Pros: Being meant for the home, Seagate did a good job considering the dimensions of the unit and it is aesthetically pleasing and fitting for the home. The drives are side-by-side to fit in a low-profile space.

The included instructions are reasonably simple to understand and get you set up. It is also easy enough to do service with. Provided instructions can show you how to open the device and swap drives.

The software (something you must install) handles the mapping of the drive for you, allowing you to even access the drive remotely without you having to set up a virtual private network.

The device handled streaming pretty well for me. On iOS, you can also use VLC to watch content from the server.

The included apps provide more functionality to make your content more accessible.

Efficiency is also considered. There are settings for power savings. By default, the drives turn off after 20 minutes (lowest setting). You can also have this hooked up to a network UPS should you have one.

Cons: The web interface and apps are a little on the slow side.

Using the web interface for service management and configuration, a third of the time was spent waiting for each page to finish loading.

Other Thoughts: This low-profile NAS design seems practically made to sit with your other home theater equipment. The only noise generated by the device is strictly from the drives themselves. That means they are no more loud than your modern set-top box.

On that note, it has an option to turn off the activity light. Very happy to see that.

Setup can take a long time to perform, so be aware that it won't be ready right out of the box.

Be aware that if you let the drives turn off, there will be a few moments before your device will become responsive again, as the drives have to spin up.

This NAS supports levels RAID 0 (striping, allowing faster transfers and up to double capacity) and RAID 1 (mirrored, providing reliability). With the included drives, that means RAID 0 will provide 8GB capacity, and RAID 1 will provide 4GB capacity while also being okay if one drive fails.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Zachary,

It would not be typical or expected for the web admin OS pages to load slowly. Please try a different browser to see if this helps. It may also help to check for firmware updates. Please use the following link for additional information on how to update the firmware (go to the very end of the article under the header "How to verify and apply firmware on the Personal Cloud"):

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/006124en

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: - Looks slick

- Study Assembly

- x2 4TB HDD's!

- Amount of space is impressive

- Options for RAID are nice for those that want to use it

- Almost* plug & play (see Cons for more info)

Cons: - Not exactly a low power consumption device, as these drives are designed to be ran all the time

- Price point feels excessive

- It's a hard drive, if it gets bumped or knocked around its more likely to fail sooner (keep it out of reach of children)

- There is a bottleneck of sorts with this device for some reason. I used multiple cables & routers (I even tried daisy chaining a couple to see how the results varied) and WOW the read/write speed was ridiculous. The FASTEST I could get was just above 19MB/s. Considering the price point... this is very underwhelming, not to mention dissatisfying for the consumer.

- Cooling feels mediocre after prolonged use with multiple devices simultaneously. Even with the corners propped up to allow plenty of breathing room, but this may not be a big deal to some.

- Seemed to drop connection during lengthy movies like LOTR

- Performance would noticeably decline if you were streaming from multiple devices at once (3-4 to be exact), this was surprising and disappointing considering the price point.

- *Windows 8.1 seemed to have some issues picking up on this device, on my extra machine I had a fresh OS install. But for some reason it wasn't detecting it, nor were the other varying devices in my network. I ended up having to call Seagate and have them do some troubleshooting with me, after resetting the device multiple times to no avail. They weren't able to help me resolve it on my own but eventually I was able to somehow make it work after opening it up and cleaning it out.

^ Granted, this is likely to not be everyone's experience but it did validate my generally speaking shaky faith in SeaGate & its products.

Other Thoughts: - One of the other reviewers said that it mapped the drive letter to S: - this does not seem to be the case with Win8.1, as it did not automatically create a mapped network drive, but showed as "PersonalCloud' under network locations.

After that I did have an option to map a network drive to it... but there was no auto-map.

Individual results may vary? Unsure.

I gave it two eggs for the aesthetics, and for the amount of space it has.

