HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB HDD Review: A Reliable Workhorse for Data Centers and NAS Systems

Great value, I'd far rather have a used Ultrastar than a new SMR drive. Bought a couple of Seagate drives for a new NAS without realizing that they were SMR. Within 2 weeks, I was noticing performance issues, especially under heavy usage. Adding a new drive to the NAS took days. Running an integrity checkup on a backup? Yeah... painful. Wasn't sure about buying used/refurbished drives, but once I finished replacing the Seagates with these, I was a convert. Zero SMART errors on any of the 5 drives I've purchased so far, zero slow-down even after filling the drives to 75%+ of capacity. Only complaint I COULD make is that they are a bit loud, but they're enterprise-class drives and so I expected that. Mine are in a Synology NAS which is in the closet about 6 feet from my desk. I can definitely hear them, but it isn't annoying, and isn't any louder than the rest of the networking equipment in the closet with them. FWIW, Backblaze named these among the most reliable drives that they have in service. Hard to argue with that.

Solid hard drive. I haven't had it long enough to say anything about its long-term durability, but here are some objective specs & details. (which for some reason were left out of the product description on amazon, as well as the actual data sheet PDF from HGST) Average speeds are in the attached photo. On arrival I tested for bad sectors and other errors. The drive was completely clean and safe to use out of the box. Physically, the drive (refurbished) was totally spotless as well. You always wonder why refurbished stuff got returned obviously but I haven't seen any sign to differentiate the drive from a brand-new drive. As for my opinions - I like the idea of helium drives for RAID arrays. They are technically denser, because helium reduces friction, allowing drives to be packed closer together, which in turn allows them to put SEVEN disks in this thing. But as of right now, HGST isn't really taking advantage of that, drawing fewer bytes per disk than normal 3 or 4-disk drives. In the near future that will probably change, and when it does helium drives will have the highest capacities you can fit into a 3.5" magnetic disk drive. But for right now, the highest capacity consumer helium drive from HGST is 12TB, so it's directly competing with Seagate's 12TB non-helium drives. And those 12TB drives are virtually impossible to find on retail. You can either order them wholesale or you can pay well over a thousand for a used drive on eBay or something. So that's obviously not the reason to pick up a helium drive. The area in which the helium drive wins out versus the Seagate drives is its mechanical efficiency. The drive requires less power per byte AND less power per byte per second. Up to about 20% actually. Not only does it require less power in operation, but even if it were set to operate at the same wattage, it produces less heat. This is really important if you're going to have lots of drives in close proximity, like in a RAID array. If you're looking for a drive for a NAS server or even a dense drive bay in your PC, this one's great because it allows you to run fans at a lower rate. For my applications, this was really important. I put three 5x3.5" drive bays in the front panel of a full tower, for a total of 15 hard drives, all running off just three small fans. Realistically, this setup could still safely cool regular drives, but the issue has been noise. I'm still looking into replacing the fans in the drive bays with quieter, higher-quality fans, but for the time being I'm stuck with these super noisy fans. The drive bays have a switch allowing you to swap between high fan speed, and low fan speed. The high is incredibly noisy, and the low is only slightly quieter. The noise quickly gets overwhelming on high speed, but in this setup, running non-helium drives on low speed is only safe for normal operation, where most of the drives are effectively sleeping. If you start any kind of major write operation (1TB+) on the RAID volume which recruits 5 or more drives, the temperature quickly goes up to 50-55 degrees celsius. This is a safe temperature for the drives themselves, but they're not just in a little storage enclosure. If you're using the drives for an NAS server or a massive PC like mine, your drive fans will likely end up blowing hot air all over the rest of your components. Since my system is air-cooled, the CPU and GPU are cooled by fans which pull air from inside the case. That arrangement depends on the air inside the case actually being colder than the CPU/GPU, obviously. You could say that means it's a bad setup, but 1) there isn't really another way to fit 15 drives into a PC tower case, and 2) most hot-swappable server systems position the drives in front as well, so in practice this is an extremely common cooling arrangement, just more for rackmount systems than for desktops. Anyway, the arrangement works just fine with the fans on low, and especially when the drives themselves only ever reach 40 degrees. Sorry it was so long-winded - that is the real benefit of the helium drives, in my experience. So the only concern I had left was the price. Helium drives are more expensive per TB than other drives, as well they should be, since the technology is more complicated. They aren't just pumping helium into the drive and hermetically sealing it. The main advantage of helium is that it allows them to put a completely different mechanism inside the frame. Like I said, 7 super thin disks, and thin write heads and arms. So the price jump is fair, since you're not just paying for the cost of pumping and sealing the helium inside, but also paying for 2-4 extra disks and the R&D that goes into designing the thinner mechanism. Still, the issue of price comes down to whether it's worth it to you, not whether it's technically fair for the manufacturer to charge more. That's why I bought the refurbished drive instead of the new drive. I started with just one because I wanted to test the quality and reliability. So we'll have to see if I have problems in the future, but based on my initial experience it seems like you get way more than what you pay for. This drive is less than $25 per TB, which is extremely low. In the ballpark of the lowest quality drives. Here you're getting better performance in just about every way than the top quality drives from Seagate, for at least a 15% lower price. The only issue is whether the drive being refurbished really matters. But what really sealed the deal was the 3 year manufacturer's warranty. If you buy this drive brand-new you only get a 1-year warranty. But because it's used, you get an extended warranty for free. Now obviously if your drive breaks down you're likely going to lose the data on it, so if you intend to use it as a simple volume, then the warranty may not matter, since replacing the drive won't replace your data. But if you're using it for a redundant RAID volume like me, this is just fine. If one of my drives breaks down, no worries, the other 4 can pick up the slack while HGST sends me a replacement... If this thing falls apart in the next 3 years, I'll be just fine. After 3 years I'll probably have moved on to a new system anyway. So for the money this is really the best value you can possibly get if you have any need for RAID storage. Obviously these read/write speeds pale in comparison to any SSD, but if you're trying to build a high-storage PC or storage server, you're going to need HDDs, period. I chose samsung 960 pro for the boot & cache drives, and there's no reason to go beyond that for me. For the high-capacity, relatively colder storage component of your PC, or for your NAS server, this is by far the best value I have seen anywhere. For all the other components in my system, their high quality and performance justified spending outrageous sums of money for the top tier parts. But when it came to hard drives, I was able to buy the best hard drives I could find, for a cheaper price than some of the WORST hard drives I could find. Really a rare deal, and I'm hoping it doesn't just go away immediately.

