Seagate (STEB8000100) Expansion Desktop 8TB External Hard Drive HDD – USB 3.0 for PC Laptop

Bought this to back up my media and other projects I work on and while it backs up my files, my PC freezes. How do I know its the hard drive? Cuz when I unplug it, my system comes back again. Now, thats terrible if youre multitasking and is backing up files in the background. Also the HDD occasionally shuts off, as in it just fails and I have to plug it off and on again. WOULD NOT RECOMMEND.

This is an excellent storage device. I have had no problems with it. It is reasonably fast, quiet, runs cool and has been very dependable with not an issue during the months I have had it. I have used 4 terabytes so far on this drive without an issue. It has been very dependable and a very good drive. My understanding (through a Youtube review) is that this is the same drive sold for internal use in computers. It has been fitted in a case and plugs into an adaptor within the case for use with a USB in my computer. Initially being an internal computer drive it can be removed from the case and used as an internal drive should you wish to do so. Mounting screws are included on the drive. To keep it cool I have removed the top part of the case to allow better circulation (which voids what warrantee it has I am sure). My understanding is with drives such as this is that they become very hot inside their cases and so I removed the top part of the case to keep it cool. After hours of use it is barely warm to the touch, just a very small amount of heat...just enough to be slightly warm to the touch. This is an excellent drive and I highly recommend it.

You were brought to this product because you are in search of a new extended storage. Well, the Seagate Expansion 5TB Desktop External Hard Drive is fast, mobile, durable, and very cost friendly. While the primary purpose of the expansion is to be used for desktop computers, I use mine for my PS4. After having just a few games downloaded on my PS4, my storage was already getting full. This is when I started to search for a new type of storage, and stumbled upon the Seagate expansion. A few aspects that can sway your decision when buying this product are, as stated earlier, speed, mobility, durability, and cost. 1. Speed is a very important aspect for external hard drives. I was surprised at how fast this product could transfer over games from my current hard drive. Depending on the speed of the Wi-Fi, it would take about 10 minutes to complete a transfer. For a comparison, if you have a baseline 65 mb/s internet speed, the average game would take you 30 minutes to download. 2. Most external hard drives are not easy to move around since they will most likely sit in once spot. The length, width, and height of the expansion are 7.1 x 4.7 x 1.5 inches. It also only weighs 2.1 pounds, where competitors usually weigh more. I move this product from my hometown house to my college house frequently and it is very easy to find space for it. 3. I do take very good care of products that I purchase, but I have dropped this product a few times. It did not skip a beat when I would start it back up and it ran as quick and as smooth as it had previously. 4. The cost is what makes this product so appealing. I bought it for $130 at the time, and have had it since the beginning of May 2017. You will find princes for 5TB extended storages ranging anywhere from $100 to $500. The price of the Seagate 5TB extended storage is very reasonable, especially for the quality of the product. If you are searching for a new extended storage for your PlayStation, or any system, I would highly recommend purchasing the Seagate Expansion. This product is Fast, mobile, durable and very cost efficient. It will be very tough to find a product as good as it on the market, with the same functions.

Id give it 5 stars if it was performing at the very apex of USB 3.0 speeds, but almost no products actually do anyway. I also always hesitate to give a perfect score. lol I have large storage and backup needs for several of my businesses. I also have an IT background, so I dont suffer inferior tech products. These USB storage devices can be hit and miss. 4 years ago, every Seagate USB drive was a gamble and the drives inside often failed. Its not a matter of warranty or cost, as much as, how precious your data is. Seagate seems to have a good product line currently. Having used or installed over 30 plus of these very devices I am confident to recommend them. So what are my write speeds and what are realistic expectations? My write speeds, using benchmark tools and just my eyeball average 40 MB/s to 125 MB/s. Why such a large variance? There are many factors really, but the most common issue is file size. If the files are small...say under 500MB, youll see faster transfer speeds but if they are larger...say 1.5GB or larger, youll see slower speeds. This is normal. And yes, the Seagate Expansion drive speeds are right on PAR with other similar products. A transfer of 25.05GBs of data of 92 various sized files in 115 different folders took a total time of 11:03 minutes. Another factor is that the internal HD is a Seagate drive designed for NAS devices and backup type work. It is also a mechanical type drive and not an SSD. Ergo - these are NOT performance drives. These are drives you dump data to and mostly forget about it until you need it. I see some reviews of people complaining about the performance because they are trying to run programs directly from them or have removed the drive from the external casing and installed it directly into their PCs. THIS IS NOT WHAT THESE ARE MEANT FOR! You will not get reliable performance if you do that. If you want that, buy a proper internal hard drive that will also give you a nice long warranty. This is just the expansion unit. There is no backup or imaging software that is including. Thats fine because if you already have that stuff (which I do), you save money. The truth is, any hard drive manufacturer can have a bad run. WD, Samsung, Hitachi...they have all had their problems. Its not a perfect world. Thats why you must have numerous and redundant backup systems if your data has any value to you. These units have proven to be reliable in my opinion. I do not hesitate to recommend them. Best of luck!

