(OLD MODEL) Seagate Central 3TB Personal Cloud Storage NAS STCG3000100

I just received my Seagate Central 4TB (SC) today, and wanted to post a preliminary review of how fast it was to copy bulk video files to it.I've learned that Amazon reviews have to be looked at with a more critical eye to the most recent first, as responsive manufacturers often will keep updating their product/software through the life of the product. Also, particularly with networks and computer stuff, users can have some real varied experiences in performance that are caused by their network/computer configuration. I believe this might be the case with the SC, as it achieved a more than acceptable bulk file transfer copy rate. I wanted to get a preliminary review posted in hopes to assist other potential buyers looking at the SC for a streaming server for the home, but who are concerned with some of the reviews that have said the SC is slow.My intended use is primarily for streaming my video/audio collection to various devices in my home. After reading the reviews I was concerned about the SC's speed, however my results were outstanding.I'm using a Motorola SGB6580 Router leased from cable provider, a very fast notebook, Cat 6 cabling, Gigabit Ethernet. I copied from an old USB 2.0, external drive to the SC today (over the Ethernet, via Win 7 Explorer). One set of files was 419 GB, containing 364 files. The files copied to the SC, from my very old USB 2.0 external HD, in approximately 3 hours and 45 minutes. I didn't calculate how fast the transfer was . . . but dang, 400 GB in under 4 hours is great for home use!I've not streamed any videos yet, but with that fast of file copying I have no doubt that I'll be very happy with the streaming ability of the SC.A couple things I did to ensure a fast transfer rate:1. Located the SC on the router with the SC included short cable with nothing in-between the SC and the router.2. Updated the SC firmware (my SC was 1 version outdated right out of the box)3. Turned all the SC "services" off in the "Manage Seagate Central" software, per one of the suggestions in the SC literature.Don't forget to turn the services back on after you've bulk copied files to the SC.4. All the Ethernet cable in my network is CAT 6I've not had the SC long enough to write a thorough review, but so far I'm real pleased with the unit. For my intended use, it appears to be spot on. The SC is simple to configure, has great instructions and is a very fast unit for the money. It can stream in the home, and I can access the unit over the web when away from home. True it doesn't have high-end capabilities, but geesh, what do you expect to get for under $200 for a 4TB NAS server! And for my intended use, I don't need all those high-end business networking features . . . I just want to stream videos/audios on my home network (and out and about). The SC looks like it'll get the job done just fine.Will update this review after further use.[7/29/14 Update:Streams GREAT to Ipad.The ios (ipad) SeagateMedia Software is weak., with many critical features missing which I won't go into here, but are fully documented in the reviews on on SeagateMedia on the Ipad. Seagate should put the effort into making the SeagateMedia ios software feature rich & address the issues raised by the reviewers on the Ipad. By doing so, you would really corner the market on a full one-step reasonably priced home server solution. SeagateMedia should remember folders and last played spot on media; keep persistence when the app is shuffled to the side and another app opened or the media is paused and the Ipad cover closed and then reopened; Vid playback should allow 3rd party association hooks option, and the SeagateMedia Vid player should have saturation, contrast, brightness adjustments in the main GUI while watching the vid, and again - last spot played and file folders looked at persistance, even when the app is shuffled to the side or the lid closed. These are critical features that would make the Seagate Central and SeagateMedia Software a one-stop solution. I note you can use any other software you want to access your media just fine thru the Ipad or other device.]Great job on Seagate's part on working at getting the Seagate Central 4T right.[8/5/14 Update:The 4T SC is till working great for streaming Vids to Ipad. It is extremely fast for my home use. A couple things I've learned.Two great iOS apps for streaming vids on Ipad are nPlayer and AVPlayerHD. Both are great for streaming vids. nPlayer is faster with identifying the SC and loading folders and a little better at keeping persistence when shuffling the app aside or closing the lid. nPlayer also has a slick finger slide on the screen to adjust volume and brightness, but lacks saturation and contrast tuning. AVPlayerHD has brightness, saturation and contrast tuning while watching a vid right handy. You'll spend under $10 to get both. I'd start with nPlayer if I had to pick just one, but if you need saturation and contrast adjustmeht, that'd be AVPlayerHD. I use nPlayer as my goto, but AVPlayerHD when I have a vid that requires extra tuning to get the picture just right.Number of subfolders matters in the Video folder on the SC when using iOS apps. I don't know if this is true in general with the SC, but I had created 11 main subfolders under the Video folder, and all the iOS apps was failing to recognize my MP4 files. When I merged the subfolder into just 6 (with the 6 having tons of subfolders in each one), all vid files were recognized by the iOS apps. So somewhere under 11 is the magic number of main subfolders under the video folder on the SC when working with an ipad.Rescan the SC after adding files. After copying files to the SC, you may want to "rescan" the SC so that it creates a fresh index of files on the SC, otherwise your newly added files may not show up on your devices accessing the SC. "Managing Seagate Central", "Services" tab, "Seagate Media" and "DLNA" have "rescan" options.]

