To further prove this, I ran a wireless file copy from my laptop to another laptop on my network and saw even poorer performance (1.5MB/sec), so it wouldn't make sense to blame the drive for a 3MB copy speed.

The worst review was "Great Drive, Bad Setup"

i have been using an external hard drive that i just plug intomy computer to store my data, but this Seagate Central offers a solution to cut all the cables and access all the data by plugging the hard drive into my router

Shortly though, it became clearer: once you set up ANY user at all, the entire drive in not accessible on the network without a password, EXCEPT via DLNA (or anonymous FTP - more on that below)

For the record, I have always defending Seagate products from friends who want to trash them (usually from catastrophic hard drive failures).

Overall, I recommend that for the initial back-up, plug your computer or other device directly into the hard drive

The drive died in <3 years

Love the drive but the software and app need work for managing back up from devices on the fly

Many are ripping the HDD out of the enclosure in desperate attempts to recover their data!The drive I have is barely more than 1 years old.

Some you would have to take apart to replace a drive and others have external access, plus if they are HOT SWAP, you can swap out failed drive with the NAS on.

PRODUCT.]This is a run-of-the-mill big hard drive, IO board and a network card all jammed into one slick case with what was supposed to be run with some amazing software

So I cannot get the data off of the hard drive.

I would not recommend this drive to anyone who wants to use it for it's reported purpose: i.e. networked attached storage.

Then I started experiencing long periods where the drive, although visible to the network, was not accessible

I was looking for a good network capable drive that i could throw in my closet with my router

The disk isn't spinning, the drive isn't working

Seriously one of the worst NAS drives I've encountered in 20 years as an IT admin

Today, I found the drive was completely dead after eighteen months of reliable use.

The hard drive itself as far as I'm concerned is fine, it's not the problem.

I returned it defective because it constantly made rubbing noise which tells me it was a bad drive

You have to go into it's own settings page and manually refresh it, but you really don't want anyone else doing that because there is a button in settings to wipe the entire drive clean

Furthermore, the hard drive capacity is reduced by about 300 GB.

If it performs any slower than that, you should evaluate your router, wireless card, and hard drive speed.

This drive give you the benefits of cloud storage without the speed constraints and hassle

Overall I am very disappointed especially since Seagate customer service recommended this drive for my application

It really is a shame that quality control is so bad with these drives, because Seagates remote access software is pretty good, and otherwise I would have no problem with this hard drive.

The entire computer hard drive does not need to be copied over again

All that aside, I have never had a drive this slow since I had a hard drive

I can recommend the drive, which always shows up in Mac's Finder and behaves as if it were connected directly to the computer

Filled up the hard drive, nearly locked up the PC, and issued not one helpful error / warning... in less than a week

You can't hook that hard drive up to the Seagate USB port and copy the data directly

Seagate requires you to send the hard drive to them to be fixed

hard drive

I checked the drive and an amber light was glowing

I have been able to get it to remotely backup my hard drive using Time Machine, but the the product information and software says that I can access it remotely and do some other stuff

This external hard drive can do WAAAAAAAAAAAY more than I am using it for, which is why set-up was a little complex

I really enjoy this drive.

For example, I had to reformat my USB hard drives a few times to find the right format this would work with

As an electronics trainer, I perform demos for sales associates all over the country and don't want to bring my content with me on a portable drive that can get broken

The top is made of cloth supported by a metal frame to allow the drives within to cool.

Excellent network drive

This time I will not waste my time with this network hard drive

I'll just use a regular USB connected hard drive as my tertiary network backup device

it shows my content, I then try to transfer said content via rsync to another drive (since there is so much data) and I start getting "Connection Interrupted" messages from this stupid drive which basically hinders my rsync transfer.

So, if you already have one of these bricks, you most likely can still get a usable hard drive out of it.