You will need a USB 3.0 interface, but at 8TB, it is cheaper than bare drives, and will store EVERYTHING. You need to backup. Cloud? Can you really restore terabytes of data? Backup needs multiple different media, and saved in different places. With this you can easily buy two and swap between them, backing up every bit of your data on two redundant drives (Im not even talking RAID here). You dont have to worry about deleting older versions. Beyond that, it just works. Plug in power and USB and you get a full drive. Suggestions: If you are on windows using NTFS, turn on compression immediately so you can store more than 8TB raw, and the transfers might even be faster. Copy everything to it (even if you are rotating two, you can sync them monthly), even if you dont think you need the old docs, you have the space. Defragment once a month - it will take a while the first time, but be easier after that. It is storing very high density, so make sure there isnt a lot of noise or vibration, and watch it if youve left it in a very warm or cold area since it gets confused until it is nearer room temprature.

This external drive has SMR (Single Magnetic Recording) media and THAT means.... I opened one of mine up to find the actual disk drive inside the box. My 8TB drive had Seagate (no surprise here) Archive line of products. This drive was initially (and still sold as) enterprise level drive with very low power consumption on stand-by and quick retrieval. Here and there, Seagate literature states write performance is limited. However, this write limitation is for bare drive only and not-at-all mentioned for this external version marketed for consumers. I have this drive installed on Linux box as internal drive. Everything works great in write mode until I accumulate about 370GB in one go. (it works fine if you do this little bit at a time. Im doing copy operation in one go.) Until this point, I cannot tell anything is different. BUT, at around this amount, write slows to few kilobytes per second. Yes, KILOBYTES! Basically crawls to slowest possible speed! Now, granted, I am using this internally and it wasnt how it was sold, but I can also see why it wont make any difference as the same drive is also sold for internal use for enterprise customers. This is an archive drive. TO ME, that means huge amount of data is written to it and the product goes to sleep, only to wake up later for retrieval. BUT the problem is, this data must be written to this drive first, and thats where it isnt acceptable. Yes, I read it is slow-write drive but few kb per sec is extreme. I dont know how this is going to be useful for enterprise customers and even for consumers. It is not unusual these days for ordinary folks in home setting to have tera-bytes of files today. This limitation isnt mentioned anywhere on advertisement either. In fact, this device being SMR appears to be an open-secret, but still a secret. Maybe if this was a backup drive and back up is done per-small-transaction basis, it may be fine. But thats really not what archive is typically done. Amazon was wonderful in letting me return untouched drives, so I am left with just one. Further, Amazon gave me a price concession on this drive. So Im not upset with Amazon. But Seagate and by representation, Amazon, should have disclosed this pertinent data PROMINENTLY and avoid this issue. I bought my set (two drives) for my personal use at home but I also am an enterprise level IT guy. I went through my installation and I can find nothing wrong with it. I also confirmed bottle neck isnt anywhere else. I cant really say I am not going to recommend it as in some uses (basically small writes at a time), its fine. Its what I expect it should do, being a HUGE drive, is the problem. So buyers should be aware before getting excited about this low price in shuck-able configuration.

