Seagate BarraCuda 2TB Internal Hard Drive HDD – 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB Cache – Frustration Free Packaging (ST2000DM008/ST2000DMZ08)

I purchased three drives for data since they were on sale. There are lots of reviews here about documentation not giving them a step-by-step walkthrough on how to install these drives. Not bashing them or anything but as my title states please know what you are buying. This drive is completely blank and its like that for a reason. The reason there is no documentation on how to install it is because there are hundreds of different uses for it. The internet is a wonderful thing! For me though, everything worked great! Popped my drive into my hard drive enclosure loaded up disk management through windows formatted and there were no issues. As far as noise goes, its almost non-existent compared to my old 7200rpm WD blacks. Honestly cant even hear the ramp up. Speed is the thing that surprised me the most. Amazons store page states that the 4TB version has a sustained transfer rate of 190MB/s and I was actually achieving that. Usually, they push the numbers up a bit to look fancy but I was 180-190 through most of my transfers. The only reason I knocked off a point is because nowhere on the site does it actually mention the drive is SMR. As stated, you should know what you are buying, and not having that listed in the drives information/specs is kind of crummy. It literally takes two seconds to find it out on your own, but not being presented with all the important information about the drive is definitely an issue. Sorry I rambled...

The 2TB hard drive is an extremely reliable and cost-effective option for anyone in need of large-capacity storage. I have personally ordered three of these drives over the past 5 years and have not had any issues with any of them. The speed of the drive is decent and performs well with modern-day data transfer rates. It offers a great value for the price and is the best bang for your buck when it comes to large-capacity storage. I highly recommend this drive for anyone looking for a dependable and affordable storage option.

Ive had several of these fail in one of my servers but to be fair the airflow and cooling in that machine is less than optimum. After jury rigging an additional fan Ive had no more failures. But they do run quite hot so plan accordingly. Otherwise they are fine and perform about as expected for their specs. They are not high performance but are not intended to be, whaddaya expect at this price?

It works pretty good for the price. A little slow but tons of storage.

I got the 2TB Seagate Barracuda bc it was the cheapest drive that had the 256mb cache and 7200rpm. Im mostly using this HDD as a dedicated gaming drive but I might put some other stuff here in the future such as mods for games and etc. Overall packaging was alright; it was literally just in a small box in its own wrapping. SATA 3 works best for this drive (most HDDs and SSDs nowadays). You also get a 2 year warranty that starts the day the HDD arrives to you. For games, It somewhat met my expectations for a HDD; its no SSD but itll get the job done when it comes to downloading and loading games. I have Halo Infinite, BF4 (All DLCs), and R6 Siege installed so far and with just the longer loading times compared to an SSD, id say it does pretty good for HDD performance. Games are usually READ intensive so its good there. Depending on how fast your internet is, it might be better to just install the game onto the HDD instead of moving the game from one SSD/HDD to this HDD because the transfer speed is horrendous. This is because its an SMR drive (shingled magnetic recording). What this means is that drives use SMR are very slow when it comes to random read/writes. Think of shingles of a house roof, thats what the HDD looks like when its writing tracks. Overall, the drive seems alright for my needs. The only thing holding back a full 5 star review is that its an SMR drive. If it were CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) where theres no shingles, just one track, then not only would that improve performance overall, but would overall make for a better HDD for all purposes. I would not recommend this drive for surveillance purposes and RAID setups. If you get these drives and want to learn more about their specs/benchmark them, I recommend getting crystaldiskmark and crystaldiskinfo, very helpful programs.

Initially it stuttered and I thought I got a bad drive but after restarting my PC it stopped and hasnt stuttered since. Dont be alarmed if this happens unless the problem persists. Speed is acceptable for my needs. Was a bit of a pain to set up as it wasnt detected by my PC initially. Good value for money though. If your PC doesnt detect it just search it up as there are plenty of guides online.

