Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

TLDR; This is a fantastic drive get it! This is my opinion, based on my experiences, Your Actual Mileage May Vary. I'm a computer professional, I have done both hardware and software design. I have bought and used many disk drives over the years. So I feel that I am highly qualified to speak on this topic. The disk drive debates tend to resemble religious wars. Lots of people with adamant opinions, but very few with facts. Or understanding of statistics. Over many years, I have purchased a roughly equal number of disk drives from both Western Digital and Seagate. Most of the drives were 4TB or less. And I have not seen major differences between the two brands for the smaller drives. About 3 years ago I purchased 3 of the Seagate 8TB drives. This is so that I can make 3 separate backups of all important data. A practice that I strongly urge every business to do (and if you keep the drives disconnected except when making backups, it will protect you from the viruses that encrypt all of your files). Frankly I have not been too happy with the Seagate 8TB drives. All manufactures claim amazing speeds for their drives, but rarely do actual systems come even close to the claimed speeds. There are a lot of factors that figure into the realizable speed, so that is why these companies can get away with what is basically False Advertising. It has been my experience that the Seagate 8TB drives are slow and noisy. One of the 3 drives is now starting to fail after 3 years of very light use. But for me the bigger issue is that they are slow, the best I see is about 40MegaBytesPerSecond of sustained Write speed and not much faster for reads. (don't confuse Bytes with Bits, Mbps = Bits, MBps should indicate Bytes, but sometimes doesn't, rule of thumb divide Bits Per Second by 10 to get Bytes Per Second). The first thing I noticed about this Western Digital 8TB drive is how quiet it is. In fact it was so quiet that I had to double check to make sure that it had power! After years of listening to the Seagate drives rumbling along it is a really nice treat to have a drive that is essentially silent. Even under full read/write load you can barely hear it. I have just finished subjecting this drive to 3 days of continuous read/write testing and I saw a sustained 100 MegaBytesPerSeconds though put. The lowest it got was about 80MBps after about 30 hours of continuous read/writes on a fairly hot day. Summary: I have 3 Segate 8TB drives (same exact price as this one). They are slow, they are noisy, and after 3 years of very light use one of them is failing. I have subjected this Western Digital drive to 3 days of hard testing. It is more than twice as fast as the Seagate drives and it is nearly silent. I cannot say what the long term reliability will be like, but past experience with 4TB drives and smaller indicates that the reliability should be good.