Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5'' HDD 4TB 7200 RPM 512e SATA 6Gb/s 128MB Cache Internal Hard Drive ST4000NM0115

Pros: Drive is a better price than most consumer 6TB drive and has much better specifications. This drives is rated for 600k load/unload cycles, most other drives, even some with 5 year warranties are rated for 300k. This drive has a read error rate that is 100x better than most consumer class drives. 1 sectore per 10E15 vs 10E14 for consumer class drives like the Barracuda or WD Blue. Mean Time Before Failure of 2 million hours. Rated for a workload of 550TB per year. Annualized Failure Rate of 0.44%. Advanced Write Caching via internal NOR flash. 5 year warranty. Specifications allow for 24x7 operation of the drive. Some other drives including Seagate Barracuda are only specced for 40 hours power on time a week! 8,760 hours a year versus 2,400. This drive uses Perpendicular Magnetic Recording and not the horrible Shingled Magnetic Recording that Seagate's consumer class drives use. SMR has such a bad reputation Seagate has changed the name to TGMR, but make no mistake TGMR means SMR.

Cons: Not the quietest drive ever made. If you are doing a lot of random read/write operation it is very likely you will hear this drive outside of your case. That being said, this is the case for most higher capacity drives, although if you get one that is Helium filled that will reduce the amount of noise. The noise isn't an issue unless you plan to use the drive for a lot of random read/write activity like d/l'ing torrents or installing your OS on it. For me personally, the noise is not an issue when compared to the incredible reliability and performance of this drive. One downside is the warranty starts from the date of production plus a couple months Seagate adds on. The drive had 4 years and 9 months of warranty left on it when I received it from NewEgg. This is likely a result of these drives not moving at the same volume as the consumer and consumer pro drives. This may or may not matter to you.

Overall Review: If you can afford it I'd recommend going for one of the 10TB or 12TB Exos Seagate Enterprise drives. Those two are filled with Helium which lowers the wind resistance for the read/write heads and as a result lowers both the noise level and operating temperature. If you can't afford those (I couldn't) then this drive is IMO the one to get. It's rated for twice as many load/unload cycles as the WD Black yet costs less. If you do decide to purchase this drive you are going to need to use SeaChest utilities to turn off the idling feature, assuming you don't want the drive to idle. If you are OK with it idling then you don't need to bother. If you want to buy a good HDD that will last you need to do the research and compare the specs of one drive to another. By Googling the model name of the drives you are interested in you can find their manufacturers spec sheets and compare them. Sometimes you even have to download the drive's manual to get all the pertinent information. If you don't have time for that... then just buy this one, lol.

Pros: Great cache capacity Better performance than I expected

Cons: Noise level above the roof

Overall Review: Overall, it's doing the job as advertised, but I wouldn't recommend them for a quiet config. These are enterprise disks, meant to be hosted in servers, in a bay, in a datacenter. No optimization regarding noise level was made whatsoever, and boy, they're loud.

Pros: Fast Large Capacity Low vibration for an 8TB drive spinning at 7200RPM Cool considering the capacity QUIET

Cons: None

Overall Review: I've only done an initial simple test to ensure it's working correctly. I know others have said it's noisy. Mine isn't. Yes, there is an audible clicking when the drive first powers on; that has never ever ever been a concern of mine since I'm not using the computer when a drive initializes. It got a little warm after writing 150GB to it. I did 3 separate writes at 50GB each using 2GB files, using Win7. They were spaced out in time so the drive would run for a while. I didn't run test software. After writing 50GB the write speed was recorded at 216MB/s. This is easily the fastest drive I have. Since Windows 7 shows an average, I can't say that it was writing @ 216MB/s after 50GB was written, I can only say the average write time for writing 50GB at the beginning of the disk is 216MB/s using large files. For a 50GB write I imagine the effects of buffering are still showing in the average (not much), but this is a real world scenario, which testing a drive using other software doesn't really give very well. It gives numbers for you to evaluate the drive in relation to other drives, but real world is writing files from one place to another and then using that data, so of COURSE buffering comes into play for actual drive usage. The heat is minimal for an 8TB drive spinning at 7200RPM, and it's comparable to the WD NAS 8TB drive that spins at 5400 RPM and doesn't give nearly the performance. Maybe a touch warmer. I can't speak to reliability since I've only run it for about 1 hr. When finding this on sale, it's worth every penny in my book.

Overall Review: Set 2 of these in Raid 0 formation which yielded better perf. I've been using this HDD with my Plex server for Home media storage and delivery and haven't had any problems with 4k 10 bit content as well.

Pros: - Value-wise, 6TB is a sweet spot - Fast

Cons: - Mine was manufactured Nov 2016, so I upgraded the firmware

Overall Review: - It has only been a day since it is mounted in my NAS server, so far so good. I is NOT running warm, nor being noisy as some reviewers noted. - It really looks like it is built to last. - The firmware it came with was SN02 which I upgraded right away to SN05. No problems so far.

Pros: Speed! Low noise

Cons: None

Overall Review: I bought this to transfer my games from my Xbox One in preparation of the One X. This drive is amazingly fast, and VERY quiet! I love it!

Pros: Both drives transfer much faster, and much more consistently, than previous consumer drives. Can definitely tell they're enterprise-class. Copied 150GB of very large virtual machine files from cheap SSD to 8TB EXOS at 300MB/s. FLAC files copied at half that speed. Write speeds were fairly consistent throughout the entire runs.

Cons: 8TB (data) drive gets warmer than 2TB (boot) drive. To be expected. Spaced them farther apart in the drive bays.

Overall Review: I have no reason to not recommend either drive -- at least not in my application. Of course, ask me in five years... Purchased 2TB and 8TB drive(s) six weeks ago, from Newegg. No issues yet -- even though I was half-expecting to RMA after reading some reviews here. Considering purchasing another EXOS soon. Drives used to power media server running 24/7.

Pros: Have many of the 1TB, 2TB and the 4TB sizes of this series in a number of 24/7 commercial servers. Zero failures in over a year. Yes they make a bit of noise and use some power but only to normal levels expected in a server drive farm.

Cons: None if you are looking for a commercial quality drive for 24/7 server use Beware description now changed! NewEgg has this drive now marked as "OEM" and that means no warranty according to Seagate. So forget the 5 year warranty on this drive. For me better to pay a bit more and get a warranty.

Overall Review: Can not understand all the negative reviews. From my experience that are prefect for what they are intended, rock solid server use.