HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664)

I purchased this drive last year when it was $156, before WD took over HGST and released a pitiful excuse for a HDD in place of this one, causing the price of this original drive to skyrocket to $216. I made the mistake of not ordering enough of these in the first place. They're quiet, fast, run cool and are reliable. The replacement drive that WD has released in place of it is a loud, crunchy sounding mess of a HDD that makes any chassis you put it in sound like a giant metal drum, and has a much higher failure rate. Leave it up to WD to ruin a company with a great record for releasing very well made, reliable mechanical drives. Shame on you, Western Digital. I think you bought HGST because their drives were leaving yours in the dust in terms of reliability. Snakes.

Just what I was looking for, reliability. Obviously a 3-year warranty is a good indicator. The Deskstar NAS is a new product. It has the 1M MTBF vs. the regular Deskstar 7k4000 (HDS724040ALE640) which has a 0.8M MTBF. The NAS version also has a rotational stability sensor to help monitor the smart status better. I was looking for additional external storage for backups & videos. I installed 4 of these in an 4-bay external USB 3.0 enclosure (Dyconn Quartz 4). For around $1100 total installed cost, you can get nice 16Tb setup for all your "stuff". I've got mine connected to a MacMini. A good (non-SSD) 3.5" drive has about the same read/write speed as USB 3.0, thus in an external USB 3.0 setup, it will give you ~170-180 MB/s regardless of RAID setup. Update #1 I was able to test drive speed vs various other drives. This drive performs as expected. I did not test in a RAID configuration. (sorry about the formatting, the last two nos. in each row are Read/Write in MB/s), all tests with BlackMagic Mid--2011 Mac Mini WD My Book Studio 4Tb, RAID 0 Firewire 800 800 megabit FW800 60 64 Apple 5400 rpm 750 Gb HD SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 68 68 Toshiba/Apple 5400 500 Gb Laptop drive SATA III 3 gigabit Thunderbolt 63 63 Crucial M4 - 256 Gb SATA III 5 gigabit Thunderbolt 382 79 HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit Thunderbolt 163 160 (Seagate BackupPlus thunderbolt adapter) 2012 Mac Mini Server Samsung 840 SSD - 500 Gb SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 560 320 Samsung 840 SSD - 500 Gb x 2 - RAID 0 SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 990 620 Patriot Magnum 64 Gb USB 3.0 Memory Stick USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit USB 3.0 242 120 Transcend 64 Gb USB 3.0 ?? Memory Stick USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit USB 3.0 15 15 HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit USB 3.0 131 126 (Dyconn Quartz 4, JOBD) HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit USB 3.0 163 160 (Anker Uspeed adapter) Update #2; I just tested four of these drives in RAID5 mode on the 4-bay USB 3.0 Dyconn.... way better than expected 250 Mb/s Read, 241 Write. Woo Hoo! So, double the single drive mode. Update #3 (April 2015): I bought a 5th HGST NAS, 4Tb! I needed a drive for another computer and decided to try a cheap SATA to USB adapter (Sabrent Flat Docking Station) , I gets virtually identical performance as above, 162 Mb/s Read, 160 Mb/s Write. Sweet! for <$200 I've got a nice external with a reliable drive. Perfect for Time Machine backups. AND, If I do loose a RAID5 drive, I've got a backup! :) I may buy 2 more 6 Tb units and RAID 0 the in a 2-Drive dock (software RAID in OS X) to use for video editing. I should get 250 Mb/s that way.

Exactly what I needed! I wanted the most reliable 4 TB drive available as a data drive for my 64 bit Windows 8.1 computer. [You need a 64 bit system and a modern operating system to get full 4TB capability as a single drive.] This filled that requirement completely. Very quiet, very fast, very reliable, very durable, and lots of storage (4TB). I was initially concerned because it was advertised as an NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive that it would only operate in that mode. However, I was able to quickly confirm that it would also work perfectly for my purpose. I have been very pleased. It was fairly priced, came quickly (well packed), works flawlessly, and is fast, quiet, and reliable. My observations agree with other raters. If you want a reliable, fast, durable 4TB drive, this is your best buy. I recommend it highly to anyone with a 64 bit system and the operating system to get the full 4TB storage from this very fine drive.

It is hard to review a drive for reliability after having owned it only for a handful of months, but so far it has been working fine in a Synology NAS box with no issues whatsoever. It is enterprise quality from what I've read, yet is less expensive than the WD-branded drives, and is faster than the WD Red (which is a miserable 5400 RPM, unsuitable for streaming video to a few different devices simultaneously). Noise is about average as hard disk drives go. Seems to be a good drive for the money!

