Seagate BarraCuda Internal Hard Drive 4TB SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch (ST4000DM005)

I've had this for about 2 months now and have had no issues with it. I have the 4TB version. I use it for media and game storage in my gaming rig. I must admit, I was a little apprehensive about getting another Seagate internal drive after my old 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives all died quickly and ran loud and hot. This is the first one I've had since those. and so far it's been excellent! No errors at all, quick and cool running. According to HW Monitor, it runs 4 degrees C cooler than the black and 3 Degrees cooler than the blue. The highest temp I've seen is 28 Degrees C for the Cuda under high load. I haven't run any benchmarks (I don't like to do that), but the speed is comparable to my WD Blue 2012 1TB, which is a pretty fast drive. The Seagate is slightly slower when reading and writing large amounts of small files, but not by much. It is noticeably slower than my WD Black 2013 1TB, but that drive cost me almost as much as this 4TB Cuda did and is considered a higher tier drive.The only drawbacks I can see so far is that the Cuda makes a bit of a racket when transferring small files. It is the only internal mechanical drive in my rig that I can hear at all over the 8 case fans. It's mounted in a quick release bay with rubber mounts, so it will likely be quite loud in a hard mounted bay. It's seek time also seems to be slower compared to the two WD 1TB drives, but again it's not by much and those 1TB drives are both 7200 RPM while the Cuda is 5900 RPM, so that might be part of the reason.Overall, I see no drawbacks with the Seagate Cuda 4TB. It's price per GB is lower than most anything else in it's price range. It's faster than the WD Blue 4TB by a wide margin, which I consider to be it's main competition. That was the drive I was comparing it to when I was looking at a new drive. I'll update this review if the drive blows up or does anything wonky, but barring that I definitely recommend it! It seems Seagate has come a long way in recent times and their products are much improved compared to the ones from 4 or 5 years ago.

Apparently, I ordered this in August 2017. I've used it to store games and anything else that isn't required by WIndows to be on the C drive.While I'm sure that I'm probably getting closer to the end of life within another year or two, it served me well for the time I've had it.On the plus side SSDs, especially M.2 NVMe SSDs, are surprisingly affordable now. At this in 2024, the value isn't quite the same as it was back then.

I've had it for a few months now. It's a fine mass storage drive. I'm not using it to boot Windows, though, since I've got an SSD for that. But who sticks their movie collection on their SSD? The main thing with this drive is to ensure you use is as UEFI. Windows 10 only supports up to 2 TB with FAT32 (even though the format will theoretically support more).When I formatted the drive, it asked me UEFI vs. FAT32. I didn't recognize UEFI and I knew what FAT32 was, so guess which I picked? I then realized that I couldn't access half of the drive. Unfortunately, it can be very painful (depending on your setup and idiosyncrasies of the hardware you're using) to switch to UEFI. Even though I didn't have Windows installed on it, I still lost my installation because I had plugged this into the P0 slot on the motherboard--thank you, undocumented "features" (long story). But if you just format it as UEFI at the outset, life will be good.

I just received 2 of these drives, for a RAID-1 setup, and so far they are working quite well.The first thing to note is that Amazon is selling a bare (OEM) drive (a generic box which contains just the drive, packaging material, and warranty). As such, the box you get doesn't give the average consumer enough information to know what is inside (the sticker on the box lists it as "ST4000DVMB05" versus the actual "ST4000DM005"). So it is not quite the same as you would find in a store. If you need screws, cables, other hardware, or a hard-copy of a manual, this may not do. I won't knock off a star for that, as it is an Amazon issue (not clearly listing it as drive only).The problem with Seagate is reliability: they have reportedly had reliability issues lately. My two have worked fine in the 24 hours or so I have had them, putting ~2TB of data on them so far. However, I of course wanted to verify the warranty, since the Amazon product info page isn't very clear (2 years shows up in a comparison chart, but it also shows 5 years for a similarly named product that is "lumped together" for reviews). So what IS the actual warranty? Let's see:The generic box has no information outside about the warranty. Inside, it includes a "Seagate Limited Warranty" card. It has a section "How Long Does The Coverage Last?" section, which states that it is the length of time indicated as part of your product packaging (fail: there IS NO time period on the product packaging). Next, it says to look at the product box or quick start guide (neither are included in an OEM/bare package: fail again). Finally, they give you a URL you can use. Going to that URL, it repeats the "product packaging", "product box or quick start guide" and URL mantra. If you are persistent, you will see that even though the URL is the same as the page you are on, clicking on it this time will magically take you to a different page where you can enter the drive serial number, model number, country, and CAPTCHA code (don't want spammers finding out warranty lengths!) and it finally gave me slightly over 2 years (huh???).So they REALLY make you jump through hoops to find out how long the warranty is, the warranty length does not appear in several places that Seagate says it should, and you have to enter your serial number to find out for certain. That just ain't cool. While they may stand behind their products, they don't act like it. A 2-year warranty for a consumer hard drive at this price is acceptable, so why hide it?Sorry for my rant, but I feel that it is important to be an educated consumer (and even more important when dealing with your precious data).