It has been performing well so far. I mainly use it for storage and backup rather than daily use, so there haven't been any issues. The delivery was prompt, which greatly helped ease a lot of stress at the time. While I’d recommend it based on my current experience, I haven’t used it long enough to comment on long-term durability.

The price of these drives offer good performance and are priced at a reasonable amount per GB. Three of these drives serve as daily, weekly and monthly tier backups and a fourth as a daily access drive. More than 80% of all files written to the drives are 150GB or larger per file (Hyperv images). A throughput rate averaging 218MB/s to 230MB/s is seen daily for writing backups when connected via USB. Your mileage may vary if you do not have at least 5Gbps USB port. The only challenge is keeping the external drives cool. The standard cooling is passive air-cooling and the drives can easily get 60 plus Degrees Centigrade. A fourth drive was removed from its enclosure (warranty probably gone) and installed in a server on a SATA port directly and the same throughput is achieved at 230MB/s. Inside the server the drive runs at no higher than 45 Degrees C. In the server the drive is used as Primary as well as Secondary storage and it performs consistently when running HyperV machines directly from the drives over 16hour periods with load. Very happy with the performance of the drive enclosures and the service from Wootware.

So, firstly some context. As of this writing (03/01/23), the average cost per TB for spinning rust (mechanical hard disks) is roughly around R450/Tb. Anything above that mark I consider expensive, anything around or below the R400 is cheap. Of course, one should factor in spindle speed, cache, sustained read/write rate, burst read/write rate, whether the drive is CMR or SMR (avoid SMR like the plague, or you need to get it at a *serious* discount), and MTBF/reliability+TBW rating, but that gives a rough yardstick to begin with. All else being equal you would prefer a CMR disk that can run 24/7 (and probably have above average MTBF), with a 7200RPM spindle speed and that utilizes CMR. And usually it's prosumer or enterprise style drives that deliver this type of specs, such as the Ironwolf Pro or the Exos series drives. "Vanilla" (e.g. non-pro) 3.5" Seagate Barracuda drives all use SMR as does all their 2.5" drives.

So about this drive. I got it on special, at below R300/Tb. Next, the drive I had inside was a standard IronWolf Pro (prosumer/enterprise drive), with a spindle speed of 7200RPM. YMMV but finding an IronWolf Pro, Barracuda Pro or Exos drive inside. Buying the naked drive would've cost me nearly twice what I paid for this external drive.

https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/
https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ironwolf-pro-16tb-DS1914-10-1905US-en_US.pdf

With a rating like this I can mostly only rate the service, which was excellent. Going by what was promised and the end result, I got the delivery one day early packaged really well. As for the product, it really needs to be in use for more than a year to really rate it but it works.. so far. What more can be said.