reporting, you have an issue and it may or may not be the drive itself. Be sure to save yourself some grief and verify it's specifically the drive causing any issues before returning one. Try other USB ports, other USB cables (if you can,) other PCs, be sure to connect it direct without a USB hub and update your drivers. If none of that fixes your problems and you have other external drives performing just fine, it's fairly definite at that point you have a defective drive.Always be sure to test stuff out within the return window, if you can help it. It's been my experience that sending a hard drive in for an RMA with the manufacturer can result in you being sent a refurb drive to replace your broken new one. Refurb hard drives are something you generally don't want because they already have a bit of wear on them which can have an impact on both performance and longevity. Getting a refurb from an RMA seems to be a common issue with computer components and electronics in general but hard drive manufacturers are notorious for this.Something like what formatting you use on a drive can make a huge difference, even if it doesn't seem that important. WD external drives tend to come with exFAT formatting. Some PCs will refuse to boot with an external hard drive connected that is formatted with exFAT. I know, I ran into that very issue myself. I'm not talking about a Windows or driver problem here, it flat out refused to even POST. These drives come with NTFS formatting, which is what I prefer.Another thing to watch out for is that nearly all external drives, these included, use passive cooling. If you make the mistake of putting two of these drives too close to each other, they're pretty much guaranteed to overheat. So, watch your spacing. I started getting blue screens and couldn't figure out why until I realized two my external drives had slide together, while I wasn't looking.Overall, these things are a great deal, as long as you get one that works. The part of me that remembers using a single 500 MB drive for everything is amazed at how big and cheap storage is these days. The part of me that remembers seeing storage size grow by a factor of 10 on nearly a yearly basis is disappointed a little at the slow down that happened when hard drives started to approach 1 TB. Based on the growth rate I had witnessed during the late 90s and early 2000s, I expected to see at least 1 PB drives at around $200-$300 each by now. I'm not even sure if it's a problem of the market or tech that slowed progress. Anyways, I have over 37 TB in external storage and most of that was filled the day I got it. The endless quest for more storage space continues.

It has a huge storage space and is convenient to use. However, you have to accept that it makes some noise when operating.