Seagate Innov8 Review

Larger-capacity external desktop hard drives let you download to your heart's content. The 8TB capacity of the Seagate Innov8 ($349.99) is enough to contain thousands of hours of video, or millions of MP3s or photos. It's future-proofed with a USB-C port instead of a traditional USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt 2 port, though this can prevent you from using it with an older PC or Mac. If that's what you have, a smaller and more compatible drive like the Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive($109.99 at Amazon) might be the better way to go. But if you want a ton of storage with a solid cost-cost-per-gigabyte value in a fast drive, the Innov8 is definitely worth considering.

How Do You Like Those Ribs?

The body of the Innov8($349.99 at Tiger Direct) is metal, with a set of silver-colored horizontal rib-like stripes around its exterior. The top and bottom plates are textured charcoal-gray metal, with a raised disk molded into both surfaces that mimics the look of a hard drive mechanism. It's similar in feel to the body of the portable Seagate Seven, though at 1.4 by 4.9 by 8.2 inches (HWD) and 3.3 pounds, it's many times larger. Desktop-class drives like the Innov8 are usually larger than portable external drives like the Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive because they use physically larger 3.5-inch drive platters rather than the 2.5-inch kind found in portables, and because desktop drives usually require external AC adapters and their associated hardware.

While the Innov8 is not exactly pocket-size, one thing it shares with its portable brethren is that it doesn't need an external power adapter. It is bus powered, so the same USB-C cable provides both power and data connectivity between the drive and the PC. That's a good fit for high-powered computers like the 2016 iteration of the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro( at Amazon) and the Falcon Northwest Talon, both of which connected to and interacted with the Innov8 easily. In our testing, some smaller laptops, like the Acer Switch Alpha 12( at Amazon), had trouble providing enough power to the drive, however.

The included USB-C cable is about 18 inches long. That's fine for laptops you're using on the same table, but it may be a little short for connecting to a workstation tower PC under your desk. Thankfully, the drive works fine with USB-C docks, though more than one USB-C port on the drive would allow for daisy-chaining to other compatible devices.

Is it Speedy?

The Innov8 is pretty speedy, in light of its USB-C interface and 7,200rpm drive mechanism. It came formatted exFAT, which is compatible with both macOS and Windows, so we tested it on both platforms. It took a scant 2 seconds to copy our 1.2GB test folder to the PC testbed, and it returned a good score of 2,115 points on the PCMark 7 drive test. For comparison, the portable Toshiba Canvio Connect II($99.99 at Amazon) took 13 seconds on the drag-and-drop test, and finished with a score of 1,450 on PCMark 7.

On the Mac-based Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, the Innov8 acquired reasonable throughput results of 181MBps write and 185MBps read. That's a touch slower than the LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2($679.90 at Amazon), which returned rates closer to 210MBps in both directions. The CalDigit Tuff( at Amazon) portable drive is slower, at 121.8MBps write and 125.9MBps read using USB-C. The dual-drive-equipped Promise Pegasus2 R2+( at Amazon) was much faster, at 332MBps write and 374MBps read.

Is it Thrifty?

The $349.99 list price of the Innov8 might give you pause, though there are very few drives with this capacity on the market right now. Usually, larger capacities require multiple-disk arrays, as on the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt 2($2,221.29 at Amazon). Lately, the street price of the Innov8 has been reduced to around $299.99 on sites like Amazon, though others still sell the drive for the full $350 price. The drive costs about 4 cents per gigabyte at its full list price, and about 3.7 cents at $300. On a cost-per-gigabyte basis, that compares well with drives like the Seagate Backup Plus (3.8 cents) and the 5TB Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive($179.25 at Amazon) (4 cents). It is certainly less expensive than the LaCie 5big (10 cents) or the LaCie d2 (8 cents). The Innov8 comes with a three-year warranty, which is very good for premium hard drives.

Very Good, With Minor Reservations

The Seagate Innov8 is good if you're a seminomadic user with today's higer-end PCs or Macs, and you spend a lot of time downloading files from the Internet and moving them among your various electronic devices. It's cross-platform compatible via USB-C and the exFAT format, so you can use it with your new MacBook Pro or Dell XPS 15 Touch ($949.99 at Dell) , though remember it's not 100 percent compatible with all USB-C tablets and lower-power laptops. (You might want to buy it from a retailer with a generous return policy—just in case.) Simple backup users will probably want to save some money with a drive like the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive, our Editors' Choice, but the Innov8 is certainly attractive for the early-adopting power user.

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• Seagate Will Ship 18TB and 20TB Hard Drives in 2020
• How We Test Hard Drives