The drives themselves I rate at 5 stars, but I received them in a box with inadequate packing and they would have been bumping against each other in transit, protected only by their anti-static bags. PBTech picker let the side down badly. I guess it's a testament to the robustness of these drives that they installed without any faults and have so far passed their regular scan and S.M.A.R.T testing. However, I'm hedging by installing them in a RAID 0 (mirrored) configuration just in case. Fortunately this was my original intention so I haven't lost by it. Chosen because they are on the compatibility chart for the NAS I purchased with them.

Purchased this drive to replace it's predecessor, which was a Seagate NAS drive purchased, at the time, for it's build quality and ability to survive in the NAS environment. Sadly, almost exactly three years after purchase, or, to put it another way, at the end of it's warranty period, it'r predecessor quietly, and efficiently died.Purchase of the Ironwolf is based mainly on the fact that I get a five year warranty with this NAS drive designed to survive in the NAS environment. I expect it will go the same way as all other mechanical NAS drives but, hopefully, Seagate will honour the terms of the warranty, unless I've missed a bit of small print that says, ubless it is mounted with a certain type of Titanium/rubber screw then the warranty is null and void. It ... MorePurchased this drive to replace it's predecessor, which was a Seagate NAS drive purchased, at the time, for it's build quality and ability to survive in the NAS environment. Sadly, almost exactly three years after purchase, or, to put it another way, at the end of it's warranty period, it'r predecessor quietly, and efficiently died.Purchase of the Ironwolf is based mainly on the fact that I get a five year warranty with this NAS drive designed to survive in the NAS environment. I expect it will go the same way as all other mechanical NAS drives but, hopefully, Seagate will honour the terms of the warranty, unless I've missed a bit of small print that says, ubless it is mounted with a certain type of Titanium/rubber screw then the warranty is null and void. It wouldn't surprise me in the least.On the plus side the drive works as expected, i.e. it's hosting my pictures and music files with no apparent problems but, at this prices, you'd expect that :)Should you purchase one? If you want the peace of mind (hopefully) of an extended warranty period then yes, if you don't care about such things then, probably not, you could save a few quid and buy a cheaper drive which might or might not last as lone.It's a minefield out there folks but, I have found Seagate support to be quite helpful when he inevitable happens.

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.

Andy's review of Seagate 6TB IronWolf NAS Hard Drive 3.5" SATA III 6Gb/s 5400RPM 256MB Cache

Pros: Decent capacity for the price compared to other manufacturers. Seem to keep up pace with my 7200rpm drives, despite being only 5400rpm. This is also good as they consume less power.Cons: No issues here so far. Can't really comment on reliability as the drives have only been up 24/7 for a few days now.

Awesome drive. Awesome Customer Service.

I bought 2 of these drives to run in Raid1 as backup storage in my huge Corsair ATX Full Tower. Install was quick, easy & painless. They're bare drives so they weren't automatically accessible. Went into Disk Management on Win10, formatted & set up as single mirrored drive (Win10 software Raid1). Easy peasy no problems. Running nice & silent. Then as the drives went into idle, I heard it. A quick "chirp, chirp, chirp" every 4-6 secs. Not extremely loud but in a desktop in a silent room, enough to become extremely annoying. I was pretty sure it was the sound of the heads being parked so I did some research. It seems the Seagate drives have pretty aggressive power saving so within a short space of time (about a min or 2) the power saving kicks in & they try to park ... MoreI bought 2 of these drives to run in Raid1 as backup storage in my huge Corsair ATX Full Tower. Install was quick, easy & painless. They're bare drives so they weren't automatically accessible. Went into Disk Management on Win10, formatted & set up as single mirrored drive (Win10 software Raid1). Easy peasy no problems. Running nice & silent. Then as the drives went into idle, I heard it. A quick "chirp, chirp, chirp" every 4-6 secs. Not extremely loud but in a desktop in a silent room, enough to become extremely annoying. I was pretty sure it was the sound of the heads being parked so I did some research. It seems the Seagate drives have pretty aggressive power saving so within a short space of time (about a min or 2) the power saving kicks in & they try to park the heads, in my case causing the recurring chirping every few seconds. Why so aggressive a setting for a NAS drive designed for 24hr operation is anyone's guess lol. Researching online you'll get the impression that it's a complicated problem to fix & dealing with Seagate customer service will be stressful in the extreme. This was not my experience. If you notice a similar sound from your drive & want to make it deathly silent, here's what to do: 1) Contact Seagate at http://support2.seagate.com/ Let them know you're getting a chirping sound at idle that sounds like the heads being parked constantly & you need SeaChest to disable EPC (Extended Power Conditions). Include a recording of the sound if possible. 2) Wait for their reply which will include the SeaChest download & instructions. 3) Install SeaChest & follow the instructions to disable EPC on your drive. 4) Enjoy beautifully serene quiet hard drive operation. I emailed them & got a response in 3 hours. The entire process installing & using SeaChest took maybe 5mins. Hope this helps someone who like me needs silent HDD performance.

