Pros: *Inexpensive compared to other NAS devices.
*Simple to use for the average consumer. I followed the spars instructions and had it up and running with no issues.
*Was not picky about the drives I used, which were three 3TB WD Red drives and one 3TB WD Green drive (I know I shouldn't use this in a NAS, but it served a short term purpose).
*It is quiet.
*Drives stay relatively cool.
*Compact footprint.
*Seems reliable. Always shows up on my network and has not failed any data transfers (and I transferred a lot of data to it).

Cons: *You get what you pay for, few features and weak hardware (but that was to be expected).
*Few application features (but what do you expect for this price?).
*Slow transfer speeds. I am running a single ethernet port on a Gb switch and I see 45MB/s max.
*The CPU hits 100% when transferring data. The CPU seems to be a lot of the reason this NAS is so slow.
*Though the initial setup was easy, it took forever with the firmware update. The SimplyRAID setup also took a day or so to complete.

Other Thoughts: I bought this NAS for a project that only requires its use for a week or so, but I am happy with it so far. I did not want any features other than the RAID storage, in this case Seagate's SimplyRAID (a RAID 5 variant). As I indicated above, I populated this device with three NAS drives and a non-NAS drive with no issues. I was then able to transfer several terabytes of data to it with no issues.

I would only recommend this NAS to someone that is budget minded and/or only needs simple network storage (photos, music, documents, etc.). This is a beginner or simple use NAS - anything more than that and I would recommend a Synology or Qnap.

Once done with my project, I may put this NAS in a friend's house to use as off-site backup. I will simply set it and forget it. I will also be removing the NAS drives and populating it with non-NAS drives. It will be interesting to see how it performs over time.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear John,

Thank you for the feedback on our Seagate NAS 4 Bay NAS. We will pass along your comments to our developers regarding adding additional apps, and improving firmware update and SimplyRAID set up times.

If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact our support staff directly and we will be happy to assist further:

http://support2.seagate.com/

Best Regards,
Seagate Support

Pros: Easy setup (despite what I have read in a few other reviews)
I had this up and running in 20 minutes. It took slightly longer to get some of the more difficult services running.
Lots of good features.
Price is great for what you get.

Cons: I took off stars for a few reasons.
1) When setting up an NFS share (I needed this to use with a linux server I am using to run PLEX media server) there is no way to restrict access by ip address (I even asked a tech guy from seagate). This is only an issue because I don't want my kids to be able to delete movies accidentally. It can restrict by user name and password but configuring linux to pass that every time it needs to access the plex data is way too difficult (or may even be impossible)
2) Since there isn't an app for android and the sdrive app seems to be a problem.....you can access it remotely using mynas through a web browser however the file transfer depends on java and that is not supported by chrome or edge web browsers. This means for me to get it working on a pc I had to tweak chrome to make it work or use internet explorer. Second it is hard to (almost impossible) to do decent file transfers from my android tablet.

Other Thoughts: I am very happy with this product over all. The price point is good for what you get and I would not send it back. I would recommend this to people but I would warn them about the cons.

Manufacturer Response:

Hi Roger,

We will pass along to our developers your suggestion regarding restricting access by IP address when using Plex media server. Thank you for this feedback.

We also wanted to note that a SDrive mobile app is coming by the end of the year. This should help with remote access on mobile devices.

If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact our support staff directly and we will be happy to assist further:

http://www.seagate.com/contacts/

Best Regards,
Seagate Support

Pros: Sets up fairly easily using the provided link to Seagate's web-site.
Supports 3.5 drives other than Seagate branded.
I use it for file sharing among my devices and disk image backups. Works with 7200 RPM NAS drives made by another manufacturer. I am using Raid 10, (mirroring-striping) to get what I believed would be maximum speed.

Cons: I used 7200 RPM NAS drives to maximize throughput...or so I thought. Has EXTREMELY SLOW data transfers. Link aggregation between the two ethernet ports is available, and I set it up that way, but what good does it do with the slow transfer and read-write speeds? Sometimes when trying to copy files, it is so slow that I am sure it has stopped working, but it has never actually failed...just seems that way. Seems to especially stumble when copying "large-ish" files. As I mentioned above, I am using Raid 10, (mirroring-striping) to get what I believed would be maximum speed.

