Seagate BarraCuda, 8TB, Internal Hard Drive, 3.5 Inch, SATA, 6GB/s,, 5,400 RPM, 256MB Cache, for Computer Desktop PC, FFP (ST8000DMZ04)

Product Information

Western Digital is one of the most trusted names in data storage, and trust is vital for a device that will hold so much of your valuable memories, media, and information. WD’s My Book external hard drive comes in an 8TB size and includes all the reliability, performance, and convenience you could want in a personal storage solution. Having a single drive storing potentially important data is always something of a gamble since physical mechanisms can, and do, go wrong. Therefore, we wouldn’t recommend putting any files on the My Book that you don’t store elsewhere, in case of failure. Testing hard drives isn't that much different than testing an SSD. Typically, this involves running file copy tests to measure the transfer times of very large files and folders, but it also includes testing the hard drives with benchmarking tools like CrystalDiskMark.

There are three active vendors in the consumer hard drive space - Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Their retail offerings currently top out at 20TB, 18TB, and 22TB respectively. When Western Digital stopped trying to make the My Book series look like actual books, it heralded a vast improvement in aesthetics. And, the two-tone wavy/flat styling still looks good on this latest version.

As we’ve already mentioned the review drive is sold as 8TB, and without dismantling it, we’ve assumed that the drive inside is a WD RED mechanism of the same capacity. So how do you know which hard drive is best for you? There are a lot of things to consider, so it's not as simple as just buying the "best" hard drive. Which hard drive is best? There are a few differences between a hard drive and an SSD, but it’s important to first note that they pretty much have the same job, they just function differently.

Those that work at home, like many people these days, want files they’ve modified to be secured the moment that they’ve closed them, not an hour later. As that increases the probability that data won’t be secured before something unfortunate happens. Mainstream hard drives of 8TB capacity generally can’t fit into a portable size, but the WD My Book is still a reasonably compact unit that houses a 3.5-inch hard disk drive (HDD). It stands upright and measures 6.7 inches tall, 1.9 inches wide, and 5.5 inches deep. You must plug it into the wall with a power adapter, so it’s not easy to tote around different places. That’s about a half of what you might expect from a SATA SSD externally connected via USB 3.0, and about a fifth of the best NVMe SSD external drives connected via USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports.Synology has introduced 8, 12, and 16TB enterprise hard drives (rebranded Toshiba Enterprise HDDs with custom firmware), but they are meant specifically for Synology NAS units (no warranties if used in other systems) and are not part of this buyer's guide. Toshiba's MG09 18TB HDDs based on FC-MAMR are quite new in the market, and will be added in a future update to this buyer's guide We suspect the next generation of My Book will have this feature and offer USB 3.2 Gen 2 connectivity, but this model works for the broadest possible selection of customers right now, critically. SSDs are incredibly popular, and it’s not hard to see why. But, if you need a lot of fast storage, and you don’t have a vault of cash, hybrid hard drives are a great option, especially for gaming.

The primary opposition to the My Book is the Seagate Desktop 8 TB External Hard Drive (STGY8000400), a practically identical concept from another seasoned hard drive maker.

Best Consumer Hard Drives: November 2022

The IronWolf NAS models deliver slightly better performance compared to the WD Red / WD Red Plus, but, have correspondingly higher power consumption numbers. On the SMB / SME NAS front, the WD Red Pro has started reaching better price points compared to previous quarters, managing to undercut the IronWolf Pro across almost all capacities. However, a plus point for the IronWolf Pro is the inclusion of the Data Rescue Service for a 3-year period in addition to the usual warranty. Traditional hard drives have a circular disk (platter) that stores your data - as the disk spins, the read-write arm reads data on the disc or writes data to it as it spins. Solid state drives (SSDs) have no moving parts, instead using NAND (Negative-AND) flash memory - the more memory chips an SSD has, the more storage capacity. The Seagate IronWolf Pro is a strong performer posting faster speeds than the competing WD Red Pro in many of our tests. We like Seagate’s three-year data recovery services as they report a high record of success, and data recovery is traditionally very expensive.