Seagate Exos 7E8 4TB 512n SATA 128MB Cache 3.5-Inch Enterprise Hard Drive (ST4000NM0035), Mechanical Hard Disk

As most of you reading this review might be concerned, I wasn't sure if these drives will have official 5-year warranty from Seagate or not since I saw mixed reviews about it and it all seems case-by-case. So let me add my story to further confuse(?) you. First, unlike other recent reviews, I got the correct Exos 7E8 4TB drives (not the Terascale) that are in plastic wrap (looks like from factory) in a cardboard box. The box includes a small card about 5-year warranty through MD Tech (the 3rd-party seller I purchased them from) but I decided to try Seagate warranty check anyway. I didn't have a high hope but I found they have warranty till March 19, 2025 (about 3 year and 8 months from now) as you can see from the picture, which is better than nothing. But there's a red line saying "Regional warranty restrictions apply.". So I had a chat with Seagate and the agent told me he cannot honor 5 year warranty since MD Tech is not one of the authorized resellers. However, he told me I can ignore that regional restriction stuff. So in summary, I get 3 year and 8 months of official warranty from Seagate and full 5-year warranty from MD Tech (assuming MD Tech is a dependable company), which makes me feel that I'm more on the luckier side. Given that HDD failure rates are not quite high from my experience so far, I guess I'm fine with what I have now. Anyway, I made a strong statement to the agent (not sure if it will ever reach the right authority though) that Seagate should honor full warranty for drives sold at Amazon as new regardless of the actual seller. If they get lots of similar requests, I guess they may take some actions hopefully. Seriously I think Amazon needs to talk to Seagate about this as well if they decided to allow 3rd-party sellers on their system. This is causing lots of confusion and frustration from the customers. Overall, I give 5 stars since the HDDs have been working great so far and I got kind of lucky with the warranty.

Good value for the product, I sometimes hear a noise when it is spinning but it is not really that loud .

The EXOS Drive is supposed to be on Seagate's higher end, and has Seagate Secure Features. The drive under normal use runs fast and cool, but during the transfer of about 2.5 TB of data I wanted to back up, this drive can get so hot that you cannot grab hold of it. In my case the drive was not in an enclosure of any kind (I used just cables to connect to the external drive port). It did not fail at all during the transfer, even with the heat, so the drive is extremely resilient......I can easily recommend it for another reason. I don't believe in keeping data on large drives (over 6TB) because if the drive does break you can lose a lot. I have (12) 4 TB drives and I don't have to worry about losing everything if just one of the drives should fail.

These must be some of the drives coming from chia mining that I've been hearing about. 3 out of 6 drives failed in the first week. One of them failed in the first hour. We built an array in our server with these, and just failed health check after health check, including the one from seagate directly. Absolute garbage. If you value your time, order from another vendor. This is apparently a huge issue with Amazon right now. I ordered more drives from a different vendor... that one with egg in the name, and all of the seagates from them worked perfect. I've had them burning in for weeks and not even an errant SMART error. I guess "Enterprise" = 50/50 chance it wont work. If you value your time, order elsewhere!!

I've been extremely satisfied with Seagate products over the years, and this model is no exception. I ordered two as spares for my NAS. Both drives pass the internal short and long tests, using the SeaTools test software. However, one drive exhibits a vibration that varies directly with the RPM of the spindle motor. That is, while the spindle is coming up to speed, a vibration is present, and as the spindle motor RPM increases, so does the frequency of the vibration. This suggests that some stack shift is present, perhaps caused by a mechanical shock during shipping, etc. Even though it passes all of the SeaTools tests, I will not be using this drive in my NAS.

First off the drive I got was labeled "TERASCALE" which made me question at first if I got the wrong hard drive. After looking up the model number in Seagate tools it comes up with the right specs but also had a few references to Dell so I suspect these are pulled from them. Either way the hard drive works fine. My problem with it is noise. It's noisy. If you have an external hard drive sitting on your desk, this sounds exactly like that. I have a quiet system in a quiet room and this is all I can hear. Just a constant hum & spin sound. Not a big deal for some of you. But then there is the clicking. At first I thought I got a dud but the click is normal. After the hard drive is idle for a few minutes it tries to constantly park the head and it makes this clicking sound like it's failing. Common issue with these drives, you can look it up on YouTube for the fix... which isn't really a fix. Basically you need a program to write a small .txt file to the hard drive. Mind you this only works if you plan to use it in a desktop. If you can deal with the noise & the click, it's a solid hard drive.

I purchased this to keep photos and videos safe and to add an additional backup to my portable drive we have in case of emergencies. Easy to use, I'd recommend a first time format to match your system format.

After writing a negative previous review about having my Seagate Harddrive less than three weeks with it starting to fail. I would like to update that review. The vendor has reached out to me regarding this issue and will refund the cost of the drive. I am very happy about that. I just want to be clear I still like Seagate drives, I have several of them with no issues. I think I just happened to get a bad one. But overall I still would purchase another one. I hope this helps anyone sitting on the fence.