I purchased this drive (5TB) as a redundant backup drive for my Windows Storage Spaces (4TB). I needed an extra level of security so that I could sleep well at night knowing my image files had a double level of backup, and I wanted an external drive I could keep away from the main system in case there was an unfortunate virus attack or other calamity. Cost per TB is so low these days that its hardly worth quibbling about price and value. Im a life-long Seagate enthusiast from way back in the early 80s. I stick with what has always worked for me, I dont ever consider any other brand at this point, just to keep it simple. I dont do speed tests, or any other type of bench testing, because Im just not that kind of end user. I worry about how long a hard drive lasts (they arent supposed to last forever), how well it holds up after endless hours of work, and if the warranty will cover my purchase well enough should it need replacing. To date, Ive never had to use a warranty, my drives always seem to last longer than expected. Im one of those users who lost a fair amount of data ages ago and learned my lesson. I always use a redundant backup scenario now, and having such a large drive (5TB) to simplify my needs makes my life a whole lot easier. So far, not a problem yet, and everything keeps on keepin on!

I bought 2 of these, one of which I dont nessesarily think I needed that much at the time as I had less then 1.5 tb at the time, which was January of 2018. I think I now (9/2019) have a little more then 1.5 tb, and I bought a 2nd one due to my 2 tb drive having less the 500 gb left. Yeah, I could have bought 2 4 tb portable drives and had a lot more portability then what this product offers and saved a bit of money, bit hey. The idea of portability is not too much in this devices favor if you want to use it on the run or if you are using it when the power goes out, since it needs 110/120 volts AC (or what ever power you use in your country) to operate. Yes, it does use USB power to connect to your computer, but it also requires house current to operate too. On the bright side, it does add additional storage to your computer. Part of the additional reason I got the drive other then due to my one drive getting a bit small is because I use a dash cam and a video and picture camera too, and a few of the videos I do put up on YouTube (9/2019), and on top of which I have multiple computers that I have too.

First off, the price for 5TB is pretty darn good. SO lets get to it: Pros: - USB3.0 is super fast compared to 2.0 - compatible with 2.0 and such. I already imaged my drive off an older laptop I was retiring and transferred it into a new workstation and my personal laptop no problems! - Unit is a little more compact than I thought. From the pics I thought Id be about the size or bigger than my old MyBook but it is actually 1/4 less diameter all around. - Cosmetics of the casing is cool - comtemporary. - Blue LED light on the back top - sturdy 3.0 cable - surprisingly quiet operation! - recognized from my old Windows XP - Vista - newest 10 Cons: - rubber feet only on vertical/bottom. I dont think theres an issue with placing it on its side but theres no rubber feet so either it may scuff the case if shifted or you have to put something like small silicone or rubber feet yourself - power cord is your standard thin wire. I hate that..I wish it has a tad more covering just as a peace of mind. If you have a cat - shield that up. A couple chews will go right through. - I personally like manual on/off switches even though this knows to standby when there is no signal. After the drive images and such, I have now decided to purpose it as an expansion drive for my xbox One. I have loaded graphics 4 heavy games such as Battlefront, Gears of War, Halo, COD, Netflix and Youtube and it read only slightly over 3% used. This is an awesome cost effective option for expanded storage for gaming!! NOTE: Save the factory software on a USB or other drive because in order for this to be treated as expanded storage and not a media (music,pics,vids) storage you will have to format it through your gaming system. I leave the stars at 4 since its still new. Ill update after some months and year of use.

