Seagate STEL8000100 Backup Plus Hub 8TB External Desktop Hard Drive Storage

Using a few of these daisey chained as a makeshift NAS. They work fine. Not fast nor pretending to be. Wake up is a bit slow as the disk spins up and then reads the very long list. I have them semi cooled with a fan which most will agree is important to there longevity.

The Seagate external hard drive provides a useful means of storing just under 7 TB of data. However, this hard drive has a two-year warranty and the end user should take this period seriously. Like all electro-mechanical devices, this hard drive has a finite life, typically up to 10,000 hours of operating time or less. As soon as you detect ANY unusual behavior, back up your data on a separate storage device because it is likely that your Seagate drive is about to fail. Examples of failure Ive experienced include: Windows failure to detect the hard drive due to a device I/O error; and the device format will change from NTFS to RAW suddenly. At that time, you will need to use data recovery software and hope your data is recoverable. You have been warned!

Ok, Ill admit it. I dont want to spend even 10 minutes formatting anything for my iMac. Despite what everyone tells you, it always turns into at least half an hour and lots of cussing, and its never as easy as everyone says. Id rather pay more $ and have this already formatted for my iMac, so I did. All of you techies who argue against paying extra for the convenience are, well, techies. Those of us who would rather spend those minutes doing anything else, buy this. Its plug and play. Honest. With apples Time Machine, it basically sets up automatically. Plus, the hard drive itself sits vertically on my desk! How is this not standard?!? Who wants to waste valuable desk top space? And it seems logical that it will cool more easily. Not sure why most external hard drives are horizontal, but this seems a much better option. I like the white and silver colors, too. They match my iMac. Pretty much love this little machine.

I just got two of these because of the low price, the added USB ports, and the humongous size. So far they are great -- quiet and huge. My one big problem so far has been Apples fault, not Seagates. If you are running Mac OS 10.13 (High Sierra), be aware that when you try to format with Disk Utility, you MUST change the view option in Disk Utility from Show Only Volumes (the default view) to Show All Devices. You will not be able to format the drive if you have the volume name highlighted instead of the device name. I spent a good deal of time swearing at my computer until I found this advice on the Seagate support site. Review update: Im downgrading these one star, because of the cables that ship with them. Those cables are too short, AND the connectors are way too loose. Every time I so much as touched them they would disconnect the drives -- very annoying! I finally bought longer cables, and these connect more securely. Otherwise, I havent had any significant problems in the last month.

UPDATE: After unmounting the drive, unplugging it for a moment, then booting it back up, the USB Ports are now working properly! All is well. Fantastic drive. _ _ _ _ _ _ I love these drives, its my second purchase. My first was the white, 8TB made for Mac. I needed another smaller drive so I purchased the black 4TB pre-formatted for windows. I reformatted it for Mac (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)). For some reason, the front USB 3.0 ports provide power to devices but will not connect to the computer. My printer was not connecting to my computer; I tried with my phone, same deal. Other than this, the device does its job. Its just disappointing that this feature is broken. Its really a nice addition, especially when youre running a Mac with limited USB ports.

Ive owned several of these for my own home-computers and theyre still ticking after several years. I just bought this Backup Plus Hub Desktop 6TB for my work computer and I HOPE it holds up as well as all of my other Seagate External Drives have, especially since Im putting a lot of data on it that I need to get off of my very full 500GB hard drive! All of the other negative reviews are concerning for sure, but then again, a lot of people dont stop to write a review when theyre happy about a product, so Im hoping this plays into the number of negative reviews and Ill say that while a lot of people have complained about Seagate, I cant say a nice thing about a single WD drive Ive ever owned so Ive been using Seagate for a lot of years because of this experience with WD. Good luck and if you have a good experience with your Seagate drive, or any product, please dont forget to post it so things are more evenly weighted.

