Seagate 8TB 256MB 7200RPM SATA Enterprise, ST8000NM0055 (Enterprise)

I bought 4 of these to use in a QNAP NAS but as soon as I installed them realised that they were far noisier than my previous Seagate 2tb Enterprise drives I had been using and realised there was no way I could live with the racket they made with my NAS been situated in the living room! I must add at this point that the drives were working perfectly, at no time have they been faulty in any way, just loud! I started researching on the web for any similar issues other people had with these drives and soon found that it was a common issue so I decided to contact Seagate customer service to ask if they had any fixes as I had seen mention of a firmware update helping with the issue although I wasn't hopeful. It was from this point forward that I discovered how great Seagate's customer service is! Not only did they reply to my email the same day but shortly after replying back to them got a phone call from the USA offering to send me a firmware update to run on the drives but when i explained that I didn't think I was computer savvy enough to install the updates they then offered to have them collected at their cost and replaced with drives that had the new firmware update already installed. The disks duly arrived within a few days but unfortunately they made just the same noise as the previous ones, so I contacted them again and asked what I could do as I appreciated there was nothing wrong at all with the disks. They promptly offered to exchange them for Barracuda Pro drives (which I agreed to as I would have had to sell them otherwise) and they have been perfect! Whisper quiet by comparison so I am now a very happy customer!

Having read online that this was one of the most reliable hard drives of last year I purchased one. Historically used 4tb WD reds in my servers (some x20 drives with zero failures to date in the last 3 years) I let it settle to room temperature, formatted it and within 3 minutes of very noisy spin up it failed completely. Don’t think I’m going to trust my valuable data to this make and model. Back to the WD Reds then. My refund was handled within 36 hours but they failed to pay my postage which was in their terms and conditions. A bad experience.