Just download the app from the Smart Hub and you're ready to stream all your movies, photos, music and documents."Inclusion of the "unique Seagate Central app" was a major reason for the purchase of this particular hard drive

Once my computer restarts, the back up stalls with an error message "Unable to back up to (my hard drive's name) because the sparse bundle is in use."I have stopped using this drive to for backups, which is why I bought it in the first place, and now it's totally useless.

Transferred all my content over (right under 3TB worth [using the 3TB Seagate Central]) and even though it has a very slow r/w speed compared to most other drives I've used at least it actually worked as a backup drive.

The hard drive seems fine, but the enclosure died

However, after some fiddling around on the TV I was able to find how to access my movies on the hard drive and now the integration works

The hard drive, a standard Seagate Desktop HDD, generates a lot of heat for the tight design of this unit.

Messing with 3 hard drives over the course of 3 weeks, spending about 10 hours trying to get these drives to connect, and spending time and gas driving to the UPS drop off location is not worth $70 I should have paid for a WD drive.

" Running it manually, it presents a message about requiring 15% free drive space -- on the drive being backed up -- then quits.

That being said, I have many, many complaints concerning the Seagate Central 2 TB Shared Storage Ethernet External Hard Drive.

I hope I don’t have to resort to harvesting the raw hard drive to bolt directly in to my Linux server.

We were just looking for an easy solution for photo sharing without having copies on each computer or having to use a portable drive moving around from computer to computer

(we have a Surface which has windows explorer as well).Additionally you can access this drive from any internet browser (securely), so you can still access your files if you are away from home or on a mobile device

The transfer times were fast by direct connecting the drive to my computer and the initial Time Machine back-up went as fast as when I set up my Western Digital 1TB drive.

The hard drive works as fast as your network

Since this is my main use for this hard drive, I'm very happy with it

Although the hard drive does basically set itself up, confusion kind of sets in between user names and passwords between Seagate Central and Tappin

I bought this product, because the other product of Seagate (Go flex 1TB external hard drive) started giving issues

I removed all instances of this and ran a virus check using Norton which showed the drive was free of any viruses

On a hunch I took the drive out of the enclosure and sure enough, the drive spins just fine, so it looks like the little motherboard that runs whatever flavor of Linux has died

Well the idea behind this product is great: a cheap network attached storage drive that can be accessed from anywhere.

Good hard drive and easy to connect to over local network

Product would not work when new PC hard drive and Windows 10 were re-installed.

Slow and unreliable, a network drive that may be used for backup but not as a media library.

It also came with it a great warranty that made it hard to pass up on such a versatile external hard drive.

The green light on top of the device is not lighting up, the Ethernet lights are not lighting up, and the hard drive is not making its spinning sound

But the problem with this product is not the drive but that Seagate released a product that doesn't work the way it is supposed to because the software that permits ongoing continuous backup is a disaster.

It's about everything else aside from the hard drive that goes along with this purchase

If you just want a hard drive to plus into a computer, then I guess it would be ok, but not sure why you would then chose this one

The drive is simply broken and cannot be repaired (at least not

I would not recommend it for business use as it does not have multiple drives in a RAID setup, and it is also a good idea to have a backup of the files kept on the NAS somewhere else in the event of a device failure.

As I suspected, the drive itself was fine - put it in a docking station, wiped it clean, and works fine.

The drive died in Oct 2015, just wouldn't turn on

These are some of the systems I am referring to and you also what to look at what model of drives are used in them, whether they are hard drives for RAID systems and have a good 5

If this system/unit fails, you will loose everything on it!!!So, if you really want reliable storage that will always be there, spend the extra money to get a Large TB Personal Cloud RAID 1 NAS system with replaceable hard drives.

It takes about a week to transfer 4gb data to this hard drive

now I have data from 1 desktop, two laptops and archives from two old hard drives all in a separate folder, how many copies of the same files to do I have, at least three.....

