Seagate Desktop 8TB external Hard Drive HDD review – does it need power supply?

The Seagate Backup Plus 8TB is tough to resist if you are looking for a transportable storage solution with acres of space to spare. It sips power, doesn’t cost the world and is blazingly fast – what’s to not like? Discover details in Seagate Desktop 8TB External Hard Drive HDD Review.

Pros & Cons

FOR
Impressive performance
Price
Bundled software
Power consumption

AGAINST
Not keen on the planning
Lack of power button

This is the primary 8TB hard disc drive we’ve received and therefore the biggest external (single-drive) hard disc currently on the market. This particular model – the Seagate Backup Plus – was announced earlier this year but uses an enterprise-grade drive which was unveiled back in August 2014.

You could probably cram about 1500 DVDs in 8TB or the content of 160 Blu-ray discs, or the equivalent of just about six million 3.5-inch, 1.44MB floppy disks (remember those?).

Seagate’s mammoth drive, otherwise referred to as the STDT8000200 within the UK and STDT8000100 within the US, is so new that it hasn’t appeared on the company’s own website yet. It sells for round the £250 mark (around $365, AU$485).

SMR magic

So how exactly did we get there? This storage capacity was achieved by making use of a replacement technology called SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) which allows the cramming of more bits on a given surface by employing a similar technique to what roofers do with roof tiles.

Drives that use SMR have one flaw – they are doing not perform well when it involves sustained, random writes. they are doing however excel when it involves sustained read speeds and burst write speeds. Potential purchasers will got to bear that in mind or they could rather be sorely disappointed.

As one Seagate spokesperson put it to us recently when talking about SMR, the drive is ideally fitted to backup and archiving, like an LTO tape and, as he remarked, “you don’t do random writes on tapes”. therefore the ideal scenario would be that of a WORM (write once, read many) replacement, where writes are rare but reads are plenty.

Seagate Desktop 8TB External Hard Drive HDD Review

Design

The Seagate Backup Plus seems like a brick, a black one with a mirror top (very susceptible to fingerprints and dust). Each of the edges (bar the highest and therefore the front) have between four and 6 triangles with dozens of small holes to enhance ventilation.

While that sounds bleeding-edge or maybe avant-garde, I didn’t consider the planning just because the corners are bloody sharp (pun intended). take care as this casing can draw blood from you; it did on behalf of me and a minimum of one other reviewer.

Other than that, there’s a micro-USB 3.0 port and a power supply port, a standard 12v 1.5A model. A status light on the top facia will let you know when the drive is in operation. 

Note that there is no on/off switch which means that you have to unplug the power supply or switch off at the mains to power down the drive completely. You also get a 1.2m USB 3.0 cable which is longer than what we’re used to.

Under the hood

Inside the Backup Plus is an 8TB drive from Seagate’s Archive HDD family, which intriguingly belongs to the company’s enterprise portfolio. You’d expect to use these mostly in data centres, for cold storage and in so-called hyperscale scenarios, not in a prosumer/consumer product.

The drive, which we believe to be the ST8000AS0002, comes with 128MB of cache, about four times the amount of large capacity hard drives. That’s mostly due to the SMR technology which requires the drive to handle data transactions on-board, a process Seagate calls “drive managed” and is facilitated by this larger buffer cache.

There are six 1.33TB platters, possibly spinning at 5900RPM, with 12 heads, and a rated workload rate limit of 180TB per year (that’s essentially erasing and rewriting the drive 20 odd times over – note that the Backup Plus only comes with a two-year warranty though).

The drive are often used 24 hours each day and sips power when in standby mode (less than 1W) and even in operating mode, consumes just 7.5W. Note that these figures are for the interior drive (Seagate hasn’t provided the figures for the Backup Plus). you’ll got to add a few of Watts for the particular power consumption but it’s fair to mention that leaving it connected 24×7 wouldn’t be a nasty idea as long as it’s essentially built for doing just that.

Seagate Desktop 8TB External Hard Drive HDD Performance review

The Seagate Backup Plus 8TB is perhaps one among the fastest external hard disc drives we’ve tested. Sure, put a 1TB SSD in an external enclosure and you’d find yourself with something faster – but compared to other traditional platter-based hard disc drives with a coffee RPM, it’s a stunner. It reached a staggering 124MBps in sequential read, and a jaw-dropping 195MBps in sequential write; both figures were obtained via the favored storage benchmark, CrystalDiskMark 3.

Oddly, Futuremark’s PC Mark 8 wouldn’t run on the drive and would consistently crash. Futuremark told us, that in theory, there should not be any issues related to SMR. we’ll still investigate and shall update the review if we manage to urge to rock bottom of this problem.

The device also comes with Seagate’s own optional Dashboard application which allows you to automatically copy your smartphone’s content to the drive (via a free app) also as your social media (from Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Tumblr) and even cloud-based content (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive).

It proposes two backup options, one scheduled and one for continuous backup. Value-added applications tend to be very basic and Seagate’s own Dashboard is not any exception – it provides the bare minimum allowing the user to settle on more complex solutions, should they need to try to to so.

This drive has no competition if you’re looking to shop for the most important single drive on the market. Sure, it probably costs less to shop for two external 4TB hard disc drives (currently about £90 each, around $130, or AU$175) but it’ll just make things more convoluted and fewer elegant.

As it stands, i do not see anyone (Toshiba or WD) competing with Seagate yet. WD consumer storage solutions reach at 6TB and Toshiba at 5TB, and neither have yet to plan to deliver anything on the brink of 8TB. the shortage of competition might actually encourage Seagate to push up the worth of the device.

We liked
Seagate Backup Plus 8TB Desktop Drive (8TB) at Amazon for $166.66
Other than the SMR-related weakness on random writes, the Seagate Backup Plus performed admirably on our tests, achieving some remarkable numbers while keeping the worth per TB fairly low for what’s a really new product. operational , it had been quiet and didn’t sip tons more power compared to lesser-capacity drives.

We disliked
The design could are a touch less aggressive – as always, this is often a subjective matter et al. might appreciate the clear cut, clean lines of the drive.

Final verdict

If you’ll accept the random write issue, then the Seagate Backup Plus 8TB Desktop Drive will probably be a secure investment for an extended time. Its Dashboard application is basic but does the work and is intuitive. Overall, the device may be a very enticing proposition.

I would however advise caution when it involves storing everything on such an enormous drive. Losing 8TB of knowledge are going to be life changing so do believe backing up. Plan for it and roll in the hay – don’t procrastinate.

This Seagate Backup Plus 8TB review sample was provided by Ebuyer where it costs £262 currently (around $380, AU$500). you’ll however catch on for fewer elsewhere.

Seagate Desktop 8TB External Hard Drive HDD customer Review

Excellent External PS4 Hard Drive

It works great with my PS4. The 3.0 usb is very fast and this model is combatable with the new PS5. I Recommend this Item If you own Quite a few AAA Games. I have Over 50 100gb plus games installed at the moment and there is no lag or issues swapping between games. The setup was plug and select the option to format for PS4 and under a minute It was transferring the data from my PS4 to the external hard drive. It is a great buy for the price If your looking to expand your PS4 hard drive as much as possible. 8TB is the max amount of external hard drive space that the PS4 is compatible with. I am not sure about the PS5 but I am sure that this external hard drive will be with you till the PS6 comes out.

By BaconCactus1 at Best Buy

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