It was that for my tech refresh. My storage systems (2 synology ds2015xs with a total of 16x4TB disks) are always the to be refreshed and so I started hunting for a seller especially since I was looking to upgrade to 16x8TB disks. My attempts at looking for a reputable seller o Amazon was to say the least not encouraging as I had spent months trying to figure out where to get the disks (I buy most of my tech from Amazon). The very poor reviews I had read from various buyers on Amazon did not give the confidence that I was going to be happy with my purchase either. So I decided to give the independent retailers a try...I choose CCL and another retailer and split the quantity into 2 batches... 9 (8 + 1 spare) to CCL and 9 (8 + 1 spare) to the other retailer.The disks ... MoreIt was that for my tech refresh. My storage systems (2 synology ds2015xs with a total of 16x4TB disks) are always the to be refreshed and so I started hunting for a seller especially since I was looking to upgrade to 16x8TB disks. My attempts at looking for a reputable seller o Amazon was to say the least not encouraging as I had spent months trying to figure out where to get the disks (I buy most of my tech from Amazon). The very poor reviews I had read from various buyers on Amazon did not give the confidence that I was going to be happy with my purchase either. So I decided to give the independent retailers a try...I choose CCL and another retailer and split the quantity into 2 batches... 9 (8 + 1 spare) to CCL and 9 (8 + 1 spare) to the other retailer.The disks arrived on time as promised and were properly secured and packaged and for the first time ever, I checked what the warranty status was on the disks. (This was one of the major issues reported by buyers on Amazon) I was over the moon when every single disk I bought from CCL still had the 3 year warranty on it!!!And when it came to building the array (raid 5, took about a day and a half checking for consistencies), not a single error was reported on completion!!!To say that I was extremely pleased is an understatement. The whole process from purchase to utilisation was ...as they say in mortal kombat..a "FLAWLESS VICTORY" for me.I would have given more than 5 stars for this transaction but alas :) 5 is the maximumI would definitely recommend CCL for purchasing tech equipment.On a completely unrelated side note, I have been camping on their website waiting for an opportunity to grab an ASUS 3090 RTX GPU...we all know how that is going these days :)

Ordered Friday 04/03/22 at 10:04am, arrived by Royal Mail on Saturday 05/02/22 before 12pm – thank you CCL & Royal Mail. Paid a little extra over a global online retailer, being put off them for computer components as I’ve had a retail boxed HDD from them in the past which had some shoddy outer packaging. Also their recent reviews for HDDs showed it’s a bit of a lottery as to how they package their HDDs for shipping. Some customers receiving very poorly packaged drives, dented and broken. My Seagate Iron Wolf 4TB arrived in it’s sealed anti-static bag, inside a thick tubular bubble rap envelope, inside a double thick, snug fitting cardboard box with a grey courier pouch bound tight outer layer. Installed and working perfectly as anticipated. A further 4 weeks later ... MoreOrdered Friday 04/03/22 at 10:04am, arrived by Royal Mail on Saturday 05/02/22 before 12pm – thank you CCL & Royal Mail. Paid a little extra over a global online retailer, being put off them for computer components as I’ve had a retail boxed HDD from them in the past which had some shoddy outer packaging. Also their recent reviews for HDDs showed it’s a bit of a lottery as to how they package their HDDs for shipping. Some customers receiving very poorly packaged drives, dented and broken. My Seagate Iron Wolf 4TB arrived in it’s sealed anti-static bag, inside a thick tubular bubble rap envelope, inside a double thick, snug fitting cardboard box with a grey courier pouch bound tight outer layer. Installed and working perfectly as anticipated. A further 4 weeks later and drive working just fine. I had thought this would be replacing a 4 year old 3TB Western Digital WD30EZRZ (CMR) as my main backup drive in my gaming PC as I was getting errors on that while doing drive image backups. Long story short, the WD drive subsequently proved not to be the culprit (memory/mobo) so I did not really need this new drive. It's quick and quiet enough while still using CMR (not that problematical shingle / SMR) recording method along with other tech alluding to reliability. It has a reasonable 3 year warranty and additional rescue / data recovery service - wouldn't expect to use it but it might show Seagate has some faith in their product. Happy so far.