I strongly recommend against buying this product because it's a terrible one and I hate it. And I am going to elaborate on my reasons why. I'm not going to bother reading through the 550 reviews this has on Amazon I'm just going to say what I think about it. After buying this I regretted it terribly and it was huge mistake, but also a learning experience. After setting this drive up on my network for almost two whole days my blood boiled, I was absolutely furious...in rage over my experience with the Seagate Central NAS. Normally when I am disappointed with a product I would not be this upset. But in this case the level of stupidity I discovered in the design and operation of this product was just incredible. I now hate Seagate intensely, and will never buy another of their products as long as I may live. I will have nothing to do with them. The Seagate Central is a NAS product made by idiots for idiots. I'm a smart person, I think differently, and on a higher level then anyone at Seagate is capable of...obviously. Clearly the fools who designed this product do not think like me as they are not smart enough to have that potential. I'm a 30 year old who has been using computers nearly his whole life since 1984, and I think I know a little more about computers than the average person, and I expect a lot more from a product such as this. So I feel compelled to write this review. I owe it, to you, the consumer.You should know THIS IS ABSOLUTELY A TERRIBLE PRODUCT AND YOU SHOULD NOT EVEN CONSIDER BUYING IT ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !And to the people or person at Seagate reading this who would try to apologize for my experience with this product, screw you! Your company has caused me a lot of trouble and grief! It just boggles my mind how people at such a large and supposedly successful company could be so absolutely brain dead stupid as Seagate is obviously. And how or why anybody buys their s****y products is beyond me. I guess I would if they have repeat customers. Maybe the only unfortunate customers that Seagate has are just stupid and don't know any better. Seagate, I am very dissapointed with you! And in case your are wondering, no, I will not change my review. I will stand behind every word of it with pride. I don't care if your sorry for my experience with this product, I don't give a S***. You guys suck! You should be ashamed of yourselves. Nothing would make me happier than to see Seagate go out of business. But the problem is not the company Seagate, it's the morons who work there, who runs things, who design things, who make the products the way they are. That's the problem. What do you do about that? I guess just steer clear of them basically, look at the competition. Make the smart choice and buy Western Digital or whatever just something else! And no I don't work for Western Digital I just think they make better products. It's nice to have choices, alternatives. It's good that Seagate does not have a monopoly I think to myself.Now I haven't explained why I am so upset with this product, why it failed to meet my needs. In short my complaints are more software oriented than hardware. The hard drive itself I can't really knock, I can't say anything negative about it. What would their be to complain about? The speeds maybe? Nah, it's typical. WD probably wouldn't be much better in that regard. It's just a hard drive. The hard drive itself as far as I'm concerned is fine, it's not the problem. So this review is really not about a hard drive. It's about everything else aside from the hard drive that goes along with this purchase.OK, so I plug it in, install the Seagate Dashboard on my desktop. I find the drive on my desktop. I go to network places (using Win XP) and go into the drives very limited number of settings (one complain I have, should be more settings available) after creating my user name and password for the drive. I install the Seagate Media and Seagate Backup apps on both my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 4. After logging in both in the Seagate Dashboard and the Seagate Backup app on either of my tablets the app failed to find the drive. I posted questions pertaining to this problem over a week ago to Seagate support forums, no answer. Why a shock right! Wow. So that's pretty much useless. I can forget about backing up my tablet to this NAS. I did restart things many times and log in and out over and over and did everything I could possible think of to make this work. Why does this not work? If somebody with my IQ can't make this work, it hopeless for the average person, they don't have a chance. Nice job Seagate :)I moved about 200GB or so of select data off my desktop to the drive which took all day [meaning like 8 hours roughly] over my 1G network. Now let me explain a little first about the nature of the data I moved to the NAS. A big part of my use of this is music. I intended to mostly fill the drive with a large amount of music as both WAV/PCM files and MP3 files. Now here is how I have my music library setup. I