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.

I bought the 8TB drive Jan 14, 2019. Plugged it in backed up my workstation, laptop and server and it just sits there reliably ever since. I have it on my home network and I'm constantly backing up to it.