A Blackhole of Data Storage

Prior to receiving this drive, the largest I had were a 6TB Toshiba & a 6TB WD. At first the drive seemed a little on the louder end of the spectrum while writing to it. My brother happened to be over during the initial large file transfer and he said his 12TB WD Gold sounds very similar. I suppose this is a phenomenon experienced with high capacity helium filled drives? The noise isn't that intrusive, just louder than what I have come accustomed to. The drive is currently residing in the aforementioned Zyxel NAS326 on my living room entertainment center. I demand very quiet, if not silent operation, and it fits that bill just fine. If you have older external enclosures, docks or potentially even your router..you may issues with a drive of this capacity. I had an ... MorePrior to receiving this drive, the largest I had were a 6TB Toshiba & a 6TB WD. At first the drive seemed a little on the louder end of the spectrum while writing to it. My brother happened to be over during the initial large file transfer and he said his 12TB WD Gold sounds very similar. I suppose this is a phenomenon experienced with high capacity helium filled drives? The noise isn't that intrusive, just louder than what I have come accustomed to. The drive is currently residing in the aforementioned Zyxel NAS326 on my living room entertainment center. I demand very quiet, if not silent operation, and it fits that bill just fine. If you have older external enclosures, docks or potentially even your router..you may issues with a drive of this capacity. I had an Anker/UCTech 6618SUS3 HDD dock, which is quite dated, and would not recognize the drive due to capacity. My initial plan was to use the dock to attach to my router to setup a NAS. I then went and purchased a Vantec NST-400MX-S3R dual bay external enclosure. This time the enclosure worked to recognize the drive for normal functionality, but I ran into issue with my Linksys EA7500 router; I've had that router since 04/16. The only way I could get it to function with this size drive was with an FTP server...which is way less than ideal. It could detect the drive, but stated there was an issue with formatting of the drive. My brother and I tried NTFS, GPT and even Linux's EXT format to no avail. Purchasing the Zyxel NAS326 and connecting to the EA7500 via ethernet was the final solution. I grabbed new HDD dock, the Nexstar TX NST-D328S3-BK for $20. Despite Vantec's site only stating compatibility with up 10TB drives, it works fine with this 14TB model. I anticipate the drive to last me quite some given how it has done thus far.

Average drive.

There’s nothing wrong with this drive model. Perfectly adequate for the job in hand versus the price paid.They are not the most reliable, but they are cheap. The 4TB model is lightweight and slim versus the 6 year-old 2TB model I’m replacing.Being a 5400RPM drive, it’s relatively quiet in operation versus a 7200RPM drive. Data transfer speed varies from 200MB/s and gets slower as more data is written. You don’t buy this drive to break speed records.I have 4 of them in a NAS and they will stay in there for 3-5 years before I replace them again.If you want ultra reliability, buy Ultrastar instead.

Blown Away, it's big... Very Big.

You will have to check the hardware that you connect this to very carefully in terms of compatibility. Most modern Hardware will accept 8TB drives without a problem, some manufacturers are posting info on these higher capacity drives on their websites with reference to their suitability. I was fortunate in that a couple of the devices I use, while not stated as being compatible anywhere, actually had no problem with the drive. My Mediasonic PRORAID doesn't at the moment support it although support is promised in a future firmware update. My Kingwin (yeah I know) external dual dock quite happily took the drive and didn't blink an eye returning read and writes of 220 and 210 MB/s over USB 3.0, the dock leaves the drive open to the environment and so any noise ... MoreYou will have to check the hardware that you connect this to very carefully in terms of compatibility. Most modern Hardware will accept 8TB drives without a problem, some manufacturers are posting info on these higher capacity drives on their websites with reference to their suitability. I was fortunate in that a couple of the devices I use, while not stated as being compatible anywhere, actually had no problem with the drive. My Mediasonic PRORAID doesn't at the moment support it although support is promised in a future firmware update. My Kingwin (yeah I know) external dual dock quite happily took the drive and didn't blink an eye returning read and writes of 220 and 210 MB/s over USB 3.0, the dock leaves the drive open to the environment and so any noise emanating from it could be quite clearly heard, not a squeak was heard. I used this to partition the drive into 4 equal partitions and then mounted it in my media server (i7 4700, gtx 970, 16GB, 32 TB in two mirrored external 4x4 arrays).and used it to backup my external tanks, there is a slight discrepancy in size (16TB v 14TB) but the free space on these drives allowed me to backup the data from 4x4TB to the 4x3.5 TB partitions. Set FreeFileSync running and checked in on it the following day. Backup completed faultlessly with the transfer speed being limited by the USB 3.0 connection between the server and the external tanks at 150 MB/s. Very satisfied, no hesitation in recommending this drive, while the cost outlay is large, it can only become less as time goes on... usually!

Great card all around, more memory would’ve been nice.

Great card, handles both desktop and VR games really well, both on Linux and OVMF passthrough to a virtual windows machine.The cooler does a great job at keeping the temperatures down, the card does dump a lot of heat into the computer/room though but that’s to be expected with cards like these. Noise levels are pretty okay, it’s audible through headphones if nothing is playing but not really noticeable once you play something, the fans also stop when idle.Main remark is that some more memory would’ve been nice but it’s a niche problem as I run some local LLMs which benefit from that.