Would I recommend this personal cloud to a friend?
Probably not... I'd be more likely to recommend a DIY solution for a cheaper or similar price point.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Craig B.,

We wanted to provide some suggestions for optimizing your network performance. This should help increase performance with file transfers and with any connection dropouts that you may experience. Please reference the following support article listed below:

http://goo.gl/CL9HjE

We also wanted to provide our comprehensive support link for our Personal Could. This includes our complete software user manual along with additional essential information for this drive.

http://goo.gl/ELSAZ5

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: The hardware and case for this NAS is pretty solid and easy to use, and the set-up is pretty simple. The drives inside are another NAS-related product from Seagate (ST2000VN000), which have pretty high reviews for reliability. They're easily serviceable and can be swapped out for other drives, should you choose to upgrade or replace a dead drive.

SMB and AFP worked fine out of the box, and network setup was fast. SMB appears to support NTLMv2. The box does not list Linux as a supported operating system, but I did not have any trouble using a Fedora 21 system to connect and configure this device. It can be configured via direct IP in a browser if you look up the IP Address that it snags on your local network.

This is a solid entry-level NAS and it is quite easily serviced, but shouldn't have any cooling or performance problems long-term. This should just work out of the box.

Cons: The drives in this NAS are a bit slow, particularly because they're designed for 24/7 use and not performance. I also noticed that the performance varied by protocol as well, as WebDAV and SFTP/FTP were incredibly slow, but SMB didn't appear to have any problems at all.

The media apps that are included are extremely basic. They'll get the job done if you need them, but I would suggest using media apps on another machine and storing the content on the NAS.

No option for SSH, at least not directly. I was able to get an SSH login prompt on the system but the credentials did not appear to be the same as the web login.

Other Thoughts: This is clearly marketed towards the consumer market, and it does solid work there. It's not the most fully-featured NAS but it's compact, simple to use and will work for most users who have never worked with a NAS before.

Pros: Relatively easy to set up and use.
Twonky media server built-in.
DLNA support is the best I've seen - even supports bitstreaming original source audio.
62MB/s transfer rate through gigabit network.
Relatively easy to perform a drive swap, should one fail.
Drives inside are NAS-rated drives, Model #ST4000VN000.
Marvell ARM dual core processor is snappy and sips power.

Cons: No SSH. I'm sure at some point someone will post instructions for enabling ssh, but unlike BlackArmor NAS devices, it isn't in the configuration as shipped. The clue I take from this is that the target market is people who love gadgets but hate learning how to use them.

Installer would not run on Server 2012, obviously using some version algorithm that needs to be fixed before Windows 10 is widespread. Should be an easy fix, but clues me in that this is in no way aimed at the corporate market, since it hasn't even been tested on server OSes.

SDrive app maps to the NAS, The app is hard-coded to use drive letter 'S' on windows systems, and actually remapped my current 'S' drive to the next open letter! This is unthinkable, in my opinion. I can't state that strongly enough - the nerve of an installer to remap my system! I have document links pervasively that refer to the S drive, and those are broken - if I want to use the SDrive program. Seagate, if you read these, please stop this nonsense and offer the user a choice of open drive letters to which to map the remote drive. I docked an egg for this.

Media apps for devices are pure skeleton. No playlists, very little in the way of functionality. But - you can just use the iTunes server.

Other Thoughts: The twonky media server included is configured so well that I am impressed enough to almost give that fifth egg back. It just works. I've played with virtually every DLNA server software package, including Twonky, and it is impressive as implemented here.

When I first hooked the device up, it appeared on the network briefly, then disappeared. The mini-guide shows an 8-minute setup time, so I waited 45 before shutting it down via the soft shutdown power button. After two more attempts, it "stuck" and I was able to access it in network neighborhood.

Case design is great. These drives will stay cool because of the surface area exposed to air movement. I'm not in agreement with all those people describing it as ugly. It is most likely going to be sitting under a router in most people's homes anyway. Now, routers, there's ugly for you.