Instructions (even online) are minimal or inadequate, and assume way too much about who is using the device. I hooked this up, registered, requested a Daily Backup and got an on-screen notice that I was all set! Indeed, since hooking it up, it ground and moaned and whirred--I thought its working!! Yay!!! Not so much. A week later I checked into the Seagate File to ensure my files were copied and safe. Nada. Nothing. Opened the Dashboard, and discovered I had to request a back-up manually. I admit I am not a coder or a programmer, but I NEVER had this issue with the WD My Passport (had to replace because I had maxed out the memory). Instructions need to be a lot clearer. More step by step. Frankly, written as if people are stupid, and dont know much. I am not certain that this device has caused my computer to completely freeze (even Ctrl/Alt/Del would not shut it down), but it is odd that all sorts of trouble have occurred since I hooked up this thing. Perhaps expert installation would have been the price, but geez, it shouldnt be this hard. Amending review on 8-25-17 While I still find the Dashboard feature confusing, after a lengthy conversation with Support, learned that the old school method of Drag & Drop will work just fine. What is lost on giving up the convenience of automated backup, is gained by being able to find your files without having to go through numerous layers of obscure file names (that you cannot change). All I want from an external drive is to back up my files and be able to find them with the relative ease I can on my PC. Drag and Drop does this. A back up is supposed to make life a little more secure, not more frustrating. Bottom Line: Forego the fancy-dan Dashboard and scheduling backups. Do a manual copy and update your files as you go. More hands on to be sure, but at least I know where the files are--and can find them. Big shout out to Adam at Support--professional and helpful.

This device was disappointing. Maybe I misread the description. I was under the impression you could plug this into your computer and the plug your iPhone into this drive and it would back photos, contacts, etc directly to the drive. Not so. Once configured you have to install an app on the iPhone and a dashboard app on the pic. Then you use the iPhone app to setup the backup. There appears to be 2 options for backup target: cloud(which I havent tried) and this device. Much to my amazement using this device as a target means backing up each file by having the iPhone send it via WIFI to the computer which then writes it to this device. Ive had a number of problems getting it to work so far primarily due to the fact that the documentation leaves quite a bit to be desired. Ive sent my questions and concerns to Seagate and they responded in a few days with less than helpful answers. For example after initiating the backup it appears to be transferring file from the phone at a snails pace. After about 10 minutes I get an error message indicating a timeout has occurred with no additional data. They responded that this happens when the iPhone app cannot find the pc on the network. It apparently found it when it started and then lost it somehow. I then asked where the files were that it had transferred before the time out. The response was that they were in a folder using my email address I used during setup. I could not find the folder on this device or anywhere else. Their response to my concern for performance was that I could drag and drop the files from my iPhone onto this device since my pc saw this device as an external drive as well as the DCIM folder on the iPhone. I gave absolutely no idea how to transfer contacts via the drag and drop method. This is probably a decent external hard drive. If you are looking for a slick, easy, and high performance way to backup iPhone files, look elsewhere. I will continue the Q and A with Seagate and if I can ever figure out what is going on I will update this review.

Works well and is an economical solution to external storage.

I bought two of these (one for work and the other for redundancy). Plugged one in and formatted it with Disk Utility. I then moved my lightroom pictures onto it and it seemed to run little faster on this than the self powered seagate drives (STEA1000400) that I have purchased previously. It seemed a little loud but I was happy with its performance. And I love being able to plug in my XQD card reader to the available USB 3 ports. Thats handy and fast uploading off my camera. The buzz (kind of like an xbox hum) was perhaps too loud, I wondered, but I figured that was just the way it was going to be if I wanted an inexpensive large volume drive. I left a 4 star review and went on about my day. But Seagate support replied to that review and it got me thinking that perhaps the noise is not normal. I hadnt yet unboxed the second copy, so I then plugged it into my iMac and it was nearly silent. Itll sleep and if I open LR it has an audible spin-up, but then has a very quiet operation. Seagate support is replacing that first drive free of cost so I am changing my review to reflect the fact that its an ideal drive for me. I thought the future was thunderbolt and SSD but the cost of that is excessive so Ill use these drives for the foreseeable future. Perform well and Im really happy with them.