It is currently February, I purchased two of these last October. As others have mentioned there is no surprise that there are a ton of hours on these drives. I can live with that. Unfortunately 1 of the 2 I ordered originally failed in early January. A replacement was sent quickly and the old hard drive was returned, so I'm happy about that. Now, about a month and a half later, the replacement they sent has failed. The other one I have is trucking right along, however. But 1 out of 3 hard drives being good for 5 months isn't great. I will update the rating if the next hard drive they send actually lasts, or if they give me a hard time about replacing it again. If I had to do it all again, I think I'd get one of these and spend the $30-$50 more to get a brand new hard drive as well and run them in RAID, so if this used one goes down you have a more reliable one until the new backup arrives. Update, May 2024: I am not reducing my rating to 1 star. Another replacement hard drive went down. I will say that customer service always offers to replace them, but boxing them up and sending them back is a pain in the butt. At this point I'm going to just call it a loss and get a new hard drive. I would not purchase another hard drive from this seller. Personally, I'll be sticking to new from here on out.

The items arrived very well protected. I ran GSmartcontrol on the 2 HDDs I bought. The test log report indicated that they were unused and had no errors (e.g. zero reallocated sectors). Noise-wise, I don't really feel that it wasn't as loud as some of what the other reviewers said. This could also be because I put the 2 HDDs into an Akitio NT2U3.1c DAS RAID enclosure. With 5-year warranties and a RAID1 configuration, they have met my requirements nicely :-)

It is a 6.6 year old HDD but works well and no defects as of now !!

I bought the drive to be used as an internal storage drive. It arrived way ahead of the estimated date provided by Amazon very well packaged, identically to any new hard drive I have bought in the past. I mounted it in my PC, connected it up, formatted it, and started tranasfering files to it. The read and write speeds under real usage are faster than a Seagate 8TB EXOS drive that I have mounted in the same system. Using Hard Drive Sentinel, it has a lot of hours on it, but very few power cycles, and shows 100% health. I imagine it was used in a NAS type situation or possibly in a Crypto rig. However it was used, it is well worth the price I paid and would definitely buy another if I needed one. It is quiet and it runs at normal temps. The seller reached out to me to make sure everything was satisfactory and reminded me that if there were any issues within the warranty period that I should contact them directly and they would make sure the issue was resolved. Just a genuine, "we're here if you need us", contact after receiving the drive.

I have bought 3 of these renewed hard drives. All of them arrived on time and in good good condition. I will be the first to tell you that I am a bit skeptical when it comes to used, renewed or refurbished hard drives. But I took a chance on these HGST hard drives, mainly for the price and the higher RPMs. One of the hard drives was on for 1484 days, one was 2032 days and the last one was 2382 days. All are quiet and spin fast at 7200RPM. I used these drvies as backups. I would buy them again when I need more and if they are available.