Seagate Exos 7E8 2TB SAS

Haven’t had a single problem with the device plugged it in set it up and it has run great. This product needs no improvement. It’s very affordable for the amount of storage you get. I would recommend this.

Annoying screech/squeal.

Other people seem to love these drives, but I definitely had a bad experience. It's a shame, too, my first hard drive was a 21 megabyte (yes megabyte) Seagate drive in an old IBM clone. Newegg, as usual, stepped up and offered a refund and I'll be purchasing a competing brand soon. Between this and multiple failures on other Seagate 7200 desktop models I'm soured on this brand. YMMV

Great

-buy newegg warranty for peace of mind. -I have other W.D. drives that just wont give up, they have continuous high read/writes with no errors. Samsung, Seagate, are no match, so far being the worst drives I still own with low read/writes during period of use longer than 5 minutes. I find that odd. -BackBlaze website labels Toshiba and Seagate as the worst reliable drives with Western Digital being 2nd most reliable and HGST being the most reliable. Thou I don't like the HGST reviews newegg has so I went with W.D. and will continue to replace all my current HDDs with W.D. as soon as I can afford it.

Huge drive with good performance

I was looking forward to swapping out my 1TB drive in my 4 camera surveillance system with this huge drive, however after I was not able to get it working I realized that the surveillance system I have is limited to 2TB only!!! No stars off for Seagate because of this. I put this drive in to my NAS for now and will see if I can update the firmware on the surveillance system to accept 4TB drives. This might be good advice for anyone looking at using a drive larger than 2TB for surveillance. It now sits next to another 4TB drive, this one specifically aimed at NAS usage, so I decided to run some comparative tests. The other 4TB drive I have runs at 5400rpm, so I assumed that the 5900rpm Seagate would be faster. I tested with PC Mark and the Seagate drive gave me a ... MoreI was looking forward to swapping out my 1TB drive in my 4 camera surveillance system with this huge drive, however after I was not able to get it working I realized that the surveillance system I have is limited to 2TB only!!! No stars off for Seagate because of this. I put this drive in to my NAS for now and will see if I can update the firmware on the surveillance system to accept 4TB drives. This might be good advice for anyone looking at using a drive larger than 2TB for surveillance. It now sits next to another 4TB drive, this one specifically aimed at NAS usage, so I decided to run some comparative tests. The other 4TB drive I have runs at 5400rpm, so I assumed that the 5900rpm Seagate would be faster. I tested with PC Mark and the Seagate drive gave me a storage score of 2011 with the other drive trailing behind at 2002. I also ran a few tests with AIDA64 and again the Seagate drive was the faster drive, however not by much. Both HDD's streamed HD video content perfectly without stutter across my network. Both drives were quite and cool and did not appear to have issues running close to each other (vibration). These drives are designed to record video and try as I might I was unable to get my video capture software working properly when I swapped this drive in to my main PC for testing. I believe that this is due more to the video camera I was using than the HDD. This hard drive is designed for high workloads over a long period of time, it has been rock solid since I started using it, however I have not yet had the ability to use it the way it should be used due to the limitations of my surveillance system. I fully intend to write another review when I can install this in my surveillance system. The only disappointment for me was the 1 year warranty. This HDD is designed for high workloads over a long period of time, I expected the manufacturer to give it at least a 3 year warranty like the other NAS drives I am currently using.

Latest Biggest Best AV from Seagate

Various new factors are impacting the HDD market for video surveillance. New global legislation is increasing the maximum retention time for video surveillance and legal requirements for surveillance in certain public places are being mandated. When you add the fact that image quality and resolution is going up, the market for surveillance hard drives is estimated to increase to over a billion dollars per year around 2017. This would be over 7 million units per year. By comparison PC HDD sales fell 7% in 2013 to 444 million units. Most modern security DVR’s support multiple drives and capacities of > 3Tb per drive. Most modern NVR’s can use >3TB drives, also. However, if you are trying to put this into a consumer DVR device, do your homework. Many consumer-level ... MoreVarious new factors are impacting the HDD market for video surveillance. New global legislation is increasing the maximum retention time for video surveillance and legal requirements for surveillance in certain public places are being mandated. When you add the fact that image quality and resolution is going up, the market for surveillance hard drives is estimated to increase to over a billion dollars per year around 2017. This would be over 7 million units per year. By comparison PC HDD sales fell 7% in 2013 to 444 million units. Most modern security DVR’s support multiple drives and capacities of > 3Tb per drive. Most modern NVR’s can use >3TB drives, also. However, if you are trying to put this into a consumer DVR device, do your homework. Many consumer-level DVR’s will not support 4TB drive sizes. For instance, Direct TV needs to be the HR34 or HR44/Genie models to use either 3 or 4 TB drives. Tivo needs to be series 4 or greater because of either hardware or software limits. Most Scientific Atlanta HD box internal drives are IDE not SATA, and so on. I tested this drive for 24 hours each in: PC based security DVR system with Geovision cards, and a linux-based NVR where I removed the other drives to just test this one (the old ones were 3TB). The drive did its job in both applications. The main thing I noticed was how very quiet it was. I tested Seagate customer phone support for this review by asking the technical questions I mentioned above. They were very responsive. On a weekday at around lunchtime I got a real person in the US on the second ring. They spent a lot of time trying to get the right answers questions. They followed up by e-mail.

