ElusiveHappiness—January 28, 2017
I just got my hard drive a few days ago, but it's working like a champ. One thing to note, you will most likely have to initialize and format it for it to be read by your OS if you're using Windows. This is done through the partition manager, which in Win 10, when you launch it, it will automatically pop up with a window stating this hard drive needs to be initialized. You also have the option of formatting the hard drive through the classic format, or the newer format which supports over 2tb in Windows 10. I do not believe the support for higher than 2tb for an internal hdd is supported in earlier versions of Windows, but this is my first 2tb internal drive, so I am not 100% sure. Speeds are definitely faster than my WD Blue drive, but not quite as fast as my primary SSD with the OS on it. I normally have 1 game installed on the SSD, but with this installed, I no longer want to do that. I may be a bit old fashioned, but I prefer having a large buffer on the primary drive for pagefiles :) Anyway, Seagate makes quality products, and you will not be disappointed with this. I do think a lot of the reviews talking about DOA drives are from less tech savvy people who did not initialize and format, as I described above. I don't know for certain, though. Another note: The drive comes in a smaller package with bumpers, wrapped in an anti-static bag. It looks like an OEM drive, but it DOES come with a warranty, for those curious. IIRC it's a 2 year warranty :) Hope this helps! -CymTyr Read more
Kayla—June 29, 2018
Bought it direct from Amazon and the drive came packaged very well. I installed the drive and ran a extended surface test on it which took about 4 1/2 hrs. The drive passed the test with no errors. Hopefully i can get 5 yrs of good use out of it before replacing it with another new unit. I will update this if any issues arise but so far so good. One thing to note, When i installed the drive it had no active partition out of the box thus it will not show up on windows explorer until you look under disk management, devices or look under diskpart in the command prompt to see in fact that the drive is being detected but isn't active with a partition. This will make someone who doesn't know much about computers think the drive doesn't work and i've seen a lot of reviews where people say the drive didn't show up when they hooked it up and thinking it was broken. Reason being that you need to format and create a partition for the drive to become active. Here's the simple steps to make it happen on Windows 10 which is what OS i use this drive on for media storage. 01 - Open command prompt in Windows 10 by pressing Winkey+S 02 - Type CMD in search box and right click Command Prompt to run as Administrator. 03 - Now when in the Command Prompt type "DISKPART" (without quotes) and hit Enter. 04 - Type "LIST DISK" (without quotes) and hit Enter. 05 - A numbered list will now show with all the drives that are attached to the system. Simply identify the number of the new Seagate drive in this list and make sure you choose the right drive or you could wipe out data on an existing drive with data. If your unsure then you could turn your PC off and unplug any existing drives with data on them, leave your main system drive and your new Seagate drive attached to the PC. Then boot your PC back up and repeat the steps back up to this point and continue on with the listed steps. 06 - After identifying the disk number, type "SELECT DISK 0" (without quotes and also replace 0 with the number that your drive identifies with in the command prompt, i only used 0 as an example.) and hit Enter. 07 - After you've made your selection type "CLEAN" (without quotes) and hit Enter. 08 - Type "CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY " (without quotes) and hit Enter. 09 - Type "SELECT PARTITION 1" (without quotes) and hit Enter. 10 - Type "ACTIVE" (without quotes) and hit Enter. 11 - Type the following command to format the partition using NTFS and to set a label "FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL=SG-Drive QUICK " (without quotes) and hit Enter. Remember to change the SG-Drive in the command with the drive name you want to use. 12 - Almost home now. Now you can choose what letter you want your drive to show up as in windows. Type "ASSIGN LETTER=F" (without quotes and use whatever letter you want, i used F for example, just make sure another drive isn't already using the letter you chose.) and hit Enter. 13 - Type "EXIT" (without quotes) and hit Enter. Close the command prompt. 14 - Turn your PC back off and plug back in any drives that you unplugged earlier as a way to prevent wiping the data on them by mistake. -----> Hope this helped someone out there. Enjoy your new drive <------ Read more
Learn More—June 1, 2018
It is working perfectly in a SATA 2 business / office PC from 2010. A clean install of Windows 10 1803 took 49 minutes (with delays from wireless network trouble and no way to get my user account rolling without creating a PIN). At the device installation screen it said the drive had 1,863 gigabytes of space. It works silently. Windows 10 scanned for errors and found none. 143 gigabytes of archived files from another SATA drive were copied over at 30 to 85 megabytes per second. The SMART data says it's a 7200 RPM drive with two power cycles and two hours of use, so it is not a used drive returned by another customer. It was packed OEM style in a small cardboard box with two plastic spacers to keep it suspended in the center. I will use this drive for backing up all my data and having easy access to old files. It will be great to hold on to large HD video files from an action camera without having to choose which ones to delete to make room. I'm sure a 32 gigabyte USB 3.0 flash drive dedicated to ReadyBoost will help the system have faster access time for frequently used files. Windows 10 1803 boot time was 85 seconds. After changing msconfig to use 4 processors, it went down to 62 seconds. Drive activity settled back to 0% at 114 seconds. The review and rating will be updated if there are any problems. Read more