Other Thoughts: The unit has been very reliable, but it is so slow I regret the purchase. I considered another brand (starts with S) because of a previous experience with that brand, but the cost was more than double. I also considered that the other brand S uses a special file system (EXT4) making reading the drives with a different device (for failure recovery) difficult at best. The Seagate, as I understand it, uses NTFS, making the drives recoverable by installing them in any Windows machine, provided they were not set up as Raid 5 or 6. Perhaps this perceived benefit of having a more or less "standard" file system is the Achilles heal of the unit that causes slow read-write performance. I am submitting a support request to Seagate to see if their support people can offer advise for a performance improvement.
By the way, the unit has a virus scanner option which I enabled. I'm going to disable the virus scanner to see if that has any effect on the read-write performance. I will follow up with the results in a future update here.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Craig,

We would recommend the following to increase the performance on your Seagate NAS. First, check to see if there are any firmware updates available. Here is a link that shows how to check for updates:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/005994en

While the support article listed below is for our Central and Personal Cloud products, some of the suggestions would be valid for the Seagate NAS, especially the notations regarding Wifi versus direct network cabling:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/005728en

If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact our support staff and we will be happy to assist further:

http://www.seagate.com/contacts/

Best Regards,
Seagate Support

Pros: -Easy Setup
-Perfect for SOHO users
-Quiet
-Only draws about 31 watts under full load (tested with Kill-a-Watt)
-Sleek design

Cons: -VERY SLOW
-Setup takes a long time, needs to reboot several times
-Apps are outdated versions
-Poor support
-EXTREMELY SLOW.

Other Thoughts: Write speeds around 35MB/s and read around 12MB/s max. Tested with direct connection as well as a few gigabit switches with no increase in speed. What's the point of even having link aggregation in this box? Called tech support and spoke at length with Jeremy (very nice) but all he could do was confirm that the unit wasn't functioning. Made it sound like it should be faster, but I just don't know if other units perform any better. Seems like this unit is targeting people who aren't going to monitor it's speed. Okay if you plan to put only a few TB on it, but don't plan on backing up 12 TB of important information.

Pros: For the cost, you really can't beat the value in this NAS.

I purchased the diskless version and added four Seagate 6TB (STBD6000100) drives with 128MB cache. The NAS has been configured as a RAID 1+0 (or more commonly RAID 10). This allowed for just over 10 TB of usable drive space. Very happy with that. Obviously if you're looking strictly for space, it can be set up as just about any popular RAID configuration (e.g. 1, 5, etc.) We wanted mirrored HDDs so we went with 1+0.


Best features:
* Simple to install and set up
* 2 Ethernet ports allows for linking for one 2-gigabit connection
* can be used on or off domain
* Multiple RAID choices
* can be used on two different networks simultaneously
* compact size and no software to install to manage (all web-based)

Cons: The biggest complaint is the processor. I have no idea if this will be a problem in the future, but it runs very hot. It's averaging around 73 C with very little load other than admin (web usage).

The disks (even with the faster 7200 rpm disks installed) are only averaging around 43-46 C. This is more in the realm of normal, but still a little warm.

The drive trays are pretty "cheap" for lack of a better term. They are lightweight plastic and I really thought I was going to break the pins while installing the drives. I give Seagate credit for making the drives snap-in without screws, but they need a more robust tray to make the user feel more comfortable with this step.

Other than the complaint regarding the trays the system seems fairly well built. Maybe not as commercial as the Drobo, for example, but good enough for something that has very little hands on (hopefully) once installation and set up is complete.

Other Thoughts: I would recommend this to just about anyone. I also have a 5 bay Drobo running with total of 15 TB. The Seagate surpasses the Drobo in quite a few ways. Web-based user interface, multiple ethernet ports, and it actually cost a few dollars less.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Mark W,

We wanted to note that the maximum allowed temperature for the processor is 105 C, so as long as it remains below this threshold, there should not be any problems.

If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact our support staff and we will be happy to assist further:

http://www.seagate.com/contacts/

Best Regards,
Seagate Support

Pros: I reviewed the Seagate STCU8000100 8TB NAS 4-bay network attached storage system, better known as a 4-disk NAS box. The unit shows-up on my network as a “Seagate-D4” storage device.

The Seagate-D4 (D4), test system came with four pre-installed Seagate model ST2000VN000-1H3164 2.0 TB hard drives; running in simple RAID mode. These drives are specifically designed for use in DVRs and compact NAS units. They run at a cooler 5900 RPM. Seagate warns that only one failed RAID disk can be replaced at a time. The system is rated to monitor up to 10 HD video surveillance cameras.

Initial setup was easy. You simply plug-in a patch cable from your LAN into one of the two NIC ports on the D4, then plug-in the D4’s external power supply cords and press the power button. The supplied quick start instructions instruct you to open any workstation browser connected to the same LAN as the D4 and type in a URL to a Seagate website. An automated script then takes over and searches your LAN to find the D4’s IP address. It then walks you through the initial NAS setup process. Note: Setup requires that you have Internet access to install the D4.

