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This was a total shock, I guess it has been way to many years since I bought an external drive. I couldn't believe how small and compact it is (the size of a modern cell phone) and didn't require any extra power outside of the USB cable.

Newegg product listing N82E16822178306, Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0023 boasts as solid drive. I haven't visited Seagate's High-end product line since their departure from the 5-year warranty of standard consumer lines several years back and only have had two 1 TB models recently for video editing / capture ( RAID 0). Since some time has passed from owning a high-end Seagate product, I welcomed the opportunity to see what Seagate has been putting under the hood lately on their Pro line of hardware, especially one in the price range near a half grand. Even with a high price there are just some inherent advantages that SAS offers over SATA and I occasionally prefer offloading to a SAS CPU than having local system boards handling data so seeing what SAS2 is in comparison to consumer lines and SATA will be interesting. (Wiki offers a good starting place for the casual beginner when looking at SAS vs SATA and determining if one or the other is a good choice for and particular utilization if you are new to SAS). With Seagate's Pro lines, I'm seeing a toe-to-toe stance when dealing with their competition and perhaps even a little extra toe stomping when it comes to exceeding longevity and outliving the problems their competitors have on their Pro lines. The drive is smooth, well put together and operating quietly and surprisingly cool, when compared to other Seagate drives and competing brands. If you see the notes in the "Other Thoughts" section, you should notice that this SAS2 drive falls in line with pretty much the performance of SATA III 6.0 drives. Keep in mind that SAS offers drive controller intelligence that SATA does not; also, SAS has the ability to monitor backplanes via sideband cable options on most mid to high level SAS cards. SATA more often mimics monitoring via software solutions weighing the system down more so than SAS hardware solutions. Another big factor that stands out is the little amount of heat that this drive puts off. True, I'm not running SQL Server or Oracle DB on the drive, but given the fact that I am moving a 40GB chunk of data all over the drive for an hour, and it's doesn't really get warm, helps draw the conclusion that Seagate's enterprise class drives run cooler and can take on more tedious encounters on a 24/7/365 basis. Further, not a single sector showed any defect, skip or error after a pounding 24 hour testing session

Large amount of storage, quiet and fast.

- Ease of setup - Speed / functionality

Big drive for a reasonable price, plug and play with my PS4.

6 out of 6 drives passed a full 3-pass write/verify certification of all sectors with 0 errors. (Compare to the WD Reds I've used, where about 1 in 3 fail.) Performance is good; basically in line with a 7200RPM 4TB drive. In other words, a nice bump up from the 5400 or 5900 RPM NAS drives from other manufacturers, but not hugely so.

Good Quality HD Case, perfect to protect your 2.5" external drives.