Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 4 TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive STAC4000100

As long as the hard drive doesn't die on me anytime soon, this is an awesome purchase.For people like me building a new PC, this is what we get:One 7200 rpm, SATA III 6.0 Gbps, 3 TB HDD.One 4-ft USB 3.0 compliant cable. "FREE"One "EMERGENCY I need to plug in this bare hdd for fixing now" adapter. "FREE" (Did not test if it's hotswappable but might be as long as you safely remove and it powers down)Yes, Seagate no longer will be making "green" drives, and will instead focus on more energy efficient 7200 rpm drives, which is why buying the external option still nets you a decent drive! It will not however, perform as good as WD Black Caviars or Seagate XTs because of its power efficiency priority.A 4-ft long USB 3.0 cable is always nice.Most importantly is the adapter (and power cable) that comes with this product. I have used it on a separate SATA drive, only 500 GB, but it was fully supported by the adapter. Easy fit and because it's USB 3.0 you get fast transfers even with older drives (so as long as your PC supports USB 3.0).There is the plastic waste removing the drive from its external casing, however since this product costs 10 dollars cheaper than the bare drive itself Seagate Barracuda 7200 3 TB 7200RPM SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST3000DM001 ($159.99 at time of writing), I find little reason to buy the drive itself unless you want to be a little bit greener (you can always recycle the plastic hopefully). The model listed on the drive label is ST3000DM001, mine was manufactured around February 2012.Now the one tidbit I found for system builders:Do not store *ANYTHING* on the drive beforehand. I made the mistake of transferring files onto the drive overnight, to save me trouble of transferring it later after I put it in. The adapter addresses the 2 TB limitation but for Windows 7, hooked up inside the pc it will not recognize the drive immediately as usable from the get go. 2 TB is the normal inherent addressing limitation. It will detect but require a reformat first before using. [I did not research further if it's possible to convert the 3 TB to detect without a reformat, if it's possible please comment and I'll update here.] Within Disk Management, after deleting all the partitions within, you must right click the drive icon and Convert to GPT, which allows the drive to address over 2 TB.After that was done, the drive has not failed on me yet. It has wrote over 700 GB of data to the drive, and read over 600 GB of data (copying back files before the reformat!), and it's still performing well. I've tried Fraps'ing 1920x1080 gaming @ near solid 60 FPS to the drive with no problems, though 60 FPS might be a bit too high.Thanks for reading, and hope this helps some of you all!(As for the physical breakdown of the casing, two Phillips flathead screwdrivers are all you really need. One if your hand it strong enough to hold open the case to reinsert the flathead. I used the holes on the bottom as initial entry to push the casing apart, near the serial label. Twist + pivot to pry open, then flick outwards to snap open, sliding and twisting to open the gap. There was some twisted plastic afterwards, the middle ventilation plastic isn't strong at all.)

Because of some early negative reviews from Amazon users, and what I'm pretty sure is a computer rendering of the product instead of a photograph, I was initially a little reluctant about this drive. But I've had a lot of very good experiences with Seagate, so I bought it. I'm glad I did.The build quality is nice. The enclosure is actually really slick. I do prefer the look of a thin, USB powered, 2.5" external, but in the world of 3.5" drives this is total design win.It performs about as expected, if not better. I'm currently still using USB 2.0, but the initial burst on this thing is crazy high, and it (very) gradually slows down to my typical transfer rate. This is more true with a single large file than many small files. But its overall performance has me really excited about installing a USB 3.0 card in my system.The Bad? Well, I bought this to be a media drive, and it "sleeps" after a relatively short period of inactivity. I want my media to be accessible all the time without waiting for the disc to fire up. Starting and stopping the drive as often as I need it to could be annoying. After changing some system settings and installing some software from the Seagate website, I disabled its auto-sleep. Now everything works as it should.However, if you're using this disc as a back up drive, the disc sleeping is actually a very good thing. It will conserve energy and likely prolong the life of your drive. So for those people, this is a 5 star product.If I could give it 4.5 stars, I would. It performs well, looks great, stays quiet and reasonably cool. There's just that one correctable hiccup that will only upset some users.Definitely recommended.

I love this drive. It's huge (4TB), its 7200 RPM (awesome), it works great. What's not to like?The problem I ran into is that I really needed it to be an internal SATA hard drive, rather than an external USB 3.0 hard drive. Well, no big surprise, it turns out that inside the case on this unit is the largest and fastest 3.5" hard disk currently on the market, the 4TB Seagate Barracuda XT ST4000DX000 SATA 6Gb/s Hard Drive. It supports both SATA III (6 Gbit/sec) and SATA II (3 Gbit/sec) (which means it can be used in virtually every desktop computer sold in the past 6 years), and runs at 7200RPM. Windows Vista and Windows 7 can both see the whole 4TB capacity with no problem. I'm not a Mac person, but if you are, you will know if this will work for you in your Mac.The weird thing is, as of this writing, the bare internal drive (also available here on Amazon) is in extremely short supply, and is much more expensive than this very same drive with an external case on it. I have purchased 4 of the bare drives, from various vendors, including Amazon Marketplace vendors, and I'm not convinced that any of the drives I received were really directly from Seagate. It looked to me, in every case, like someone had purchased one of these GoFlex 4TB external drives, removed the internal drive, threw away the enclosure, and repackaged the drive as a bare internal drive to sell to me. Hmmm.The problem is that Seagate, and most other hard disk manufacturers, have been beset by supply problems due to floods in Thailand and so forth, so these bare Seagate 4TB hard drives are in very short supply at the moment. Seagate has chosen to sell the few units they do have in the form of these GoFlex external drives, and when supplies become more plentiful, they can also offer the internal bare drive.The solution? Remove the enclosure yourself! As of this writing, here on Amazon, the external GoFlex version of this drive is selling for just $230, whereas the very same drive as an internal bare drive is selling for $499! Holy mackeral! What's wrong with this picture? :)It's not hard to remove the enclosure, so you can use the internal 4TB Seagate Barracuda XT ST4000DX000. If you do it carefully, you can preserve the enclosure so you can reassemble it in case you need to send the drive back to Seagate for warranty repair. I bought two of these GoFlex 4TB external drives here on Amazon, and yesterday I removed the enclosures from both of them. The first one took about 10 minutes for enclosure removal, and by the second one I was down to 5 minutes. No problem. To learn how to remove the enclosure using nothing but a Starbucks splash stick and a Phillips screwdriver, go to YouTube and find the video, "How to remove the drive from a Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB enclosure." I don't personally know the fellow who made the video, but it's a good, easy-to-follow video. You'll be an expert in minutes, and it's kind of fun. There are some other similar videos on YouTube as well that cover the same topic.It's been driving me crazy that the internal bare drive is so expensive, and the external version of the drive is so cheap. Makes no sense. Just take off the enclosure, and you're all set. Hope this helps someone!