Hot and Noisy Drives

I replaced the 5400 RPM WD RED drives in my Netgear 204 NAS with 4 of these drives. The increase in noise was immediately noticeable. The WD Red drives were nearly silent in operation, while these emit a lot of spindle noise. Seek noise, which was not noticeable with the WD Red drives is present, but the level is below that of the spindle whine. The increased power drain when reading/writing (8W on the spec sheet) causes the inner drives to climb above 48°C unless the NAS fan is set to its highest setting: "cool". To keep the inner drives at 44° C, the case fan now runs at 2750, occasionally increasing to 3250 RPM when one of the inner drives climbs above 44° C in heavy use. Formerly my WD RED drives ran about 37°C with a 1500 RPM fan speed. NAS performance is ... MoreI replaced the 5400 RPM WD RED drives in my Netgear 204 NAS with 4 of these drives. The increase in noise was immediately noticeable. The WD Red drives were nearly silent in operation, while these emit a lot of spindle noise. Seek noise, which was not noticeable with the WD Red drives is present, but the level is below that of the spindle whine. The increased power drain when reading/writing (8W on the spec sheet) causes the inner drives to climb above 48°C unless the NAS fan is set to its highest setting: "cool". To keep the inner drives at 44° C, the case fan now runs at 2750, occasionally increasing to 3250 RPM when one of the inner drives climbs above 44° C in heavy use. Formerly my WD RED drives ran about 37°C with a 1500 RPM fan speed. NAS performance is slightly improved, transferring large files at about 55 MB/s compared to 50 MB/s before. However it's definitely not worth it, considering the noise and heat. I DO NOT RECOMMEND these drives for a residential NAS. Far too hot and noisy. Loudest drives I have heard since the 1990s. I regret purchasing these drives, and may return them, even if I must pay a restocking fee. I should have stuck with WD RED drives, which have served me so well in the past. Don't make the same mistake I did.

Seagate Ironwolf 16TB HDD Review:

Other: Overall, I am very impressed with this drive. It doesn’t sacrifice any performance (within the constraints of what platter based drives can achieve) despite its huge space. Overlapping work data onto this drive from other SSDs and HDDs took about 7 hours to write 5+ TB over part of a day. Of course I want to imply that if one intends to use all 14+ TB of this drive, start considering backups and mirrors of one’s data as this is getting to data center levels of capacity and 16 TB is a lot of space. My particular drive arrived in a small box with Jell-O plastic cushioners and barebones, yet was in good shape. SMART and other tests showed all sectors were good. We’ll see about how this drive holds up long term, as platter drives naturally have reputations for ... MoreOther: Overall, I am very impressed with this drive. It doesn’t sacrifice any performance (within the constraints of what platter based drives can achieve) despite its huge space. Overlapping work data onto this drive from other SSDs and HDDs took about 7 hours to write 5+ TB over part of a day. Of course I want to imply that if one intends to use all 14+ TB of this drive, start considering backups and mirrors of one’s data as this is getting to data center levels of capacity and 16 TB is a lot of space. My particular drive arrived in a small box with Jell-O plastic cushioners and barebones, yet was in good shape. SMART and other tests showed all sectors were good. We’ll see about how this drive holds up long term, as platter drives naturally have reputations for being sporadic on their lifespan and behavior from time to time. Operating temperature in a mounting cage in a Caselabs SMA-8 Rev. A with passive cooling / venting was about 35 C continuously, reaching about 41 C while writing. This variance is only due to my room fluctuating in temperature, but the drive’s range specifies from 5-70 C operating so clearly it can handle far worse. Doing large bursts of copying to this drive presented no issue, and I was getting advertised speeds at 33% use of the drive compared to my own diagnostics. Windows and this drive handled a few 600 GB to 2+TB copies like a champ, no issues. In terms of pricing, one may think it easier to buy two 8TB drives, but the cost for this singular drive is not too much higher and it’s nice that the pricing is still in the curve of efficiency. So if you have a ton of work, project data, RAW files, video, B-Roll, etc., and don’t mind this cavernous volume not being an SSD, what is presented here can’t be beat, well until probably next year when Seagate and others push 18+ TB to market.

Solid Performer

Bought one of these drives for use in a RAID (ZFS) array and the performance has been absolutely solid, unlike certain other drives (*cough* WD Red *cough*).While I was initially disappointed by how noisy the drive seemed to be, it has quietened down considerably over time so it seems like there may just be a bit of a wearing in period during which it's extra "crunchy", now the drive is barely audible unless I really push it.Read and write performance are both excellent for a 5400rpm drive, both managing around 110-120mb/sec reliably in my case, though of course a more random workload will slow it down, though the 256mb cache and Native Command Queuing seem to help it cope well all around.

Use Scan rather than Amazon

I have a six bay NAS that required some replacement disks. I tried ordering them from Amazon but for some strange reason they only allowed a maximin purchase of four, so I searched and found 'Scan'. Ordered two disks. Both packages (Amazon and Scan) arrive on the same day. The packaging from 'Scan' was far better than that of Amazon. Given the relative nature of a Hard Disk it is important that the packaging around the disk be adequate to protect the disk.The disk itself, the outgoing disks were WD red. They lasted about six years in the NAS so they owe me nothing. Time will tell how long the Seagate disks will last, time will tell. However, the Seagate disks do appear to be a little faster than the WD red.