My hard drive appears to have bit the dust. I have had three hard drive failures in the past two years. Although hard drives do occasionally fail they normally fail after a number of years of use. They are not supposed to fail after just a few months. The other drives that failed were Seagate, so I decided to try another brand to see if I would have better luck. No luck. I was transferring files from one drive to another, from my main hard drive to this back up hard drive. And then next thing I know I get an I/O error during the transfer of the data. And Windows seemed to take a long time in trying to access the drives, when I wanted to see what was actually transferred. And it never did finish reading the hard drive. I kept getting the busy indicator and it never finished reading the drive. So I did a restart and following restart, Windows no longer sees the drive; it is as if the drive no longer exists. I then booted from a diagnostic disk into Parted Magic, to run diagnostics on the disk, and it could not see the drive either. I check connections and no luck, it seems that the drive experienced a catastrophic failure. The disk itself seems to make a faint whirring and clicking noise which seems to indicate that there has been a drive motor burn out. With simple bad sectors, the drive could still be accessed from both Windows and Linux Parted Magic disk. If the disk were corrupted, Linux or a Windows diagnostic would still see the disk, but not be able to access it. But the drive failure is so complete that the drive is not even seen. The problem is not the brand. Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, whatever. The problem is that most of these disks, whatever brand they are, are made in China, and evidently the Chinese companies that manufacture for Seagate and WD and others are NOT doing quality control on these disks. I don't care where the disks actually come from. I don't care if they come from China, Japan, Singapore, Russia, or Central African Republic. I do care however that I am getting my money's worth. Two hundred bucks down the toilet! ******* Update ********** I have examined this disk and it is actually made in Thailand, not China. But apparently, quality control doesn't seem to be in the vocabulary wherever they are being manufactured. ******* Update 04-20-2016 *********** I upgraded my power supply as someone who commented on this review suggested. But I was thinking about power issues myself, since I was wondering if I had enough "juice" with two optical drives and two hard drives and a couple of USB drives going. And when the two hard drives were going or when USB drive and the internal drive was going, the system seemed sluggish, and occasionally there were I/O errors that would crop up. So it was either a faulty drive from the beginning, or the drive wasn't getting enough juice to function properly, or even perhaps both were true. I looked into the warranty and sent the faulty drive back to the manufacturer and they sent me a replacement. This new drive seems to work well enough. In fact, it seems faster than the other one I had. Well, keep fingers and toes crossed that this drive will have a long, long life.

For a couple of years, my home storage system has been provided by two 2TB FireWire units, one from Seagate and one from Western Digital. They handle my music and video libraries, plus a collection of big virtual machine images that I run on VirtualBox for software development projects. In addition, all of the laptops and tablets in the house are backed up using Time Machine, and the whole thing is further backed up to the cloud (using the Backblaze service). So a few weeks ago I started noticing performance glitches and log messages about recoverable disk errors, which I traced to the Seagate unit. My preference is to deal with soft errors before they become hard, so I investigated my options. The best solution that I could come up with was a Mobius two-bay enclosure, together with a pair of 4TB HGST Deskstar drives. So that's what I got. Performance and reliability have been excellent. The noise is a little higher than the Seagate unit which it replaced, but it's within acceptable limits. The only issue I'm encountering is that sometimes (but not always, just to complicate things), when I reboot my iMac, the Mobius drives aren't mounted. This confuses iTunes and other software. The fix is easy - I just power cycle the enclosure, then restart the apps - but it's annoying. It also disrupts other operations, because when I set up the Firewire chain, I put the Mobius in the middle (between the iMac and the WD unit) rather than at the end. At some point I'll probably reconfigure it.

This review is for the 4TB version. As other reviews have said, the performance is decent. Noise, however, is not. In an SPCR-approved case, idle noise is about at the fan noise level. When the disk head is seeking however, the grinding is noticeable and obvious. It's not as bad as a 90s hard drive, but it's more like an early-2000s quiet hard drive. It's not enough to be disruptive when you're working, but you will notice it. If your computer is in your bedroom like mine is, you will not want to have this drive accessing while you try to sleep. At 6' distance, the seek noise is still readily discernable (disclaimer: I am an extremely light sleeper). I bought two of these drives to replace 3 Samsung HD154UI 1.5 TB drives. Those drives are whisper quiet even when seeking, are barely noticeable next to the computer, and inaudible at 6' distance. I am hoping the reliability and size will make up for the noise--but for anyone looking for a drive for an HTPC or other noise-constrained application, I would look elsewhere. UPDATE: After 1 week of use, I am returning these drives; they're just too loud for what I'm looking for. I should have guessed there might be a problem when none of the documentation I could find listed a noise rating. I am replacing these drives with equivalent 4TB HGST Deskstar CoolSpin drives, which don't offer significantly worse performance while being dramatically quieter. I would only use the NAS drives in an environment where noise is irrelevant.

Great drive! Hitachi used to be IBM hard drives. I find their drives to have a great balance of performance and reliability. Other drives may quote a high read speed at a particular group size, but Hitachi delivers good performance and great reliability across the board. I still have 500 GB drives from 7 years ago. At less than $45 per terabyte how can you go wrong. I have 2 500 GB drives from 2007, 3 2-TB drives and 3 4-TB drives on my home server and desktop. Hosting data at home is cheaper than the cloud, where else can you get 1000 GB for ~$43 or $86 for raid 1 data storage. Recently Western Digital bought Hitachi and I worry about quality. Already I see less technical data offered on Hitachi's web site. The new 5 and 6 TB drives use a new technology and have even faster performance. Looking forward to buying one when the price drops. Be careful SSD and hybrid drives may not last as long. Solid state drives are maturing technology and rapidly getting better. These drives will likely last much longer and cost a fraction of the price.

HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5 4TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s High-Performance Hard Drive And Good Packaging High capacity___ Good speed Good cache size Good value

They are quiet, fast, and so far reliable. Just bought another 4. I own 12 of this line of drives now. I also own 6 seagate paperweights.

Seal was broken, partitions were setup on the drive - when I buy something that's "New", I expect it to be new.

Very good Performance. I stream my IP Camera Video Stream to this disk 24/7. Its been 6 months and its working great. Good Read and Write Speeds

I bought this for my Synology 415+ Nas box which run 24/7. It's 6 months and this product is rock solid. This hdd is specifically meant for NAS boxes and not general HDD.