have a WAV folder and an MP3 folder. In each of these I have a folder for each artist, and then within that a folder for each album. All the MP3 files are edited with ID3v2 tags which are pretty complete including an album picture. The WAV files all have an album picture with the folder of each album. In Windows XP all the folder are thumbnail view and all are setup to display an album picture. I then have a large collection of scanned documents in JPG format along with some PDF's as well. All this is organized by a folder for each business, then a folder for each year, and the file names at the date basically. My system is just great, and it makes it very quick and easy to find anything, in tens of thousands of scanned images. Then I have a large collection of pictures as well all in different folders. And lots of videos too. So this is a bulk of what was moved to the NAS. Now here's the problem, in the Seagate Media app on my tablets everything id grouped by the type of media. So whether is was a scanned document or just some picture, it's all thrown in together in one long list of files that in the ten's of thousands. Nice :) Good like trying to find anything. No setting to change this by the way. This is how it displays. What are they thinking over there at Seagate??? I have everything organized on my desktop. This Seagate NAS is the opposite of organization. It CHAOS! All these files just randomly thrown all over the place is totally useless. It's totally useless. What am I supposed to do with this I thought. I went into a rage. So now onto music. All my music is just one long this of thousands of tracks. WTF??? What if I want to play a CD? How I am supposed to do that? Create a playlist? Why should I have to do that? My tablet organizes all the music in the Android music player that I put on the SC card. All my music is well organized on my computer. Why can't this drive and it's app do that for me also? I later found there was a way to change the display of the music by album or artist on the media app. Well great, but I still have a problem. First of all it won't display the album pictures which my tablets and computer do just fine. Secondly I can't see the file type. I can't see if it's an MP3 I am looking at or a WAV. Why such limited information? This is so freaken stupid to me. Why there is not even an option to be able to have some control over this and change the way some of these things work. Of course I post some questions on Seagate support forums about this issue also and still after over a week no answers. Wow, what a surprise, yeah?So in short I don't like the way my files display on the media app, how they so unorganized and hard to find, and not ordered properly, sectioned off by the folder they were in on my desktop, how I can't see even what type of file I am viewing. The backup app didn't work at all and couldn't even see my NAS so that was a total failure.I did not even bother trying to connect to the drive with my Samsung 60" plasma SmartTV, what for? I wouldn't even be able to find anything anyway. It probably wouldn't display much differently than on my Samsung tablets! I have thousands, ten's of thousands of files, and many have files names that are totally random. How can I find anything? Folders, that's how, at least on my desktop, and Samsung tablets. Apparently Seagate doesn't believe in folders or in the concept of organization of data and files for it's Central NAS products. WTF is wrong with you guys!!!??? Really, why don't you pull your heads out of your a&*s! Read this review and learn something. Maybe you can design better products in the future because, and guess what, you can have my ideas for free, I don't want any money from you, can just take my ideas and use them for free. What a super deal that is huh! Cause you could learn a lot from me. You know, I'm the customer, and the customers always right, right? So listen to me, and think about these things I say a little bit.What you made is a terrible product that sucks. I am pissed off about this experience and I sincerely hope I can drive as many potential customers away as possible, and I myself will never see another of your horrible products ever again. I will buy Western Digital or something else like that. At least Western Digital has a clue how to make a decent NAS product, unlike you guys.Now I did read over much of the owner's manual for the Western Digital My Cloud NAS product which by the way is a very comparable price, but more importantly, a much better product. I don't own it, but still I read much of the manual for it and it looked pretty good to me, I liked what I saw, I liked it a lot, it looked very promising, much more how shall we say intelligently designed. Unlike Seagate's s*^&*y product, it has a 1.2Ghz processor with 512MB of RAM, a heck of a lot better than the ARM 700Mhz processor with 256MB of RAM that the Central NAS uses I would note. I like that the WD product has a multicolored light on the front very clearly visible with many different colors it can be to show the