Seagate Game Drive Hub 8TB Review

TweakTown's Rating: 93%

The Bottom Line

The Seagate Game Drive Hub 8TB is a welcomed addition to the family. It's honestly the only solution you need to enable you to keep your entire game library at your fingertips.

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Earlier in the year and even into late last year, Seagate went all in on console storage solutions, launching first the Game Drive for Xbox followed by the PlayStation model. Those solutions were then followed up with the Game Drive for Xbox SSD which we promptly reviewed. A few months later, we have a new solution that aims to tackle your entire game library, the Game Drive Hub for Xbox.

The GDH is a 3.5" solution aimed at gamers that want to store their entire libraries in one location. Seagate claims upwards of 200+ games can be stored within this solution's 8TB capacity. Connectivity is handled by a USB 3.0 port on the back while offering two additional ports via a hub on the front. Performance is said to reach up to 160 MB/s with overall dimensions roughly 198 x 41 x 118mm.

The MSRP for the Seagate Game Drive hub 8TB comes in at $239.99 with a one-year warranty.

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Packaging follows the Xbox color scheme with an image of the drive bottom right and capacity above it.

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The back of the packaging mentions features of the drive in many languages.

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In the package, we find the power adapter and USB 3.0 cable along with a paper manual.

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The front of the enclosure houses two additional USB 3.0 ports making sure you don't lose a port of connection when adding capacity to your Xbox.

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The back of the drive gets a bit washed away with our white background, but within the black area, we have the power port at the bottom and Type-B connection above it.

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Opening the drive up, I was surprised to find a Barracuda Pro 8TB, but that is what we have in this unit.

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The controller used is an ASMedia 1153.

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Connecting the drive to my Xbox, I get 7.2TB of useable space.

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Performance in CDM allowed me to reach just over 191 MB/s read and 184 MB/s write.

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FBM showed similar performance, 185 MB/s read and 150 MB/s write from 16M to 512k.

I have been using the Game Drive Hub for going on a month now and I must say it really is a blessing for anyone wanting to keep their full game library at their fingertips. Between AAA titles and Indie games, I have a touch over 160 games and apps installed on this drive and I still have a solid 20% free. I haven't had any issues with build quality since I began running the drive - I have noticed long gaming sessions to build some heat which does make me wonder about longevity over time, but I did not experience any issues.

Performance is substantially quicker than the stock HDD; you can physically tell when loading games how much quicker the Game Drive hub is. In synthetics, I easily beat marketing numbers by 30 MB/s in some cases. I reached 190 MB/s in CDM while Flash Benchmark topped out at 185 MB/s.

On the flip side, I'm a little disappointed to see this solution carry a one-year warranty when the drive used internally is a five-year drive with a 330TB/year workload rating when purchased outside the enclosure. With that said, I too am surprised there is no price premium by adding the Game Drive enclosure.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Maximus IX Hero (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
• Memory: G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4 3200 (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Hybrid (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Intel 730 480GB SSD (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
• Secondary Storage: MyDigitalSSD BP5 512GB SSD (buy from Amazon)
• Case: EVGA DG-86 (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 750 P2 (buy from Amazon)
• Networking: ASUS PCE-AC88 AC3100 (buy from Amazon)
• Networking: ASUS ROG 10G Express
• Networking: ASUS Thunderbolt EX3 (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)