Setup consisted of installing the latest firmware/OS updates, creating user accounts, setting admin/user passwords and access rights, and setting options. Tip: Restart the NAS after this initial setup completes for any new firmware and setup changes to take effect. System restarts and shutdowns can be performed from within the browser admin interface. Another tip is to change the D4’s default workgroup name to match your local workgroup. This will make it more easily visible to older OS like Windows XP.

After the initial reboot, any new public shares created, should be visible to all of your LAN clients. Any LAN client can access the public folder(s), create new folders and add files using Windows File Explorer. The assigned administrator can create additional private folders as needed and update the access rights. Group access folders are also supported.

The web interface has five main icons: Device Manager, File Browser, Download Manager, Backup Manager, and an App Manager. Note the Backup Manager is for backing up the D4 only, not your clients. You will need to use separate backup programs for each of your clients. Seagate currently offers only small number of additional Apps on their website. Both an antivirus and a security camera monitoring App are offered though.

Cons: While not a huge con, reboots took the D4 around 5 minutes to complete. Reboots with firmware updates took even longer. The system log also indicated some disk checks took place during one extended reboot session.

The included monitoring software indicated the ARM CPU was running at a rather hot 150-155°F.

From the odd department, the internal system log file had entries in it dating back to 2009?

A single client can easily pin the D4’s CPU at 100% utilization during heavy copy sessions. This does not bode well for larger offices with multiple clients. My impression was that the D4 is a little under-powered in the CPU department. RAM utilization always stayed in the low 25-35% range. As more data was copied to the NAS, RAM usage increased. The system also makes use of virtual memory, which seems silly on a NAS. Why not simply add more RAM? A larger RAM disk cache may have also improved the data transfer rates.

The help instructions are all located online at Seagate’s website. This allows Seagate to always present the most up-to-date help instructions. On the other hand I found the help instructions to be rather brief and lacking in details. For example the instructions offered for the various supported network protocols left me wanting. I have a BSD Unix based NAS4free server running in my basement and as a result I was somewhat familiar with many of the terms Seagate uses. A newbie to NAS may be left totally confused by all of the various network protocols supported and their setup options.

I could not get the Sdrive remote Internet access feature to work. My buddy and I spent several hours working on the remote access issue with no results. It worked fine on my local LAN, but while he could logon to the Sdrive service using my user ID and PW, he could not access any of the public files and folders I had created on the D4.

Other Thoughts: LAN Speed Test measured the following gigabit LAN transfer rates in Mbits/Second, using three file sizes and as compared to my existing home-built NAS4free system. The latter uses an AMD Athlon-II dual-core CPU, w/4 GB of RAM and no RAID:

File Size: Seagate-D4 NAS4free 64-Bit
20 MB: 369 Writing/393 Reading 502 Writing/502 Reading
100MB: 348 Writing/403 Reading 530 Writing/502 Reading
650MB: 279 Writing/365 Reading 369 Writing/393 Reading

The D4's four hard disks all hovered around the mid 95-105° F. temperature range, even under a heavy work load. This bodes well for longer disk life. 8TB of disk space was reduced to 6TB usable, by the built-in Simple RAID data protection system. The installed hard drives carry a 3-year manufacturer’s warranty.

The D4 ran quietly for the most part. Under heavy use you could hear the internal fan speed-up somewhat. But noise output was never an issue.

Mac users can stream iTunes from the D4 and backup files using Time Machine.

I thought the network transfer rates above were a little on the slow side for a modern NAS. This could be the result of using an ARM CPU instead of a more traditional x86 desktop CPU. It could also be due to lack of RAM, at only 512MB, which would have limited disk caching. The poor transfer performance may also be caused by the slower 5900 RPM video hard drives. I’d love to hear from another end-user who bought the disk-less version and added his or her own 7200 RPM drives.

Overall I thought the price to performance ratio of the Seagate-D4 was acceptable when compared to other similarly priced NAS solutions. I was rather disappointed at not being able to get the Sdrive remote access feature to work during the short review period. Being limited to only accessing my files from my home office LAN was a major disappointment.

A search for help on this Sdrive remote access issue using both Google and Seagate’s own forum site, only returned one unrelated item, which was of no help. Seagate really needs to beef-up their online technical support for this NAS system. I don’t know about you, but I hate calling tech support help lines for assistance. I just don’t have the spare time. I prefer things work correctly out of the box.

Hopefully Seagate can address the online help info short comings with updates to their website and the Sdrive issues with future Sdrive software improvements. Due to the technical and poor online help glitches, I gave the Seagate D4 three out of five eggs. I plan to follow-up with Seagate regarding the Sdrive issue. If we can get it working, I will submit an updated review.