Question 1

After formatting, how much usable space?

Accepted Answer

With Mac OSX10.10 Yosemite Format: MacOS Extended, Capacity 8TB and currently I have available 7.03TB with Used 989,310,309,502 bytes... so I would say 7.924 TB approx...

Question 2

can this be used for movie storage?  like to rip my blurays to hd and have my collections at my fingertips vs getting up and putting discs in.

Accepted Answer

I own 6 of these drives and I use them to store movies myself . They will be a little slower then other drives which is perfect for movies and cold storage . I wouldn't want to use one for my OS or high activity programs though where read/write calls are high. If you're just hitting it with read requests it's perfect !

Question 3

I am looking at this drive for use in backup on my home server.  The backup (incremental) runs nightly.  Is this drive a reasonable choice?

Accepted Answer

Yes I believe you would be happy with it for that purpose . It's the best price for the storage size. It's not a performance drive.. And I would only throw small to midsize transfers at it .. Very large transfers will eventually slow down to almost nothing every now and then and wait for the drive to catch up .. But that's only like 1TB+ I've noticed. Otherwise it handles pretty well. (Writing data)!.  I have about 8 of these and have never had a problem besides being slightly slower then regular non shingled drives .. Very pleased.

Question 4

Is it fast enough to stream 100Mbs 4K (UHD) video at sustained speed? I'd like to use it for my 4K media server storage. I'd especially   appreciate answers from those who has such experience with this drive. Thanks!

Accepted Answer

Two of these in a mirror (RAID1) configuration will do well in a write one read many configuration like a media server. You can push 89-121 MiB/s easily. If you plan on writing and rewriting I wouldn't RAID this with any data that can't be replaced. Check out FreeNAS, it works well as a media server.

Question 5

Will this drive work well in Windows 7 mirrored raid array?

Accepted Answer

I'm using two of these in a RAID1 on a Linux system without issue. There is nothing inherent in these drives that would preclude them from being used in any RAID - the OS sees them as a standard hard drive.

These drives trade off increased storage for reduced speed. They may or may not be suitable depending on your application. They perform well for media storage and retrieval but will be slow in database or other applications requiring a lot of random read/writes, whether used in a RAID or not.

Question 6

Can I use this to store big size .rar and .zip files and move back and forth between another hard drive at a reasonable speed or is this drive way too slow for that purpose?

Accepted Answer

Yes, absolutely.  For reads, I've seen 190MBs, but writes to these drives may be significantly slower (as they may/will still out periodically due to how SMR works.

Question 7

I would like to know if this drive would work for streaming dvd and blu ray movies? I have allot of movies I want to rip to my computer and I need cheap storage. What do you guys think?

Accepted Answer

No issues. I stream from mine all the time. Often multiple computers and streaming boxes.

Question 8

I know it has 4k physical sectors, but what's the logical sector size?

Accepted Answer

Logical Sector size is 512 bytes. 
Physical sector size is 4196 bytes.

So definitely an Advanced Format drive.

Question 9

Is this acceptable for recording use in a camera DVR?

Accepted Answer

While these may have sufficient speed to handle a camera DVR you would be better off with a AV drive. They provided more cache and better error handle (basically quicker skip of a bad sector).

Question 10

What is the difference between version 2 (v2) and the original one?  Thanks!

Accepted Answer

Not sure. I've only seen the V2 model for sale.  So likely, the v1 was an internal/development model.

You'd really have to ask Seagate.

And I've confirmed, all of mine are v2 (and dates back to March 2015)

Questions & Answers