Pros: Setup is easy enough, plug into power & network. It takes about 5 minutes before you can pull up the IP properly (says loading). In which you refresh and it loads the GUI and downloads and installs the latest firmware (~10 more minutes - v4.1.5.13 - 2015.02-12 of which the rest of this review is based on.) You then choose if you want RAID 0 (8TB) or Raid 1 (4 TB mirror). Let’s get to it, these are real world benchmarks with real data and a stopwatch. Large is a single 10GB+ file. Medium is a hundreds of MP3s/JPG under 5MB, tiny is tens of thousands of files smaller than 4K each. They were copied TO and FROM a Ramdrive that reads and writes @ 6.3GB/sec, through a gigabit switch, with Cat6 cables, so minimal bottlenecks in anything except the device (and of course the 1gb/sec limitation of ethernet. - I do get to near 125MB/sec transfer speeds all the time, in-house, with large files): Best scores are posted, AKA you can’t expect better numbers than these:

Speeds with RAID 1: (Mirrored data 4TB)
Large Read: 34.5MB/sec
Large Write: 51 MB/sec

Medium Read: 21.6MB/sec
Medium Write: 23 MB/sec

Tiny Read: 1.07 MB/sec
Tiny Write: 1.8 MB/sec

Speeds with RAID 0: (Performance 8TB)

Large Read: 74 MB/sec
Large Write: 45 MB/sec (Yes, slower than RAID 1)

Medium Read: 34 MB/sec
Medium Write: 37MB/sec

Tiny Read: 1.21 MB/sec
Tiny Write: 1.75 MB/sec

What killed me was how the RAID 0 was SLOWER in writing large files. I thought for sure I’d be reading the limitation of the 1gb/sec bus (125MB/sec). I tried it again and again every which way and I posted the highest result. 20-26MB was not uncommon. I’m actually surprised the speeds are so slow for 3.5” HDDs in an expensive high end like enclosure with lots of CPUs and Rams inside. I get faster read and write speeds to my 2.5” 2TB external. ***The bottleneck is surprisingly NOT the 1Gb ethernet! It’s the device itself.*** I am shocked by that. These have got to be some of the slowest hard drives they make. I guess they were going for quiet and reliable.

Cons: This is all non-exact-product specific propaganda, which you can read over if you wish and go to “other thoughts”. Con is the company:SEAGATE The bulk of the cost of this item is in hard drives, which is at the center of price fixing scandal that started with a fake hard drive shortage in November 2011 (google: fake HDD crisis) where there was flooding in some parts of Thailand, (not where Seagate’s factory was located though), yet that didn’t stop them artificially inflating the prices by 199% - 328%, and they haven’t lowered to pre-11/2011 pricing since. Before November 2011, you could get a 2TB for $60 after rebate any day. Today I see that 2TB are listed at $70 for a refurbished drive and $80 for a new. After two decades of price per GB dropping a little more than 25%/year, you should be able to get a 4TB for $60 as well, but instead they are well over TWICE that, minimum. That’s the character and quality of company who you are dealing with. Yes, they are receiving record profits, higher than ever. Because with a little wink and a nod, the duopoly (there are only 2 manufacturers now. Toshiba, not yet a real player) they are colluding to keep prices high. Mark my words, someone will talk and in the future you will get a little postcard about a class action lawsuit for price fixing and “If you purchased hard drives between December 2011 and 201X..” you are entitled to a few cents after the lawyers took it all. So keep track of your HDD purchase invoices. So Seagate, you lose THREE stars for taking advantage of your customers, just because you can. Shame on you. When everything in the entire industry gets twice as fast/big for half as much, but Seagate slashes warranties from 5 to 2 years, double, triple your prices, and price fix...

Other Thoughts: All hard drives fail. Period. Not everything is practically cloudable though. It is completely useless to argue about anecdotal stories about which HDD manufacturers failing. You can buy a $250 2TB drive or a $89 2TB and it could fail in 3 seconds, 3 days, 3 weeks 3 months or 3 years or 6. So you RAID 1/5 up or shut up. But with multiple computers, and not wanting to leave 1 on 24/7 for on-site backups or media, I could see this device is quite handy. It’s not the quietest, you can certainly hear the HDDs grinding all the time. I think it’s too loud for a living room, or even in a computer room. Server room, okay. So in conclusion, It has some lightweight goodies (apps, FTP) I mentioned previously, and if you are looking for something with the simplicity of an appliance, this may work for you indeed. Sure it’s company takes advantage of you, and is guilty of price fixing, but what can you do about that?