Ever since Seagate released an 8tb 3.5″ hard drive, I’ve been dying to get my hands on one. I’m a bit of a data hoarder and currently have my personal date spread over about 15 drives varying in size from 2 to 4 tbs. I’d really like to consolidate all of that into 5 or 6 drives, and these 8tb drives give me that chance.
The knock on these drives is that they are slow. In order to get 8tb in a 3.5″ form factor, these use shingled magnetic recording (SMR), and one of the upshots is relatively slow and extremely variable write speeds.
I didn’t realize quite how slow this drive could potentially be until I did what I routinely do to all new hard drives I buy — I ran a full disk encryption program to encrypt the drive. With Western Digital Green 4tb drives, that typically takes about 24 hours using my setup. The Seagate 8tb drive took ten days to fully encrypt the drive. Ten days.
It also runs much hotter than the WD Greens I’m used to. I had this in an external USB 3.0 dock and had to resort to grabbing a small fan and pointing it at the drive for the 240+ hours it took to encrypt.
On the other hand, once it did finish encrypting, it functions about as I expected. It may be a little slower in transferring files than my WD Green drives, but not enough to write home about. It was more than fast enough for the sort of archival purpose that I bought it for, and being able to have that much data on a single drive is so much easier to manage.
Now I just need about 12 more of them.