The internal circuitry was getting quite warm when I played around with it, leading me to believe that the major issues are in the unit, not the drive.

cloud+storage+nas(This is a diskless system that you can install whatever size hard drive that you want to start with and later install larger ones down the road.

Redeeming quality--if you take it apart and smash everything that makes it a NAS, you will have an expensive 4Tb drive that can be used for other purposes.

If you want your files saved, Seagate wants you to pay them to extract / back up the files before you send the hard drive in to be fixed

I was excited to try it out as I needed a hard drive that would be cloud-based for my school and work related files

That external drive failed, and I made the mistake of buying this as a replacement without doing more than a quick glance at star ratings

I like the drive, easy to set it up and would recommend it to other buyers looking for a relatively fast, intuitive and fast networked drive.

For daily and weekly backup, I’ll continue to use my external hard drive with USB 3 hook-up.

hard drive crashed after less than a year of use and now I've lost TB's of my priceless memories

It took a few seconds for a USB hard drive (A 4 TB Seagate functioning as another NAS by being plugged into the router's USB port) to count the contents of a single 3.7 GB folder with 87,488 files

I chose this product because I wanted to hook up a hard drive so that I could play my tv shows on almost any device on my network

So this review is really not about a hard drive.

External Hard Drive advertises to have integrated USB 3.0 BUT!1

The drive also stays very cool

Of all the hard drive manufacturers, Seagate is by far the worst

For example \\seagate-2347\public and map it to a drive letter like that.

The network card failed on my drive, no support from Seagate, I tore it apart and installed the hard drive in my computer, windows does not recognize the file system and can't read it.

Thats great in all, but there is no way I can erase the hard drive before sending it in.

I have a small removable hard drive that i can use to move files around quickly if i need to

I ordered this hoping that the drive was not damaged and it worked

They use a strange custom Linux partition which makes it difficult to recover your data on a Windows pc - however if you don't mind losing your data, you can take it apart - hook the hard drive up to your windows pc and then format it

It's just that as an external drive it seems much slower than a standard external USB drive or an internal drive

The drive itself seems to work fine as expected although a little slower than I had hoped it would be

So basically does not do the job that I need it to do, at all, and now I get to go through the trouble of copying all of my data onto a different hard drive, and finding a different solution.

This is a great drive that runs a Linux operating system

The hard drive itself appear to be fine, the case died

It's just a hard drive.

This was the sole reason why I bought this hard drive was for this integration using the app.

rpm hard drive

Good drive, has a lot of storage, and is immediately and automatically detected by all devices on my network.

I moved all important data to another hard drive

UTF8&qid=1409149415&sr=8-9&keywords=cloud+storage+nas(Not that I favor Western Digital or Seagate, but this system uses RAID type of hard drives that

The Seagate Central 2TB Shared Storeage Ethernet External hard drive is a good product in principal, but the application did not live up to my personal expectations

The drive worked fine on the computer it was plugged into but seemed inordinately slow on the remote computer.

If this system/unit fails, you will loose everything on it!!!So, if you really want reliable storage that will always be there, spend the extra money to get a Large TB Personal Cloud RAID 1 NAS system with replaceable hard drives.

While I've lost the cloud functionality I was pleasantly surprised by the solid performance of the hard drive.

The hard drive doesn't spin up and I have no access to the hard drive or files

As I suspected, the drive itself was fine - put it in a docking station, wiped it clean, and works fine.

I've owned hard drives from Seagate since 2007.

This was an excellent choice, as it's finally given me a shared network hard drive that I can connect up to from anywhere in the house, as well as being able to easily share files between family members and computers

It also came with it a great warranty that made it hard to pass up on such a versatile external hard drive.

I purchased the Central 3TB external hard drive, and was impressed at how easy it was to set up.

