Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Terrible distracting vibrations as the head seeks. A loud (faster spinning) drive would mask that noise a bit, but this one being otherwise quiet really slaps you in the face with the noise when the drive is active. According to their technical specs, this thing is dead silent, but mount it to a case and the vibration turns it into a speaker, amplifying the head noise. You really need to suspension mount it with foam or similar. Performance would start okay for quite a while, then go horribly, horribly slow for a long stall out, before getting back to normal speeds again. I've tracked it down to the software I have probing the drive's temperature. Either there's a bug in the drive electronics, or it's just so underpowered that requesting that SMART data while the drive is quite busy reading/writing will stall out the drive for up to a couple minutes at a time. It's horrid, and not something I've had any issue with, with other brands of drives. The read/write performance is pretty disappointing. An 8TB WD Red (not "pro" either) with similar RPM rate, reads/writes 33% faster than this 8TB Segate. That's no small difference, but a huge bottleneck when backing up or restoring your data. I'd put up with it, if not for all the other problems. The warranty terms are pretty nasty, too. Not only is it just a 2 year warranty, but they have strict limits on how much data you can read/write to your drive in the warranty period. If you happen to backup your drive a lot, or regularly zero/scrub it for secure data deletion, or anything else like that, you can find your warranty void much earlier, for no good reason. And you'll only discover that after having paid to ship your drive back to them. And for all these drawbacks... Seagate drives are barely any cheaper than WD drives. I have no affiliation with either WD or Seagate. I used to prefer Seagate drive, many years ago, but they seem to have really given up and fallen behind their one major competitor. Even as I have issues with WD drives and decide to try Seagate again, I find they've only gotten worse along the way. AVOID!