Seagate has really degraded the build quality of their hard drives during the past 10+ years, perhaps so they can price their drives cheaper than the competition. But unlike buying inexpensive clothing or cheaply-built furniture, this is terabytes of your valuable data that you potentially risk losing when you try to save some money by purchasing Seagates cheaper hard drives. I was previously a huge fan of Seagate during the 1980s and 1990s. During the early 1990s, I purchased more than 80 Seagate Elite 9 Fast Wide SCSI 5.25 hard drives for a computational compute cluster that ran non-stop every day of the year (10-GB hard drives were very spacious in 1994 :-) The compute cluster was used for numerically-intensive computing purposes along with two Cray Y-MP supercomputers (bonus points if you know what that is :-) Seagates Elite 9 drives weighed as heavy as a brick, and their build quality and durability were as solid as a brick. I also mainly used Seagate internal drives in my desktop computers during the 1980s and never had a single hard drive failure. But since the start of the new millennium, it seems that Seagate now tries to trim as much manufacturing quality off of their hard drives as they can, perhaps to price their internal and external hard drives cheaper than the competition. I purchased two of these Seagate Expansion drives. Their speeds are slower than Western Digital My Book drives, and they sometimes make a small rumbling noise that I do not mind. But the USB and power connections on these Expansion drives are very loose. Both the USB port and power connector on the drive seem to be made of softer metal. The AC adapters are also temperamental, and if I sometimes plug them into the surge protector power strip at a slight angle, or if I slightly bump their AC adapter while I insert another plug into the power strip, the hard drive can lose power and disconnect, and I have to reseat the AC adapter in order to restore power to the drive. I have never had other AC adapters be so temperamental. Sometimes when I plug the supplied USB cable into the Expansion drives USB port, it slightly pops back out again and I have to push it back in. Just the weight of the USB cord is enough to slightly pull the cord out of the USB port. If I am able to get both the power cable and USB cable firmly plugged into the drive and the AC adapter firmly plugged into the power outlet, the drive works okay, albeit not that fast. But if I happen to slightly bump the USB cable, it sometimes randomly disconnects the drive because the USB cable has such a loose physical connection to the USB port that the USB cable easily loses contact with the port. Both on Amazons own reviews for this hard drive and on other Web sites, do a search on keywords such as loose, USB port, power, disconnect, and connection, and you will find many complaints about these manufacturing defects. These customer complaints have been going on for more than one and a half years now. Seagate should be aware of this because I see Seagate Support replying to some customer reviews. But Seagates replies with repetitive parrot comments such as it is not typical or expected for the cable to behave this way and We apologize for the cabling problem with your 5TB Expansion Desktop drive, as this is not typical or expected, and this is just blind denial that their manufacturing quality stinks!!!! I have several cheap $20 made-in-China Bluetooth speakers that have better USB and power cables and ports than these poorly made interfaces. If Seagate scrimps so much on the build quality of their USB and power ports and cables, then how much are they cutting the quality of the internal hard drive components that cost more money to manufacture?!? The two 4-TB Seagate Expansion hard drives that I bought are the first Seagate products that I purchased since the late-1990s, when their product quality started to degrade. I have purchased more than 26 Western Digital My Book external hard drives during the past three years, without a single failure so far. Three of those My Book hard drives have fallen off of desks onto a rug on the floor while they were turned on and spinning, and they continue to perform without issues; one drop was due to me accidentally knocking a drive off the desk, one drop was due to my cat bumping the drive off the desk, and one drive was pulled off of the desk when the cat jumped off the desk and her foot caught and pulled the My Books power cable downward. Some of my My Book drives have had their USB and power cables detached and reattached hundreds of times, and those cables still firmly plug into the USB and power ports without issues. But my two Seagate Expansion drives have had loose USB and power connections from the day that I unpacked them. If a cheap $20 Bluetooth speaker can use solidly-built USB and power cables and ports, there is no excuse for a hard drive to have such terrible quality on these crucial components! It does not cost that much to manufacture a decent-quality USB port and power connector. After almost 20 years of not buying Seagate products, I tried two of these Expansion drives because they were aggressively discounted at a price of $26/GB. But no more Seagate for me... it is worth it to me to spend an extra $20 or $25 more for peace of mind by buying Western Digital or HGST hard drives. Maybe in another 5 or 10 years, I will check back to see if Seagate finally decides that quality, not price, should be Priority #1 when it comes to hard drives. After Western Digital acquired Hitachis hard drive business in 2012, Hitachis hard drive factories were sold to Toshiba. I purchased 8 Toshiba 5-GB X300 7200-RPM drives last year on sale for $125 each, and I have been very impressed with their speed and reliability so far. Unlike the SSD market that currently has huge amounts of competition, the hard drive market needs more competition to keep Seagate honest. To Seagate Support: if you read my review, you do not need to reply to my review with a pre-recorded comment of please contact us as your problems are not typical or expected because I do not believe you! These quality issues have been around ever since these Expansion drives were released, and Seagate Support continues to be in denial of everything and parrot the same replies of their hard drive problems being not typical or expected.