Hard drive died in 3 months!Stay away at all costs

I have ordered a new Dual Band 802.11ac wireless card (Intel 7260) which should bump that up even further.-Plugged directly in to the Gb router I experienced another huge increase from 12MB/sec to 30MB/sec.-Still plugged in, I took my laptop hard drive out of the mix by connecting another Seagate USB 3.0 drive directly to my laptop and copied across the network to the SC, and speeds went up again to a nice 36-40MB/sec

Good hard drive and easy to connect to over local network

I also had trouble getting the drive to remember that I had turned off all the extra services if the drive was restarted

Warning signals popped into my head-the only reason I could think of them doing this is that they know of issues with this hard drive and are not releasing or recalling the troubled units.

My main PC's hard drive collapsed with massive bad sectors, and this NAS was the backup location I'd put things before acquiring a Mac for the replacement.

Perhaps if Seagate properly addressed their failure they could establish a connection with their customer base, by offering better designed Drive casings so that users could regain access to their files, but their response was for me to recover my files and then return the failed Drive for a similar replacement

hard drive, but not even closed to the advertised product

The hard drive works as fast as your network

Because this device is just an external hard drive attached to your network via Ethernet

Drive is now completely dead.

The internal drive failed.

Had the drive taken apart to directly access the SATA connectors, but it turned out to be a complete hard drive failure, i.e. total data loss.

These hard drives work great until they don't

The hard drive seems fine, but the enclosure died

In our house we have at least five PC's with WIN 7/8, seeing the drive is inconsistent from PC to PC, trying to figure that out.

This NAS hard drive was clearly designed for home use, and for that purpose I think it does a fantastic job

So, if you already have one of these bricks, you most likely can still get a usable hard drive out of it.

This is a very good reliable NAS drive for video steaming to DLNA

Foregoing the warranty violation problem, I took the device apart to harvest the hard drive (Seagate ST3000DM003) and slipped it in to a Sabrant USB 3.0 lay flat hard drive enclosure.

I'm hoping some future firmware version will make this an attractive backup drive into a media-friendly device...

The drive seems to be fine, but the hardware supporting it seems to have failed.

It takes a few minutes on Seagate's website to create an account -- set up the hard drive, name, password, etc

That collapsed hard drive was a Seagate drive as well, coincidentally, but at least it was ~5 years old

The drive was very cheap for a NAS Drive

I bought the second one in hopes that my problem with the the first one was the enclosure, and not the actual drive.

I was looking at a wireless portable drives

The resultant scan file somehow found over 9TB of data on that 3TB hard drive

It's only purpose is read USB based storage (not file transferring nor PC/Console/etc communication as any USB receiver would expect from an External Hard Drive)File transfer speeds are just a joke..

As a whole this drive runs much MUCH hotter than any other drive I have ever used - and I have two other 4 TB drives by Seagate

I would recommend this to anyone looking for a family backup hard drive.

This drive was super easy to set up

The first thing the buyer MUST beware of is that this is no ordinary plug and use hard drive.

The two bad things are that the upload speeds are only about 40mb per second when connected directly to my computer, and that you can't piggy back another hard drive on this to add additional storage for DLNA

Their drive failed on me and I have to pay to salvage my contents.

Here is where the problem arose: apart from the NIC interface, there is no other way to communicate with the hard drive in the device.

Since it only has a single hard drive, this is definitely for household use, and I would recommend not making it the sole location for storing important files and media, as it could be lost in the event of a device failure

I bought this to replace a dying wd external hard drive

We were using a "plug in" external hard drive and it worked fine but was a bit of a pain to find a handy spot for it and then have to plug it in each time.

The drive is dead.

hard drive crashed after less than a year of use and now I've lost TB's of my priceless memories

It takes a few seconds to open due to the fact that hard drive goes to sleep mode

And as there's no power button, only solution is to unplug AC.I had a Western Digital WD Elements 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive before

WD seems to have a better one, but being just a NAS hard drive there is no reason why there can't be more control over the hard drive

The drive itself works great

Setting up the hard drive was straight forward.