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!

Bought 4, will buy 4 more

Upgrading my NAS from 8x 4TB Drives to 8x 6TB drives for more capacity. I have bought four of these drives so far and they are working exactly as they should. I'll buy the other four next month and finish the upgrade. Very happy with them in my FreeNAS build. I am running a Raid-Z2 for redundancy and so my available space was approx 20TB before and it will be approx 32TB after. Plenty of room for our photos, videos, projects, home storage, audio, etc. For now anyway.

Drive failed in 6 months

This is a totally useless drive. It failed in 6 months. It is showing unrecoverable read errors. I have lost all data. I am trying to get support from Seagate but the drive's model number and serial number are failing to find the drive on Seagate support website. This drive has big claims on performance and reliability, but fails to deliver. The drive claims a workload rate of 300TB/year but failed at 50TB in 6 months. Knowing Seagate support policies, even if I can get support from Seagate, at best, they will replace it with a refurbished drive. This will again put my data at risk. Update 9/3/2017: Seagate was able to verify the warranty status from serial number. After talking to Seagate data recovery service, it turns out that they can recover only Word, Excel, ... MoreThis is a totally useless drive. It failed in 6 months. It is showing unrecoverable read errors. I have lost all data. I am trying to get support from Seagate but the drive's model number and serial number are failing to find the drive on Seagate support website. This drive has big claims on performance and reliability, but fails to deliver. The drive claims a workload rate of 300TB/year but failed at 50TB in 6 months. Knowing Seagate support policies, even if I can get support from Seagate, at best, they will replace it with a refurbished drive. This will again put my data at risk. Update 9/3/2017: Seagate was able to verify the warranty status from serial number. After talking to Seagate data recovery service, it turns out that they can recover only Word, Excel, Pictures, Videos, database kind of files only. So, if you use this drive for something like VMWare or NAS, Seagate has never heard of it. So much for business/enterprise applications. Also, the recovered files are sent back on Windows/Mac compatible 4TB external drives only. The failed drive is then sent to the warranty department who sends out a replacement. The failed drive has to be sent back in Seagate approved packaging. I am waiting for Seagate to send me the packaging. The overall process might take a month or more. The data recovery service is only for 2 years, even though the drive warranty is for 5 years. I will update the review once everything is done.

Jack's review of SKYHAWK 2TB SURVEILLANCE 3.5IN 6GB/S SATA 64MB

Pros: Great drive, very fast transfer speeds in both read and write and cost effective for the capacity.Cons: Enterprise/NAS drives are much louder than standard consumer drives which can be a small annoyance when installed in a desktop computer. However this is a trade off for the capacity and performance.

Very good NAS drives, nearly perfect!

Synology 4 bay NAS, 4 year old 4TB versions of this drive, 1 failing with bad sector warnings so purchased a 6TB drive to replace it. Easy swap, auto re-build, also bought another 6TB as a spare. Good quiet drives, they stay cool, However my many years experience says 1 in 6 drives you own/use will fail in time so be ready. Good prices right now.