I've had this for about 2 months now and have had no issues with it. I have the 4TB version. I use it for media and game storage in my gaming rig. I must admit, I was a little apprehensive about getting another Seagate internal drive after my old 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives all died quickly and ran loud and hot. This is the first one I've had since those. and so far it's been excellent! No errors at all, quick and cool running. According to HW Monitor, it runs 4 degrees C cooler than the black and 3 Degrees cooler than the blue. The highest temp I've seen is 28 Degrees C for the Cuda under high load. I haven't run any benchmarks (I don't like to do that), but the speed is comparable to my WD Blue 2012 1TB, which is a pretty fast drive. The Seagate is slightly slower when reading and writing large amounts of small files, but not by much. It is noticeably slower than my WD Black 2013 1TB, but that drive cost me almost as much as this 4TB Cuda did and is considered a higher tier drive.
The only drawbacks I can see so far is that the Cuda makes a bit of a racket when transferring small files. It is the only internal mechanical drive in my rig that I can hear at all over the 8 case fans. It's mounted in a quick release bay with rubber mounts, so it will likely be quite loud in a hard mounted bay. It's seek time also seems to be slower compared to the two WD 1TB drives, but again it's not by much and those 1TB drives are both 7200 RPM while the Cuda is 5900 RPM, so that might be part of the reason.
Overall, I see no drawbacks with the Seagate Cuda 4TB. It's price per GB is lower than most anything else in it's price range. It's faster than the WD Blue 4TB by a wide margin, which I consider to be it's main competition. That was the drive I was comparing it to when I was looking at a new drive. I'll update this review if the drive blows up or does anything wonky, but barring that I definitely recommend it! It seems Seagate has come a long way in recent times and their products are much improved compared to the ones from 4 or 5 years ago.
| RAM | 4 TB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 4 TB Mechanical Hard Disk |