, i recomended this external hard drive

While Seagate is usually a very trusted name in hard drives, this hard drive is a head scratcher, a hair puller and finally, it is now a big dead weight on my desk

I'm going to start over with WD, not sure if I'll try another NAS or just get separate portable USB drives for my machines

In short: for all practical purposes, it simply is an external hard drive, which connects to your router, rather than the USB socket in your computer

When syncing a PC and a Mac to the back-up hard drive, we needed to change some configurations on the PC

Though if you need that you will definitely not want such a slow drive

many of you guys mentioned the drive being slow over wifi, but one thing you should know is that when you have a NAS in your home network, you always always always access it through ethernet, never wifi

This makes me very nervous because I know that it isn't good to abruptly unplug a hard drive

its a good hard drive , i like it, its ideal for small office and

, I had a large 3 terabyte external hard drive I wanted to attach to the Seagate Central - what a joke finding how to access the drive when it's hooked up

Seagate, told me that I would only receive a new hard drive if I sent in the old one.

I am seriously considering buying a Western Digital NAS to replace this POS even though the reviews on the WD are worse than the reviews on this NAS.I used to love my Seagate drives, even have a nice wifi drive I use for personal file keeping at school and such

We have gone through several hard drives for storage

Set up was a breeze but accessing the drive has been a complete miss.

so I can't access it like a regular external hard drive.

Funny, when I bought the original drive, it was new but Seagate seems to think it's ok to send their customers recertified drives (aka other peoples' junk).

It had worked before the hard drive failure and the hard drive and Windows 10 were re-install.

The green light on top of the device is not lighting up, the Ethernet lights are not lighting up, and the hard drive is not making its spinning sound

I have always been a real fan of Seagate hard drives and had really high hopes for this since it is a great concept.

This seems to be a great external drive

I did not plan on getting this at best buy, but I had 2 portable hard drives that I needed to replace, and I figured the 4TB storage would be great, and I wouldn't have to worry about putting different content on different hard drives

We've recently switched from independent small hard drives to back our devices to a large shared network drive and are fairly pleased.

That said, if you have a lot of patience, it seems to be a solidly built hard drive, and it's a good price for this amount of storage.

For example, let's say you had a few big portable hard drive full of stuff that you would like to copy over to the Seagate Central

a large TB Personal Cloud RAID 1 NAS with removable hard drives, which is a mirrored hard drive configuration that will mirror and backup your data on two drives,

For this I am very happy, although the drive is a little noisy if you are near it.

If I send the unit to Seagate, they will destroy it and send out a brand new unit - but away into the ether go all the photos and videos etc stored on the hard drive.

The Seagate Central External Hard Drive has a lot going for it, but also has drawbacks

I then did a transfer of files from a USB external hard drive on my desktop computer (connected to network via ethernet) to the Seagate external drive (connected to the router via ethernet), and saw sustained speeds of 30MB per second

I could recommend this as a network drive.

The hard drives in these units are fairly good, its usually the little electric controller that fails

Worst Drive DO NOT BUY

I have had this drive for 1 1/2 years and it just died on me.

Does Seagate know how to make hard drives

I very rarely am able to access this drive for more than 10-20 minutes when transferring files from these devices before I lose the connection, and I am accessing the drive from no more than 15 feet away.

Awesome drive

I would highly recommend this hard drive.

As other reviewers have noted this drive is SLOW

message).Perhaps these things are only supposed to live for two years, but I've had harder-worked portable drives last longer.

My wife's computer hard drive crashed this

]This drive is so slow over the internet that you could burn your data (larger files) on a DVD and send it VIA U.S.Mail and have it delivered by a blind Postman quicker

This hard drive would randomly spin up like it was being accessed at random times of the night despite all computers being turned off.

