Features:

  • Store and access content for years to come with 8TB in a USB drive
  • A great external hard drive for Mac and Windows, this hub can charge mobile devices and transfer files from USB cameras and USB thumb drives via its two USB 3.0 ports
  • Use seamlessly between Windows and Mac by installing the provided NTFS driver for Mac
  • Take advantage of a complimentary two-month membership to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan for access to awesome photo and video editing apps
  • Enjoy long-term peace of mind with the included two-year limited warranty
In case if you are wondering what bare drive inside

UPDATE-2: After Christopher K.'s feedback I conducted further tests to isolate that "cyclical head activity" situation. I first unplugged CAT6 cable to my NAS (Synology DiskStation DS213air). Wi-fi is already disabled. So NAS become absolutely stand-alone, away from all external interaction. When you unplug the ethernet cable, it goes thru a busy few minutes with disk activitiy. Then after it "calmed down", I noticed that such semi-cyclical head activity is still going on. At that point the only possible intervention to drives can obviously be coming from NAS operating system (DSM 6.1.3-15152 Update 3) and/or these 3 "packages" running on that NAS OS: -Universal Search (can't disable) -File Station (can't disable) -Media Server (can uninstall) So in theory either NAS OS or one of these packages can be "polling" the drives cyclically. Otherwise, such cyclical activity must be coming from drive itself. I checked a bit more online for that ST8000AS0002 drive. Looks like Seagate part no is 1NA17Z and firmware version of my drives is: RT17 . Seagate website informs that; "No Newer Firmware Available / A field update is not available" (I guess they don't want to give users the ability to change firmware - potentially discovering built-in "NSA code"! (as discovered by Kaspersky few years ago)). Since user Christopher K. reported silent NAS operation of his same drives; the chances are that they might have never firmware. Or it could be purely because of NAS OS. I update both OS and packages on my Synology NAS as they become available. So it might be theoretically possible that one such update (which coincided with me installing these new Seagate drives) could be the reason behind such cyclical activity. But I noticed this nuisance immediately after upgrading to these new Seagate drives. So I still reasonably think that it's being caused by the drive itself (whether SMR structure or firmware level). On my test, next I plugged back CAT6 cable to my NAS. So now it's hardwired to my router (Netgear Nighthawk R6700); another potential source of external polling to the drives. Again after few more minutes of "calming down"; already existing activity level of drives didn't change. So the router is not guilty. At that point my hard-wired desktop PCs are off. I turned on one of my Win10 PCs (running Kaspersky Internet Suite); still same activity level on those Seagate drives. So my conclusion is; I still think that these drives (at least the ones I have - with potentially earlier firmware) are not able to "sit quite" in my given NAS. The only absolute proof will be when I upgrade them in the future (it'll be a non-SMR drive). If the new drives will be as quite as my earlier (non-SMR) Seagate drives; then I'll know that the reason was those drives after all... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE: In my NAS; drive heads seek in irregular intervals (about every 5-15 seconds), even there is no user read/write activity going on. Drives might be refreshing their buffers or something. Previous Seagate models (non-SMR type) were not doing that. Other than that extremely audible nuisance, this non-stop mechanical activity might shorten life-span of drives. I'll update if they fail prematurely. I suggest that you avoid this (and any) drive that uses SMR technology. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inside the unit is a Seagate Archive HDD v2 ST8000AS0002 8TB 5900 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive. I needed the internal drive. This external unit was cheaper than buying the bare drive. Plus I have an extra USB3-to-SATA board with power adapter. This drive uses SMR technology; so it's supposed to be slow (not to be used as system drive - for archive purposes only). I replaced one of my aged NAS drives (also a Seagate 4TB Barracuda ST4000DM000 which reliably served me about 4 years - 24 hrs) with this new ST8000AS0002. Both drives have 5900 rpm speed. New one uses SMR technology, old one does not. New one runs at 100 F temperature (measured by my NAS) - old one at 90 F side-by side in NAS enclosure (fan cooled). I use my NAS strictly with ethernet cable (although it has wi-fi option; it's a joke and I disabled it after trying it once). So with old drives (in parallel writing RAID mode) I was getting 75MB/sec transfer speed. Surprisingly with one new drive (other 4TB still keeps running after 4 years) I still get the same speed. So speed of this 8TB SMR drive is totally acceptable to me. Much more than archiving speed, I can consistently stream HD movie with that 75MB/sec hard-wired ethernet connection. For those who are thinking about doing the same; opening the case is pretty much destructive (read: your warranty for whole unit is void). Interestingly; I checked warranty status for bare internal drive : Seagate web site informs that "the unit was sold as a system component. Please contact your place of purchase for service"... So after all; directly buying an internal drive (and paying a bit more) makes better sense for warranty purposes. I'll update later on about longevity of the new drive.

One of my top purchases of 2018.

This hub is an absolute game-changer. The two USB ports on it allow for me to expand my Macbook's free USB slot into effectively 3, which I couldn't find with any other brand. Before, I would have to unplug my drive every time that I wanted to print something or check another drive, which made it a nightmare, as well as impossible to transfer files from one drive to another. This allows me to always have it plugged in, and plug all of my secondary accessories directly into it. It's also very quiet and incredibly affordable. This has been one of my favorite and most used purchases this year.

This was cheaper than the actual 8TB HDD. I ...

This was cheaper than the actual 8TB HDD. I ripped it open and kept the hard drive, I also kept the hub mechanisms in tact and popped in an old 1TB HDD. If you open this yourself, expect the plastic housing to be ruined.

