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 purchased 8TB drive 14 months ago for purpose of it being attached to NAS for a differential backups.NAS recognized it in a breeze, only issue NAS has is that it can not let the drive into sleep mode.I realized this after two months of continuous run on this poor desktop aimed harddrive inside its neat piano black enclosure with convenience of expanding your USB3.0 ports to additional two. Fortunately, the constant strain onto this non-workstation drive havent had any impacts whatsoever. It remains to be superbly quiet while being amazingly fast with a limit of 151MB/s I have noticed on desktop while backing up from local SSDs. May not seem too impressive compared to SATA3 speed limits or SSD drives speeds but considering its a single HDD with its capacity platters and quietness, this is rather impressive, especially comparing my old 1TB usb2.0 Drive which is slower than one 6th of this drives performance. Spin-up is lengthy but the drive supports sleep mode while a source its plugged into via USB cable is turned off and I would say power on spin up time sacrifice is a great feature vs shorter drive life. Once its booted its access time is snappy, may take couple of seconds at most but then again, this is a mechanical drive which does well also in this regard.Best feature is the front USB HUB, and If I knew I will once buy this drive, I would save 30 bucks by skipping the purchase of 4 port USB3.0 hub that also needs power adapter. This drives front hub suffices my needs for USB3.0 ports by itself and places them right where I need it to be next to external optical drive and a card reader separated from the desktop case into a furniture piece with opening for what I call a media peripherals cabinet, it is very convenient just for this matter itself as I hide the wiring clutter in the back of it and all looks neat and tidy.If you keep the drive exposed, you may also like the breathing style logo LED backlight while its at works. When in standby, it just stays lit and isnt intrusively bright.Software-wise, the drive comes pre-loaded with a small application that will forward your web browser to seagate web site regarded to registration of particular product that could be skipped and still provided you with utilities: Toolkit - free of charge for your desktop backups being done once, daily, weekly, monthly, atm or differential backup.RescueData - could be downloaded for a charge and sadly, this utility is not free.Theres a fame that Seagate drives are defective and dont last long, yet I have never had an issue with Maxtor nor Seagate drives since late 90's. Actually It was Western Digital that gave me issues on three different drives. I have 2 seagate IronWolf drives in NAS and are running 24/7 and report healthy with 0 errors for the past year and a half or so.I strongly advise you, dont give on others reviews bashing this brand, seagate honors warranties and wont try to steal your money as some state. This honest company does not need to damage its name.In pc world its just fan war between the brands just like consoles flame wars go about PS vs Xbox, so do the PC spheres go Intel vs AMD, Nvidia vs AMD, Seagate vs WD where in reality, all the products perform about the same and only winner is who throws a better competing price tag onto their product. You are not getting damaged, or 50% less performing product, those who try to tell you that, are completely out of the picture. I dont even believe their said experience with DOA drives, unless they play football with them, place them next to 300WATT speakers magnets, plug and unplug usb or power cord while the drive is being accessed at the very moment pretending its hot-swappable and expect everything to be fine. Of course it wont, nor would it be okay with any brand HDD or SSD.NOTE! 8TB drive, as of Feb. 2020 has a wrong price. Its only 50cents cheaper than 10TB version, whilst I purchased this over a year ago for 149.99 - this needs a FIX do not buy 8TB Drive for more than US$150!UPDATE: Soon it'll be 4 years of daily use with backups set once a week, rather occasional write of random files ranging from single kB up to well over a GB, numerous daily accesses. Still snappy & quiet, performs just like on Day 1 and as excpected, CHKDSK report in provided screenshot confirmed theres 0 bad sectors. What more to state than this drive is phenomenal? Only that I truly feel sorry for unhappy owners of this flawless drive. Since my purchase in Dec of '18 price went up 22 dollars and STILL holds lowest price tag for 8TB external drive with added bonus in form of USB hub other brand drives lack, just cant beat it for the price and considering purchase of another one.

This is a beautiful, heavy-duty, and well thought out external hard drive. It can even act as a hub since it comes with two USB plugs into which you can attach another peripheral as well as charge your phone or whatever. The advantage here is that, if you’re short on USB ports you, not only not lose one by plugging this in, you actually gain two. I did try to attach another hard drive to it hoping to speed up the backup process, but things actually slowed down. But it will run a mouse, a keyboard, a tablet, a card reader, as well as charge a phone or i-pad.As a casual, non-technically savvy user, the speed is not something that immediately impresses me. The main reason is to make a final backup of everything I could potentially ever want from my ancient Mac OS 10 snow leopard laptop that I’m retiring. Other than that, I’m selecting backing up folders full of videos, RAW files, and photo files from my Windows 7 and Windows 10 PC’s. I really don’t notice that the process is that much faster than it was with USB 2, but I’m not sitting here with a stop-watch either.That ability to use it on both systems is rather amazing and a very valuable asset since I have important information on both platforms and it’s great to gather similar information in one place. From the description on Amazon I expected that I needed to download something to make this feature kick in. As it happens, this wasn’t necessary. My 4-TB drive recognized and communicated with both platforms out of the box. (I don’t know if this applies to the other sizes as well.)I have used the automatic backup software from Seagate (and another one called Simple Save) and did not find them satisfactory to the way I work. I neither want to do a complete back up of the daily status of my main computer nor do I want to end up with duplicate files. The latter happens when you save a file with one name (or the camera-assigned photo numbers) and later rename that file to something more descriptive or if you move a file from one folder to another. I ended up spending hours manually deleting from the backup or the drive would fill up too fast with duplicate information.I prefer to handle my backup manually and to mentally mirror folder structure I’ve established on my computers. For this reason, I have given up on automatic backup programs and didn’t activate this one. They are great for updating files that are still in the original place and have the same name. If you are organized enough for these parameters, I can attest that the Seagate program works conscientiously.On the less positive side, I’m concerned that the drive gets pretty warm with extended use. Since I don’t have the software installed, I don’t keep it plugged in all the time. (This would defeat the archival purpose of having data in second locations). Still, when it is plugged in, it is for an extended period as I transfer large chunks of data to it. It gets warm, you do feel the vibration of the spinning disk and, while it doesn’t make any alarming noises, it is certainly not silent.The reason the heating concerns me is that I have another 2 or 3 year old Seagate drive that, after hours of continued use also heats up a bit. It then starts giving me an I/O error message which requires either re-booting the computer or disconnecting and reconnecting the drive. It’s still working, I have bought new USB 3 cables to see if that will fix the problem and it doesn’t. I can still access the information on it, but my confidence in it is a bit diminished.On the whole, I’m very satisfied with this drive so far. I’m keeping an eye on the heating problem and trying not to have the I/O problems of its cousin drive affect my opinion on this one. Should that occur, I will immediately update this review.Truthfully, I haven’t had a single hiccup on any of the computers and have no justification for deducting even one star. The unit is very attractive but feels solid and hefty. I love having those extra USB 3 plugs in the front facing me where I can easily plug in anything I want.UPDATE: I lost a couple of external hard drives. One was due to a power surge during Hurricane Irma (I had forgotten to unplug it) and the other was due to a Windows 10 update that made my computer no longer recognize a drive it had recognized a couple of days before and the manufacturer does not provide drivers for that old drive. (Something to keep in mind when purchasing HP drives!) I decided to get another one of these. Again, I did not install the backup software. This one does not get as warm and is pretty silent. As I copy my data to it, I find that it is pretty slow to write.Slower, I think, that the previous one. Still, I'd rather have dependability than speed so I'm satisfied.