many different states the drive can be in. As a contrast the Seagate drive has a little light on top which is hard to see unless you stand directly over the drive. It also is not capable of conveying nearly as much information as the WD NAS drive does. For instance, the light will not show the presence or lack of activity on the drive, whereas WD NAS drive does do this. So I think that's kinda dumb. I'm not sure what their thought was on that, but it doesn't surprise me knowing what I know now. It's just plain stupid thinking, it's not even thinking really, it's below that somehow, it's like, not quite thinking, or thinking on a really low level with a really low intelligence I think. It's just a bunch of stupid idiots at Seagate that designed this Central NAS product. I'm still pissed off about this I guess it makes me angry just to write this cause now I have to relive it again, and I want to put this behind me. But I think this needs to be written. I really regret buying this product.I like to have options. Seagate likes to limit these. They like to make a simple products that's easy to setup, easy for a moron to use that is. But I'm not a moron, I'm a smart person, I like options, I like control, Seagate would deny me of these things, and instead place a lot of limitations on my use of the product. So a lot of things just are not even an option. You can think of it, you can conceive of it, but the option is not even there. Let me take for example my Actiontec C1000A VDSL modem. It has basic settings and advanced settings, and my god does it have a lot of settings, you could spend days or weeks almost just researching to try to understand all the advanced settings and what they all do, and I have for some of them, and I use for example MAC authentication which most people probably wouldn't even know what that is. My point in this is, I have a lot of control over how this modem runs, a LOT of options, and I do love that. Many of these settings I will never need or use, but, at least they are available for those who can understand them. Why take them away? That is precisely what it appears Seagate wants to do with this NAS drive.So few options, so few settings. And I just totally disagree with that. Like how long that drive spins before it parks, I don't have any control over that. I do on my desktop for it's drive/s, but not this NAS. My use of the NAS would be very limited, like let's say just in the evening only for instance. I did a test. I left the Seagate NAS on all night. When in got up in the morning I could feel the drive was stopped. Good. So I turn on my tablet, it was off all the way, not standby. As soon as my tablet connects to the Wifi, the NAS starts spinning. Why??? I don't use any Seagate apps. I don't try to connect to the drive. Now it's gonna be running for hours, and for what??? I'm not using it at all, and I wasn't going to. Seagate, this is stupid. And you don't even give me this option to have control over things like this. That's makes me angry.I think I was under the impression that WD's product cost more and I was saving some money by going with the Seagate product. And that's not really true. I was looking at a wireless portable drives also so I think I got a little confused with the pricing on all these different products I was looking at. So now I know that they are pretty comparable in cost but not at all comparable in terms of the product itself. Western Digital is far superior to Seagate I believe!!! I own a lot of Western Digital products and have been quite pleased with them so far, so Western Digital will continue to get my business. And Seagate will never again.This is not super pertinent to this device but I will finish by mentioning the following. I want whatever NAS I go with to work with my Logitech Squeezebox Duet network media player. The Seagate Central is DLNA complaint, however the Suqeezebox is not. So, I don't think it would work. The idea is to stream my massive music library to the Squeezebox player, without a computer involved. I'm not sure WD drive would even work for this. Logitech only officially supports the Netgear ReadyNAS so I have decided I will probably end up going with that. It is 3 or 4 times more expensive. There is a saying, you get what you pay for. I tend to believe there is some truth to that. Hopefully it is pretty nice NAS and will do the job the way I want. I want to run the Squeezebox server program on the NAS. Generally as home-based personal type of NAS is just for storing files and accessing them on various devices maybe, backing up stuff, but not running a server program like this. So I guess I am asking a lot apparently, some people have had trouble with what I am trying to attempt. But it is possible. So that's the plan. I have to first read the owner's manual, check Netgear's support forums, check out their apps for their drive, try to anticipate every possible problem, and not repeat any of my past mistakes such as I made with buying the Seagate Central NAS.Thanks for reading my review and have a nice day :)