I almost regret buying this drive, while I mainly got it for what it is designed to do it is extremely slow getting those files to the HDD so it can do what it is supposed to do. Which is storage ,backup and or archiving. Dont buy these drives the 2TB 4TB 6TB and 8TB (not sure about the 1TB) if you need an active drive that will be doing alot of writes or storing small sized files like 100KB-1MB files took me 18 hours straight everyday for 4 days to move and defrag 1.8 million 100KB-700KB image files to this drive. (technically I shouldnt have even defragged but I didnt understand the SMR part until after I did it.) If i was a normal person with a normal life it would have took me 3x-6x as long (based on 6hrs to 3hrs spare time respectively) to have done that lol. 2ndly if you say oh hey 4tb (or maybe 2TB, 6TB or 8TB) for all my steam games (why i originally bought it). Just dont, save your money and buy a normal high capacity CMR drive. This drive cant keep up during downloads, i download at 100Mbps which translates to about 12MB/s after about 60 secs at that the HDD cache just poops out on it, then it sends your beast PC into a potato mode that sometimes crashes explorer.exe at the worst and at the least into a lagged state of operation. I found a sweetish spot round 3mb-4mb/s throttled download speed where it could handle it a little better still no where as good as a CMR or SSD. Only thing good about these SMR drives is the $ to TB ratio. Before you buy these drives please do yourself a favor and read into what they are, be it official information or forums where people that use them speak about them. I didnt, I wish i would have understood what i was buying before I bought it. My fault entirely rather store page here stated it or not, other reviewers have and did. I should of read into their claims before i pressed that add to cart button. You can go to the seagate website and read the data sheets on any model of there HDDs to see which are SMR and which are not. I highly recommend you do that. All I got to say for good, is the 4TB for at the time $85 and I be honest I still dont think it was worth it! Because the performance is worse than hard drive speeds of the 90s. It really is that horrific! If i actually get my games backed up on it before either it fails or I die from old age waiting on the file transfer Id feel pretty blessed.

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I own two of these drives. First drive was- relatively- difficult to install for me. Ive owned or worked on a number of drives that are larger than 3tb and in Windows 10 at least, never ran in to the issue I had; drives can format in GPT or MBR and for some reason, both of mine decided they would detect as MBR instead of GPT (again, Windows has always known to use GPT in the past) which had me scratching my head until I learned that if you have a drive larger than 3tb, the system has to be told to use MBR instead of GPT. Again this was never anything I had to deal with before despite using drives larger than 3tb in the past. I suspect that Amazon and Seagate have probably had to deal with returns over this Im not sure what mechanism my other drives have used to prevent this but both my 6tb drives required that tweak. With that out of the way- even though the listing says NEW and my invoice/order details said new, I did end up getting a drive that was opened on my second order... and Amazon did the fulfilment too! Fortunately Amazon very quickly accepted a return and got me a new drive that had never been opened. The drives are pretty quiet, but that sort of comes at a price- they are pretty slow. I do not think youll be able to beat the price though, the value is there, the quietness is there, I can live with the slow speed. I will try and update my review later, if I have any issues. Update: Even though its only been a day since I wrote this review... this drive is SLOW. I maintain my position that this is still a 4 star product given the absurd per dollar storage, but, speed might be a consideration for you. As I had stated before, I have two of these drives purchased within a few weeks of each other. One was used to create a backup of all my older drives, and one is being used to replace all my older drives, then the first would be wiped and then used as a backup for the second. This means that I ended up having to do a few 4 tb (the sum of the data in my previous drives) writes. It took about 18 hours each time. Last night I did a virus scan- and system scans typically took about 4 hours with my previous drives. Last night- 7 hours. The total sum of the data that had to be read remained functionally the same- probably within 10 gb. I want to note too that- I shut down my computer for a few hours using start menu -> shut down, and when I booted this morning the newer of the two drives had an error that Windows had to fix during booting. I ended up spending about an hour on the computer doing normal tasks and then decided to see if the issue could be replicated. On a second boot, I did not get the error again. Cant imagine what I could have done to cause it though. The virus scan didnt claim it found anything so I do not believe it altered any files and it came from a cold boot after about 3 hours so I do not think heat was an issue- heat also probably not an issue because I have a mesh front case (Corsair 450D) with a pair of 140mm fans that push fresh air across drives in a room that is about 72 degrees. I hope that this information helps you make your decision. Again, I still maintain that this is an adequate value for the $140 spent on each drive- though I am certain you could get a better drive I doubt you could get one at this price point.

I bought a pair of these and use them in a docking bay connected to my MacBook Pro. The first time I used them, I was disgusted. I filled it half-way up and then the next time I tried to use it, it wouldnt mount and I thought all my data was gone... TURNS OUT... it commonly does this IF you accidentally disconnect it without first properly ejecting it. I assume its going through some self-test integrity check before it will allow the OS to mount it... but after 5 (or so) minutes, it pops up again, good as new. As long as you play by the rules, you wont experience this. I only mention it in case someone had a similar problem and didnt understand it and thought the drive was bad. Its not. The build quality feels really rugged and its quiet - makes just enough sound that you know its working without being annoying. If it were inside an enclosure, you probably would barely be able to hear it. Im very impressed with the speed - while pitiful next to a Thunderbolt or a top-tier SSD drive, for an inexpensive physical drive, its pretty good. 7200RPM. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test puts it at around 160MB/s Write and 190MB/s Read. Again, not the fastest, but screaming compared to the 12-60MB/s thumb drives I was using before... and its very reasonably priced! Hope this helps!