Seagate - Central 4TB Personal Cloud Storage External Hard Drive (NAS) - Black

I purchased the Seagate Central 4TB unit for my home network. We have a mixture of Windows and Mac's in the household so I wanted something that would allow cross-OS compatibility. After researching the available options at my local BestBuy store, I settled on the Seagate Central 4TB system. After a quick read through the installation info, it was painless to connect to my wireless system (Apple Extreme). My Sony Blu-Ray player found the unit immediately, as did all of my computers. My Blu-Ray testing revealed that some video files are not compatible with the system - MPEG-2 specifically - which is what I use to encode my video files. After re-encoding some test files into H.264, the unit played them fine.

I bought this a few weeks ago. It's my first NAS. The instructions are a little confusing (Seagate Central vs Seagate Dashboard Agent vs Remote Access) but once you get it, you're in for a treat. I've been transferring my old recordings and files from my laptop to the NAS and streaming them using the Xbox One Media Player (it plays MKVs). If you're interested in using it for that purpose, you will love this item. The only two negatives I can think of is that every so often it makes a snapshot sound when browing the web or when I'm streaming. I'm not sure if it's backing stuff up or just makes that sound at intervals. I ran a health check and it passed. The device is not loud at all besides the snapshot sound every so often. Another negative is that if you make files available remotely (say you put a file in a folder, send a friend a link so they can download it off the internet), the download speed for the user downloading/viewing your file is terribly, uselessly slow.

Love the massive amount of storage this has (4TB). It's pretty easy to use if you're technically inclined, and if you're not, you can get someone who is to help you set it up and teach you how to use it. As a frequent traveler I have found it very easy to connect to this drive (which is at my house) via the web interface and download the files I need while traveling.

I purchased this device to consolidate my video library and offer a streaming solution for devices on my wifi network. Before, I had videos on each of my devices, and not 1 central library. With this device, I can watch any movie in my library from any device connected to my wifi network. Some devices (my phone and tablet) need an app, which Seagate built and is free in the store. The device works great, and was fairly easy to setup. The streaming works well. I have heard from friends that Seagate has lower hard drive quality than other devices. Not sure if this is true, but it has been flawless for me. This drive is likely not fast, but it really doesn't need to be because it isn't for that purpose. The only real down sides: 1. To configure it and load it, you need to be hard wired. There is a USB port, but not sure what version of USB and there is no cable. So I had to use a physical connection through a hub or switch to load it up. It takes time to load it up, but if you have many movies, it is a large amount of data. 2. The device doesn't have built in wifi; you plug it into your wifi router. In my case, plugged into a wifi extender. I suspect feature #2 was missing to lower the price...there were more expensive options than this, so I can live with that.

I mostly use the Seagate Central Network Storage Device for archival storage of thousands of picture, songs, and video files. Previously, I used many large capacity portable USB drives. I will continue to use the portable USB drives as a second backup copy. The process of moving thousands of video files over my (wired) network takes time. If I were to do this again, I would get a jumbo-capacity USB-3 drive, attach it to my main computer, archive to it, give it shared status, and share it from / through my main computer. I sometimes use the Seagate Central as a server to play items. The items can be played individually or added to a playlist. Both methods work well. The ability to access the Seagate Central from any computer in my house is very nice. A 50 mbs wireless connection to my 8-year old & slowest computer causes slight pauses when playing videos from the server. A wired 100 mbs works well; Gigabit connections work great. The Seagate Central drive will handle long file names unless you want to edit the file name on the Seagate drive - there seems to be a maximum length during the edit process on the drive. To solve this, copy the file with the long name to your main hard drive, edit the name, and copy the renamed file back to the server. When used as a media server, playlists are helpful to avoid making second and third copies of everything (although the storage space is massive and would allow it.) After a playlist is made from items on the Seagate server, a copy of the playlist can be saved right on the server. The playlist works well when played from the server. Another problem with Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 is getting a clean copy of everything to any external device. My experience is that Windows will sometimes change a few bytes of video files during the copy process. (This often causes the copied video file to stop playing - very annoying.) I solved this problem with TeraCopy which double checks everything in the copy process. I seldom copy with Windows Explorer anymore. A challenging problem when archiving documents, audio files, and video files from several household computers is to get everything organized so to avoid duplicate files and to have the best file saved as the archived master. I haven't figured out a good strategy for this, but at least I am not introducing errors when I use TeraCopy. I do not use software to make direct backups or images of my computer(s) to the Seagate Central server, but I believe that can be done.

SO far have had absolutely no issues with this device at all . I love the networking capability and the amount of space on the drive .. Fairly easy to set up and get working ..

believe it or not i just purchased a new laptop and ran out of space in the 1st 6 months. I didnt realize how many videos I collected. In comes the personal NAS. It was easy to set up. The only issue was the initial setup requires you to plug your laptop directly into the device. My fancy ultabook does not have an external network port. I setup using an older laptop. I only rated this as good because I'm still trying to set up multiple accounts. I'm sure it's in the users manual. I will update my review then.

If you are looking for easy to set up network storage for most basic needs for Movies, pictures and backups this is a great way without needing to open a computer or server case or rack.