Less than 2 months to catastrophic failure

I have never seen a drive utterly fail in the first year of owning it. I get that there are anomalies and sometimes bad things happen. I just wish they happened to other people with less important data. Two eggs because they're giving me a new drive and time to get the data off the old one before sending it back.

Quality Hard Drive

-I'm not a super hard drive geek. I know latency, disk width, disk density, and other HDD terms but consider myself a regular HDD user..which is just to store data. I don't time them at all to the m/s...to me, the HDD is either fast or slow. Just remember that this hard drive is specifically designed for Surveillance systems which means it writes at just the right speed of 5900RPM, for long periods of time, but if you were storing data on this HDD, then that's where you'll run into issues because it takes more time for it to read. Not an ideal HDD to store small data like pictures and small video clips because it reads slow. But great for surveillance systems for when you're on away for vacation or don't touch the system too often. I did have a chance to test it on ... More-I'm not a super hard drive geek. I know latency, disk width, disk density, and other HDD terms but consider myself a regular HDD user..which is just to store data. I don't time them at all to the m/s...to me, the HDD is either fast or slow. Just remember that this hard drive is specifically designed for Surveillance systems which means it writes at just the right speed of 5900RPM, for long periods of time, but if you were storing data on this HDD, then that's where you'll run into issues because it takes more time for it to read. Not an ideal HDD to store small data like pictures and small video clips because it reads slow. But great for surveillance systems for when you're on away for vacation or don't touch the system too often. I did have a chance to test it on a friend's surveillance system. This system was NOT HD, only 480i. The only issue is that the surveillance system did not support more than 2TB hard drives. We tried to go onto the surveillance systems' website, but no luck with an updated driver. We went ahead and just use the 2TB for testing purposes. Before, it had a Seagate Barracudda 500GB at 7400 RPM. After using it for about 3 days, I did not see any lags at all whether it was playing back or recording multiple channels. We had 6 of the 8 channels hooked up to video cameras all around my friend's house. All recordings came in clear. Despite it running at 5900 RPM, it seems to handle the job quite well. Even though it ran at a lower speed, I did not notice any heat differences inside the case. I did notice that it took maybe a second or two longer for the 4TB HDD to start when it was in idle for more than 1 hour but that was the same case with the other Seagate 500GB HDD as well. I can see how this HDD will save energy in the long run but I'm not an electrician and I don't know how much it's actually saving per hour versus using a regular 7200RPM hard drive. To those looking for a simple answer to their question "does this HDD work for me?" The answer is "YES" it does work. Will it do everything..."NO". It's specially built for Surveillance applications. If you need a 4TB, first find out if the manufacturer of the surveillance supports 4TB. If they do, I'd recommend getting this particular HDD because of the build quality and it's gonna do what it needs to do.

