These things are great. I have a LOT of data that needs archiving. Buying dedicated USB drives or external hard drives would get outrageously expensive quick! So instead, I bought one of these and then I just buy used 500gb SATA drives on eBay for $5-10 each. You cannot beat that for archival storage!
Pro tip for those used drives - depending on age and warranty status; you might be able to buy them, and then ship them back to the manufacturer in exchange for a manufacturer refurbished one.
I bought a few seagates a while back; one was dead, two had smart errors. eBay was no help - but seagate exchanged all three.
Now there’s an idea…
US Based company worth supporting too. Yes, they source from elsewhere, but this is as close as it comes to being “US based” in electronics these days.
Would this with a couple good high capacity drives inserted work as a media source for a Plex server running on the PC I have it hooked up to?
Is the transfer speed fast enough for 4K?
Most of my ideas are bad … just ask the wife. You’ve been warned.
Not at all. As Seagate drives are awful and fail often. And Seagate knows it. If you have Seagate drives or are able to purchase used Seagates, it’s well worth trying this. The company knows their faults, and you may benefit from that knowledge that they have. As far as other used drives, you may find difficulties. For example, Western Digital will not be so quick to admit to their faults and help you. However, their drives can often be MUCH, MUCH stronger than Seagate drives, and last much longer, as just one example.
How are you able to get warranty through an ebay purchase? This sounds brilliant but I have never seen a company honor an ebay purchse of a used item for warranty…
That’s a great question that I hope @pavzaq can answer. If Seagate does it, that’s generous. If they did it for 3 drives from eBay, that’s amazing.
When the drives arrived I tested them - when I found them to be faulty, I checked their warranty status - they were under warranty. I filed an rma and during the process they asked me what diagnostics did I do, what errors presented - yada yada - they asked if I had the original receipt and I said no I did not. Two days later I had a shipping label; packaged all three up and sent them to seagate. Seagate in turn sent me three new drives.
This wasn’t a one off - I’ve done this multiple times with the same results.
I’ve even bought drives, put them into use, have them fail a year later and then find out that they are still under warranty and Seagate honors the warranty.
When the drives arrived I tested them - when I found them to be faulty, I checked their warranty status - they were under warranty. I filed an rma and during the process they asked me what diagnostics did I do, what errors presented - yada yada - they asked if I had the original receipt and I said no I did not. Two days later I had a shipping label; packaged all three up and sent them to seagate. Seagate in turn sent me three new drives.
This wasn’t a one off - I’ve done this multiple times with the same results.
I’ve even bought drives, put them into use, have them fail a year later and then find out that they are still under warranty and Seagate honors the warranty.
That still is amazing…