Avolusion PRO-T5 Series USB 3.0 External Hard Drive for WindowsOS Desktop PC/Laptop (White) (14TB) (Renewed)

I’ve had this drive for only a couple of months and I’ve been running it, since it arrived. I will share my honest review and promise to come back to this review if anything ever changes.INITIAL EXPERIENCE:With allowing the drive to run 24/7, I’ve experienced no issues whatsoever. I’ve written just over half of the drives capacity (7 TB) to it and it is running just as good as day one. Yes, occasionally I will hear the drive spin up and/or make a small noise like it’s reading/accessing the drive but these are perfectly normal sounds to hear from a mechanical hard drive. The unit has four blue light indicators on the front, which are on 24/7. I really have no preference or dislike about the blue lights. The hard drive is stored in a room that I do not sleep in and honestly, even if I did sleep in the same room, the lights and/or occasional noise would not bother me.TECHNICAL OBSERVATIONS:When you receive the drive it includes all of the needed wires, hardware and power adapter to get it operating. A small power adapter is required, which is expected with an external hard disk drive. Obviously, this is not a solid state drive and expecting this drive to be similar is unrealistic and should not be anywhere near anyone’s expectations, that is considering to purchase this drive. Also, using the included USB cable is highly suggested. If you happen to try a different cable and the drive is not being recognized by your computer, it’s most likely that your USB cable is not 3.0. Besides the technical details I’ve just listed, the drive takes up a relatively small foot print. It is about the size of a small paper back book and includes a small plastic mount piece, if you wish to mount it upright vs having it sit on its side.OVERALL SUMMARY:The overall performance has exceeded my expectations. Like I previously stated, I’ve written well over 7TB on the drive and have deleted large files (50GB+) regularly, with no slow downs or changes in performance. Files download to the drive very fast and the read/write speeds are exceptional, when copying from device or drive to drive. I’ve ran several tests to check the integrity and actual drive capacity and everything has checked out. Yes, you’re really getting that many TB’s for the price. In fairness, 12TB’s yielded just under 11TB’s (10.9TB) of usable space, once the drive was plugged in and seen by my computer.INITIAL RESERVATIONS:To be completely honest, I was unnecessarily, overwhelmingly worried and concerned before I would commit to purchasing this drive. I did see a review or two that reflected a poor experience but i also saw reviews that shared the exact opposite.SATISFACTION OF PURCHASE:Needless to say, I’m happy I went forward with this purchase. I actually just purchased a second 12TB drive from them (slightly different design from this model) and it should arrive in a few days. If you’re like I was and think this drive could be too good to be true, stop thinking like that. It’s completely realistic and understandable how a company can produce drives of this size and offer them at these price points. It just shows how so many other companies are totally overpriced and how they have conditioned us to pay these inflated prices.CONCLUSION:So, in closing, instead of overpaying from some other company that uses similar, if not the exact same internal drive, do yourself a favor and purchase this drive instead. It’s from a company that builds a solid and reliable product, backs the product they sell and has a nice lineup of different sized drives, all for different applications. I promise you, as long as you receive similar to what I did, you WILL NOT be disappointed and any concerns or reservations you had will all be for nothing.PLEASE NOTE: I am sincerely committed to coming back and updating this review, if I run into any unexpected issues. One of my hesitations was due to the fact that the reviews are not extremely thorough and I hope my review can help eliminate and alleviate that concern for others.(If nothing is written below this, all is still well and the drive is functioning the same exact way as described and discussed above)UPDATE: June 2024It’s been about 6 months, I have around 2TB still free on the drive. It is still performing perfectly and I’ve had zero issues, slowdowns, weird noises or any problems. Have written several TB’s, deleted several and rewritten. Definitely still a solid product. I will update this review when the one year date is reached.

The price was great. Now the gamble to see its longevity begins. I waited to post this after I backed up all home videos and photos. It does have a slight sound but that's expected with a non SSD drive. Not loud enough for concern. Speed of 9 TB transferred was great. I did not use for gaming though, outside of that, this works great for a Windows 11 PC. I have had so much issues from recent Seagate that I thought why not, but keep in mind you better have back ups of back ups.

Go figure. I bought a Seagate Firecuda drive, 8tb, from Amazon awhile back and it arrived with 834 bad sectors right out of its shipping bag. In a half hour, that number went up to 838.This PRO-T5 drive, whose Avolusion brand is supposed to be, well, inferior to Seagate, at least works and it works without an issue. What happened regarding the "superior" Seagate drive just pissed me off completely--yep a brand new $180 drive with rave reviews that arrived as unusable junk.Sometimes buying something like this that's cheaper actually works out better than buying something more expensive.

The good, the bad, and the ugly:The Good - the drive is fast, I'm 99% sure its a refurb Seagate Exos. I measured 230MB/Sec-ish reads and 202ish writes over several test runs, at least until it got so hot at the end of a 4TB write it thermally throttled itself down to about 60MB/Sec on a large file transfer. The electronics of the drive interface work well.The Bad - its refurbished, I shucked the drive and its even got a sticker on the side of the drive that says "OS refurbished". They wiped the smart data (yes you can do that) and loaded a new firmware 'OOS14000G'. At this price point nobody should be surprised its a refurb drive though.The Ugly - it runs horribly hot, so hot that its going to die a quick death. It IDLES at 118F/48C and at the 4TB transfer it was 129F/54C. I even tried taking a hole saw and cutting two holes in the to let some air in but the plastic top case is so tight no air can move. As a test I shut it off to cool to ambient and then turned it back on, in an hour and a half it'd climbed up to its 118F/48C just sitting there with nothing being written/read from it WITH the holes in the top and bottom of the case. The top of the drive was so hot I couldnt leave my finger on it for more than 30 seconds.Also, a quibble, but the bright blue LED lights are annoying. They'll light up a dark room and they never go out unless you cut the power.In comparison I pulled the drive and put it in a aluminum Nexstar HX enclosure that has a low noise fan.The exact same drive idles at 86F/30C. Next time I'll just buy a enclosure and a refurb drive and put it together myself and save a few bucks.This would be a good product if they just opened up the case a little and added a fan to blow on the bottom of the drive.

So I purchased this and had to put into storage for a couple of months but when I reconnected it to my pc all of a sudden the storage went from 18tb to only 4tb watch out there seems to be something up with this sad I thought it was a good price for the size but now suspect it’s truly only 4tb they just do something to it to make it appear much larger because it was stored in a cool dry storage in it’s original packaging and was barely used only one time be careful it says it has a 2 year warranty hopefully they will correct this problem I will try to leave an update later if things change? So I finally figured this storage unit out and changed my review it seems as if there is a small power button on it and that it was off and that’s why it seemed so small so it seems to be a very good deal for the size just know that it has to be in the on position or else it will give a false size

Hasta el momento todo bien