I can recommend this drive, but the truth is, they ought to make it easier for people to figure out how to use it

Via the Amazon Vine Review program, I had the opportunity to try out the Seagate Central 2 TB Shared Storage Ethernet External Hard Drive that was offered

My last drive would do an initial backup of my entire hard drive (a little over 600 Gigs) in and hour or two.

My excitement waned considerably when I saw how long it was taking to move everything from my 320GB external hard drive

cause i'm still need the external hard drive ...thats it

Several months in, the drive works with no problems

After I figured it out, the drive works as described.

I am an experienced Hardware Repair technician and have done so much data recovery, that I know backing up and restoring to a failed computer drive, are better done with a direct connection

I will now have to try and use a USB cable (which i had to purchase seperately as the Central does not come with one supplied!) to connect it to my IMac, so i can at least use it as a normal external hard drive

The hard drive

Was useless but just removed the hard drive and use it in my computer to this day

I bought this product in September 2013, and for two years it was a reliable, if slow, network shared drive for my backups, large file storage, and confidential information (a secure partition required a password to access)

Will have to replace the hard drive with a direct usb 3 connection which this one does not seem to have

and then you had to provide the hard drive on top of that

It appears the only useable solution is to remove the hard-drive and use it in another NAS box.

Loading 1400 Raw photos into this hard drive is taking 2 days...2 days!

The hard drives in these units are fairly good, its usually the little electric controller that fails

I would highly recommend this hard drive.

So I will probably use this as my backup/main access point for files, but keep the originals on other hard drives so if this thing ever breaks down I will still have my originals somewhere else.

and I was intrigued by the ability to access the hard drive from my TV.In terms of setting up the drive so that I can have Time Machine automatically back up to

For one, if a hard drive fails, you are just looking at just the cost of replacing one hard drive and not a whole unit.

For example, let's say you had a few big portable hard drive full of stuff that you would like to copy over to the Seagate Central

So, if my case is typical (and from all the research I have done it seems to be), the drives are good, the rest of the unit is garbage

Since this was at the end of a 16 hour transfer I first looked at the locations of the two folders before skipping, and when I clicked skip then the whole drive went crazy

This Drive falls in that class and is Poor and should be avoided

I did not plan on getting this at best buy, but I had 2 portable hard drives that I needed to replace, and I figured the 4TB storage would be great, and I wouldn't have to worry about putting different content on different hard drives

As much as I would love the idea of a wireless hard drive setup, this device makes it practically impossible to consider it

We decided to buy two matched portable external drives, keeping one plugged into the Seagate Central's USB port, the other in our safe, and swapping them every two weeks

For the price slightly more than a 4 TB hard drive I have a device that I can access from any computer in the house, my phone, my tablet or any computer in the world as far as that goes

Next, my drive repeatedly disconnects itself from the network, often in the middle of a backup thereby corrupting the backup and not serving the exact purpose for which I bought it.

At this point I still have a failed hard drive with a service plan, and no idea if it is ever going to get fixed.

Either the drive has failed, or has unchecked corrupted data on the system (the OS data is stored on the

Additionally, according to their replacement policy they will refurbish the hard drive and send it on to someone else.

I subscribe to a tech helpline they " pinged" the drive and said looked like the drive was basically good but needed new software as just not communicating as it should but that Seagate tech help would be best way forwardHave lodged two help tickets with the desk and have phoned the helpline on 3

The major issue why I am giving 2 stars is how severely noisy the drive is

It also slowed down connection speed as everything was going back and forth from the router to my computer, back to router to the hard drive.

its a good hard drive , i like it, its ideal for small office and

Just buy a regular hard drive

It has been great and there is so many reliable brands out there that you can install RAID hard drives into with good warranties that will last like my NAS has.

Transferred all my content over (right under 3TB worth [using the 3TB Seagate Central]) and even though it has a very slow r/w speed compared to most other drives I've used at least it actually worked as a backup drive.

I've rechecked everything on my network, everything is connecting at 1GBit per the router lights, and this is the only device on my network that is showing this poor R/W performance