A decent back up drive on the cheap

We have been using this back up hard drive for a few months now and it's going strong. Its about 1/3 full and has not hic-upped yet. The USB ports is a nice feature and can be used to copy from one drive to this one. The logo at the top of the drive provides the power and status lights. The external power supply is a large all in one style rather than the previous drives we have bought in the past which are a dual corded brick. About the only thing I wish was different is that you could lay this drive on it's side. Seagate mentions you are not suppose to do that with this model and it needs to remain standing upright, boooo! As for the performance it is pretty decent for being a back up drive. This is a "shingled" hard drive so data has to be rewritten since there are over-lapping areas, which means a speed penalty. At first the drive leaps off the line in Windows 7 large file transfers at 60-ish mbps, which will reduce until it's hovering around 28ish mbps write speed on USB 2. It's not bad for back up purposes at all, and you could work off from it, but it wouldn't win any speed tests. One key feature that drove us to this Seagate instead of Western Digital and others is the fact this drive is NOT encrypted, and that's what we want. If you have an encrypted drive and the case burns out and the drive itself is fine...you still lose all the data since the two are keyed together and make the drive's data is inaccessible without the case. This particular drive is not encrypted, therefore if anything burns out with the case, we can pull the drive and get to our data via computer or another case. We aren't carrying confidential files on this thing anyway so we don't need the encryption, I just don't want to lose several years of photo, videos, and music because a circuit burns out in the case. All in all we are happy with the large storage size for the price and the bonus extra USB hub!

Overall I'm very happy with the drives

Wanting to upgrade the (4) 2TB drives in my NAS, I searched for quite a bit for a inexpensive 8TB+ drive. Unfortunately bare drives just aren't affordable yet in large capacities. Instead I bought 4 of these guys and gutted the bare drives from them to replace my existing drives. Only 1 of the 4 were archive drives. The other 3 were Barracudas! ST8000DM004 to be exact. Overall I'm very happy with the drives, and my NAS is now 4x bigger than it was a few weeks ago.

FAST & QUIET - MY FAVORITE EXTERNAL DRIVE!

I am a speed junky and a musician - so I want fast and quiet drives. This drive is both - it's the fasted external USB3 drive I have (faster than my internal Barracuda 2TB SATA III). With USB 3, this drive is blazing fast (151 MB/s write and 146 MB/s read - on Macbook Pro 2011 17"). Warming, USB 2 connection is VERY SLOW (24 MB/s write and 29 MB/s read). So, if you only have USB 2 ports on an old Mac and you have a Thunderbolt mini video display port, get a Thunderbolt to USB3 converter (there are some excellent hubs on Amazon - I am extremely impressed with the Akitio Thunder Dock (Thunderbolt Cable Included)). I've attached the Black Magic disk speed test. NOTE: This is testing the drive on my old Mac through the Thunderdock via the Thunderbolt cable. The two USB3 ports on the front of the Seagate backup hub drive are also very fast!

Pleasantly Surprised The Second Time Around

This is my second Seagate 8Tb Backup Hub. The first drive was loud, with a lot of whirring and clicking (like Fargo:"clicks and buzzes"). I returned it immediately and decided to look elsewhere. Continuing my research, I kept seeing how people loved the Seagate Hub. I decided to give it another chance. My second drive arrived in just 1 day. Once connected exactly as the last one was, silence! I mean whisper quiet. I had to touch it to feel a very fine vibration to be sure it was working. I recently converted my HDD to SSD and can now really appreciate how quiet a computer can be. I am delighted with this new drive. If you get a loud one, send it back. This drive can and should be whisper quiet (at least those are my first impressions).

Easy to set up, even for a non-techie

Ok, I'll admit it. I don't 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 it's never as "easy" as everyone says. I'd 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. It's plug and play. Honest. With apple's 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.

Works perfectly with the XBOX ONE X!

Seagate has a few of these 8TB External Hub Drives segmented to various markets. Just wanted to let everyone know this works perfectly with the XBOX ONE X. Literally plug and play. Your XBOX will ask you if you want to use this as a media drive or format as a game drive. Once formatted you'll have about ~7.2TB available for game storage. (After over-provision: This is normal for ALL drives) So if you're looking for a matching black hub drive this will work wonders for you. The only thing missing is the fancy Xbox branding that the white Seagate Game Drive Hub for Xbox 8TB Storage With Dual USB Ports (STGG8000400) has on the chassis.

Great for Apple Time Machine!

I got the white 4TB iMac model to use for my Time Machine, which had run out of room on a 2TB drive and had to delete about 15% of the earliest backups. Installation on a 2017 iMac 27" was a piece of cake. I took the opportunity to run a AJA disk check (see accompanying photo) and got a respectable 156 MB/s Write and 165 MB/s Read. The irregularities in the red 'instantaneous' Disk Write plot at the bottom left however, hinted at the sustained write limitations of the SHR technology used in the embedded ST4000DM000 5900 RPM hard drive. Don't get too nervous however, as the writes had no errors and Time Machine is a reasonable use for this drive. The only difficulty arose when it took 17.5 hours to transfer the existing 1.5 TB Time Machine database file from a faster 2 TB LaCie drive to the Backup Plus Hub. That is an average of less than 24 MB/s and illustrative of the poor sustained write speed of SHR technology drives when they have a lot of writes to do in succession. Once the initial backup on a Time Machine is done, the amount of new material each hour is minimal for personal use, so it will function fine until it runs out of room. Then Time Machine will cull the oldest backups, which require a lot of writing so may take a few hours. That should occur on the order of 1/year and I can afford that. I would NOT recommend this drive if you have to write long files to it often enough that it slows your work down or for RAID use. It would be ideal in a situation where there are predominately reads, like a music or video server.

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