Seagate FireCuda HDD 8TB Internal Hard Drive HDD - 3.5 Inch CMR SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 256MB Cache 300TB/year with Rescue Services (ST8000DX001)

Its noticeably faster than normal drives but not as fast as a full blown SSD, but for sure alot cheaper for the 8TB I got! I bought two because I hate downloading things and I find it better to have long term storage vs having to wait for inflation to ruin it.I strongly recommend this drive as a secondary drive.my personal tip to you gamers is use a 1TB at least for Windows or whatever OS you use and then this drive for all your other content for much more ease in gaming or whatever it is you do.Just remember the drive won't just pop up like a USB on Windows and you will have to search "Partition" bottom left screen to spot the drive unassigned to a format and all, it will ask if you want GPT or some older version so go with GPT and you can label it "Local Disk" and then select what letter you want but I always go with "D" for the 2nd drive that way it's all less confusing in the future, but if you want to learn that the hard way do what you need to do but I feel like you might need to start over one day with setting it up.anyways I recommend this drive for sure, great for gaming. Good luck to you buyers.

I bought this because I had made my daughters and wife a backup drive on SSD (M2) as a Christmas present. After spending 3 years digitizing all the old VHS and 8mm reel-to-reel tapes as well as the 15 years of digital content, I learned that solid state drives require an electrical current to maintain the memory of what's been written to it. If the device goes too long without being accessed/read/watched, you run the risk of losing all that data. Since I had invested a significant amount of time and energy to digitize and catalogue 35 years of video memories, I opted to back all of it up to this 3.5 inch platter drive. It has blazing fast transfer speeds and I've been able to read all the videos/photos I've put on it. Since it is an 8 TB drive, it will last me for the rest of my life and then the kids can decide if it important enough to maintain it. But at least they can't say I never gave them anything! :) Because I use it only as an archival disk, I bought a separate power (12v, 2A barrel port connector) with the SATA connector. The external power spins the disk which makes it readable/writable. I store the disk in a Hard Disk Protection Box that is made for 3.5 inch drives. This is easier than burning BlueRay discs, because more and more the external disc readers are harder to come by and most things are going digital/streaming. I do plan to keep my blue ray burner safely stored so I can be sure to access the previous home videos that have been burned to blue ray.

I know from experience that I can fill up a 4GB drive with PC game content. So, when I got my new gaming desktop, I left the included 2TB NVME SSD for the boot drive and any programs that I wanted to launch quickly, and installed ALL of my game content on this 8TB CMR SATA HDD.Yeah, it's slower than SSD or NVME, but it was WAAAAY cheaper than an 8TB NVME SSD (the holy grail). It does take a while to load some games sometimes - like when I launch WoW it's noticeably slower than if I were launching from SSD. But once the games are launched, they run pretty well. There may be the occasional bit of lag as new content loads, but I can't say that it's every negatively impacted my gameplay. In fact, I only wish I hadn't gotten an even bigger drive since with all the XBox Game Pass content I'm interested in trying, I'm liable to run out of space again. It's crazy how big modern games are.

I received this FireCuda 8TB HDD 2 days ago and was pleasantly surprised at how well it was packaged/protected for shipping! I had received a WD Blue 8TB HDD about a week before that only came in the original box that the drive comes in when you buy it in store, which is no doubt why it arrived in a damaged box and DOA! No outer box, no air bags, no foam, no bubble wrap, etc., etc. Needless to say, I returned the WD drive and purchased this FireCuda hdd to replace it.... but now I have to return this one as well.After not even being able to initialize the WD Blue HDD, I was happy that the setup, initializing, formatting, etc., for the Seagate went flawlessly.... right up until I needed to put files on it. I quickly found out that there was a "This drive is write protected" error that continuously popped up anytime I tried adding anything to it, change any setting, permissions, etc. I tried various troubleshooting steps to get it fixed, but to no avail. I then decided to go into the Event Log history to see if I could narrow down a cause for this, and that is when I found out what was really going on...... this "new" HDD that I ordered had been previously owned/used by at least one other person before I received it (attached photos)! I received this "new" drive on 17th Apr 2024, but in the photo you can see that someone was receiving errors on it back in January 2024. What's really incredible is that some other random person was using this drive on their home PC about 6 days before I received in from Amazon!!!Even though the drive arrived in what I assumed was the original manufacturers packaging, the drive had already been used, was returned by the initial buyer, wiped clean by the seller(?), and then RESOLD AS A NEW DRIVE!!!! After spending a few minutes on Google, I found out that this is becoming more & more of a common practice, especially with the sky rocketing costs of PC storage!!PLEASE check the history on the drive ASAP if purchasing an HDD from this seller! They are even able to bypass the SMART checks and are essentially just "resetting the odometer" on these drives now. I suspect that this is going to become more & more of a problem moving forward. You can Google this issue to see other photos that show where the dates on old drives are being erased by the manufacturers, sellers, or whoever, then being sold as brand new, unused drivesJust a heads up if you're in the market for any type of "new" HDDs!

I am a big retro gamer, and I have legal roms and emulators stored on my PC. My 2TB HDD was not enough to store it all, so I decided to swap it with this 8TB FireCuda, and I am glad I did. It's absolutely massive, and stores so much stuff, and runs a fast speed for being an HDD. I feel good about saving my games, family photos, and other stuff on this drive.