Seagate 4TB Surveillance HDD - Works Great So Far

I have a lot of HDD's which I run in servers, NAS units, and External Drive Bays. Some, I run in RAID configurations, others in JBOD. I have HDD's from a variety of HDD Manufacturers with the majority of the HDD's from Seagate. Over the years I have learned that it is better to pay a little more money for the NAS or surveillance drives to ensure compatibility with External Drive bays and NAS devices. The firmware for the desktop or "Green" drives which puts them in sleep mode will cause major problems with External Drive bays. I would use Enterprise level HDD's if I could afford them. These Surveillance HDD's have worked excellent in every server, NAS, and multi-drive External Bay I have tried them in. I even use some for surveillance systems with 6 - HD cameras ... MoreI have a lot of HDD's which I run in servers, NAS units, and External Drive Bays. Some, I run in RAID configurations, others in JBOD. I have HDD's from a variety of HDD Manufacturers with the majority of the HDD's from Seagate. Over the years I have learned that it is better to pay a little more money for the NAS or surveillance drives to ensure compatibility with External Drive bays and NAS devices. The firmware for the desktop or "Green" drives which puts them in sleep mode will cause major problems with External Drive bays. I would use Enterprise level HDD's if I could afford them. These Surveillance HDD's have worked excellent in every server, NAS, and multi-drive External Bay I have tried them in. I even use some for surveillance systems with 6 - HD cameras (Mix of 720p and 1080p Cameras running 60fps). I have had a couple installed and running in a RAID 1 array for more than 8 months of continuous 24/7 operation with no problems at all. I tried a couple in a Mediasonic 4-HDD bay in a RAID 1 configuration that I use as part of a PLEX server which gets pretty continuous use. I have been able to run 4-6 different 1080p video streams from these HDD's with no problems. Since the drives do not have firmware that causes the platters to spin down, I have not experienced any problems with accessing the drives or the Drive Bay needing to be reset when the system has been idle for more than a day. I have had many problems with the drives becoming inaccessible or External Storage/NAS needing to be reset when using standard desktop drives or drives from external drives I have disassembled. The only problems I have had were with the Vantec HX4R and Ultra 4-Drive external drive bays. No HDD I have used in those units was stable. I believe this is because the Vantec External Drive Bays themselves are defective, not the HDD's. In conclusion, I recommend these Seagate 4TB Surveillance HDD's. The specs are the same as for the NAS version and the warranty is the same 3 Yrs. These go on sale for US$5 less than the NAS drives on sale so they are a good value for me.

So far, pretty great!

I picked up a pair of these to throw in a Synology DiskStation along with one 4TB WD Red drive (picking up another once I spot a good sale) for purposes of testing reliability between the two manufacturers/disk types, putting data that I don't really care that much about, and backing up the stuff I do to Glacier (web backup from that book company named after a rainforest) in case of simultaneous drive failure. After about two months of non stop operation in a SHR (Synology's proprietary RAID format), none of the drives have given me any problems. One of these drives is running at 31C with the other running at 33C. The WD drive is also humming along at 33C, and is adjacent to the 33C WD drive. All that is to say: performance is pretty much the same with no issues to ... MoreI picked up a pair of these to throw in a Synology DiskStation along with one 4TB WD Red drive (picking up another once I spot a good sale) for purposes of testing reliability between the two manufacturers/disk types, putting data that I don't really care that much about, and backing up the stuff I do to Glacier (web backup from that book company named after a rainforest) in case of simultaneous drive failure. After about two months of non stop operation in a SHR (Synology's proprietary RAID format), none of the drives have given me any problems. One of these drives is running at 31C with the other running at 33C. The WD drive is also humming along at 33C, and is adjacent to the 33C WD drive. All that is to say: performance is pretty much the same with no issues to date!

Solid Performer for its Purpose

After running this drive for over two weeks recording four 720p video streams I can say it is awesome for that. Trying to run a system backup on it was a no-go though because of several bad disk sectors. Not a single system backup worked for me. These translated to almost-imperceptible bad pixels/ frames in lengthy surveillance which didn't matter a bit for that. I guess if some guy was robbing you and the moment the gun went off you lost a frame it might matter, but I'm willing to bet those odds. I am thinking about using this drive full time but I think I'll have to do some research into other formatting methods mentioned to see if I can get another one to get two 4TB drives into a RAID 1 just in case whatever caused the bad sectors ends up killing one of the ... MoreAfter running this drive for over two weeks recording four 720p video streams I can say it is awesome for that. Trying to run a system backup on it was a no-go though because of several bad disk sectors. Not a single system backup worked for me. These translated to almost-imperceptible bad pixels/ frames in lengthy surveillance which didn't matter a bit for that. I guess if some guy was robbing you and the moment the gun went off you lost a frame it might matter, but I'm willing to bet those odds. I am thinking about using this drive full time but I think I'll have to do some research into other formatting methods mentioned to see if I can get another one to get two 4TB drives into a RAID 1 just in case whatever caused the bad sectors ends up killing one of the drives, I can still go back in time without losing all that footage. Four HD streams should fill this drive up in about three months and the DVR will then start to write over so I'll always have three months of footage in there from each camera. That's pretty cool! Just don't buy it thinking it is a miracle drive for anything you want to put on it because it has a very specific purpose and for that it rocks.