Seagate Technology Desktop HDD 8 TB SATA 3.5 in 5900 RPM 256 MB 6 GB/s, st8000dm002 (3.5 Inch 5900 RPM 256 MB 6 GB/s)

Never buy this drive (ST8000DM002) !! When IDLE it makes a very loud noise, not acceptable!!!

A massive 8 (EIGHT) terabytes of SATA storage, currently the most available on a single spindle. Performance seems top-notch, though you'll need a modern SATA3.0 (6Gb/s) controller with proper cabling to take full advantage. On my slower USB3 and SATA2.0 (3Gb/s) interfaces, the drive was pegging the controller. Pleasingly, the drive is 7200RPM instead of the "variable rate" that was popular a couple of years back, and the 256MB cache is the largest I've seen on an individual drive. As with all spinning disks, performance will vary by whether you are writing to the inside or outside of the platters, as well as OS load and caching practices. One caveat with all the capacity and performance: the drive runs hot. Upright in an open USB3 dock (writing continuously for 16 hours), smartmontools reported its internal temp at 50C (ambient was around 70F). That's not exactly a fair test, since when will you normally write 8TB in one stretch? But that measured much higher than my enclosed 3TB drives. Try to install this drive in a well-ventilated location with adequate airflow. Another caveat would be applicable to using any large single-spindle storage; performance suffers under a load of mixed read-write or random-access requests. A well-tuned operating system or performance controller can offset that degradation, but in the end it's the physical limits of a single drive. Thus very large drives are better suited for: archival storage, large-file access (sustained sequential reads/writes), or single-user access. Keep your OS, web browser caches, and the like on small, fast SSD drives. Other thoughts: the drive runs quiet (slight clicks as it seeks, nothing loud, no vibration). There's even less visible circuit board than usual for SATA drives. The drive takes a while to physically spin down after being powered off, if you use an external dock like I do, give it 15-30 seconds before removing the drive. FreeBSD shows this drive as: 7630885MB (15628053168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 972801C) The two-year warranty is a steep drop from the 5 years offered on enterprise drives (see the Seagate ST8000NM0055 for the enterprise 8TB version), but is still superior to the 1-year (and shorter) warranties that thankfully didn't catch when vendors tried them a couple of years back. This is a bare drive (ships with nothing, not even screws), but hopefully somebody buying this sort of tech already knows what to expect. Amazon shipped it wrapped tightly in heavy bubble wrap, inside a small sealed box, inside a larger box with air-filled padding. I was pleased with the packaging. A high-capacity, high-performance drive from the market leader. If you need gobs of storage space, this is the drive you want to be buying. Recommended.

I purchased the 8TB hard drive during a sale on Prime Day. This purchase was intended to help allow me to store more photographs without having to disperse my files across different hard drives. However, the amount of audible clicks and wines that this hard drive produces (especially while it isn't actively copying files) has me quite worried that I may have purchased a defective unit or it was damaged during shipping.

The drive was delivered as advertised, has a tremendous amount of storage, it's fast at 7200 rpm, and it was easy to install. So far so good. That said, once you start using it your realize there's a problem that can't be fixed or corrected: this drive produces an insanely loud amount of noise both when operating and in idle, which is more puzzling. It's loud enough to become a problem beyond a nuisance, as it's so distracting it makes using it with your computer just impossible past 10 minutes. Apparently it's not just my drive, as many users are reporting the exact same loud and annoying noise with this very Seagate model. I ended up returning it; I just couldn't deal with such loud noise constantly in the background while working with my computer. There's something seriously wrong with this hard drive model.

Very nice drive and works as expected once spun up. Docking it one star because the comparable 4gb drives seem quicker. It feels like a longer latency.

Extremely noisy, sounds very sick and not like a normal hard drive. Too noisy and and annoying to be anywhere it can be heard. I swore off Seagates due to very bad experience with crashes, i'm regretting having given them another try.