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

Kinda of hard to hate a usb 3.0 hard drive with 5tb of space for what I paid. It actually looks kind of sexy with the diamond plastic covering. I do not need anything pretty but it does look much better than any of my other external drives and I have a lot of them. I havent had any issues at all with Win10 Pro, Win7 Pro (laptop) or WinXP (Laptop). For the price, it is really hard to beat. If I run any comparative tests, I will edit. Edit 05/22/2017 - This drive is still going strong and I have used it as a mainstay for keeping larger data banks with me when i travel from music, game directories, backup files for work and everything else that will fit. The 5tb sizing makes sure that everything i really need on me fits. I usually keep it in my laptop backpack and have had 0 issues to date. I really do feel like hard drives in general are a mixed bag of death, especially when dealing with platter style drives. Either it is made correctly or something happens and the whole device is crap. A lot of people complaining of bad drives could have been prevented if these companies spent more time with quality control. I would still buy this drive if I needed another.

My husband used this for his Xbox. From the beginning it gave us some issues. We would often have to unplug it and replug it or the apps on it would keep crashing. Just yesterday it started doing something weird and it keeps shutting off the Xbox. We tried troubleshooting a lot of different ways to get it to work and even did a hard reset without any luck. Its an expensive product to only get 2.5yrs use out of. Would not recommend.

This is an older drive that has been in daily use for several years. I bought it when the 5 TB drives first came out. I gave it four stars for capacity because now there are many drives with much more capacity. When I decided to switch operating systems with the next computer I bought, I stopped buying internal drives. The PC that I was using when I purchased this drive was finally replaced a few years ago with a Mac. One of the nice things about a USB drive is that when you switch operating systems you just plug it in to the new machine and reformat it to use on the new system. (back it up first). I like the way Mac OS manages the Seagate USB drives. When they are not in use, my Mac totally powers them down. As I have several external hard drives for different projects that is nice. I keep my operating system and program files on the internal SSD drive so even with my data on USB drives my machine is still fast where it counts. If you have other data that is mission critical and you need instant access, you can keep that drive spun up all of the time. As my drives are idle 90% of the time, I like that they are not wearing out while I am working on a file in RAM. I have a couple of Western Digital USB drives that I use to back up my critical data. The Mac OS does not seem to power them down. So when they are idle (even unmounted) they stay on standby. I back up once a week so afterward I power down my computer to make sure the buffers are written to the hard drives then turn off the surge protector for those drives. Otherwise the flashing lights bug me all week until the next backup. This Seagate drive has been a workhorse and has had no problems for its entire life so far.

First of all I live in New Zealand and I was very impressed with just how quickly from first ordering this product, to having the order in my hands even though I live in a corner of the South Pacific. It took labout 5 days and I was expecting a few weeks or more. The external hard drive arrived securely packaged which was very good. The Seagate 8TB is a very good external HD and it has been working flawlessly with my Xbox One S and will swap straight into my new Xbox One X this coming November for my 4K textured and Digital downloaded games, which is why I need the extra hard drive space. I was so impressed, that I bought another 8TB External HDD from Amazon, which is now with my PS4 Pro, so between the two external 8TB hard drives, both my consoles are set for years to come, as far as hard drive storage space is concerned. Both are running as they should be with no issues. I am very pleased with my purchase and would recommend purchasing this external 8TB hard drive and ordering from Amazon, with no second thoughts. I would not hesitate to recommend Amazon and this Seagate Expansion 8TB External hard Drive to anyone that is interested. Great quick service. AAA+++ Experience.

First thing to note is that these are SMR drives. What is SMR? It means Shingled Magnetic Recording, basically the data on the drive is written overlapped like shingles on a roof. This means you can get more data on each disk platter, hence less platters for a given size and thus the drive is cheaper. Ok thats great right? Well the problem is this DRASTICALLY slows down the write speed for long sequential writes. It can get bogged down during large writes and become very very slow, like 10MB/s on average slow. Reads are fine it is only writing that is affected. That being said, the SMR technology does make this drive one of the best for $s/TB on the market, just dont expect amazing performance from it. You definitely get what you pay for, and for its intended purpose as a backup drive it works fine. I cant speak for the long term reliability as I havent had them for very long, but it has a 1 year warranty (most drives have a 2 or 3 year). The warranties are specifically calculated to balance between how cheap the manufacturer can go on the components and how many RMAs they will get when a certain expected % of the components fail. I wouldnt expect to get 5 years out of this drive, not that its not possible but you are relatively lucky if you do. Summary: -SMR = slow writes -Only 1 year warranty = components of meh quality -For the price and purpose, not a bad drive

It seems like all USB 3 drives eventually fail. However, there isnt much choice for backups except for RAIDs or tape backup, which are both pretty expensive. My advice: back up your data to more than one drive, and then move to new drives each year or two. Drives are more likely to fail if in a hot place or in constant use/connection, but Ive found they can fail even if theyve only been connected to save to backup. If you have critical data files that will financially impact you, definitely get a RAID!

Really, really fast delivery. Product as advertised. One of the largest drives you can buy at an affordable price point. There are 8TB drives out there as of this writing but the cost-premium does not make as much sense because prices on those even-larger devces have not dropped yet due to the relative infancy of these new device product cycle. Simple installation (the installation guide is a single picture), and the device booted and formatted within minutes. Only 4.5TB available after formatting but adequate for moving files off of several lower-capacity drives into this newer, more-reliable device - and that should allow most users for a few more years of reliabilty for their storage needs. The connector wire appears to be a USB 3.0 Type A Male Connector 2 on the computer side to a USB 3.0 Type Micro B Male on the drive end. The cable is backward compatable to older USB formats such as USB 2.0 which was my application. Write speeds were around 18MBs/sec while drive was still relatively empty, but this was on a USB 2.0 port. The drive is slightly smaller and lighter than previous versions of consumer external storage devices. The performance appears to be fast and solid. The properties showed that the device was pre-formatted NTFS. I always copy the pre-loaded files that come with the drive to another location and then do a quick format with NTFS before moving the files back. I learned the hard way that filling a humongous drive on the factory format is a recipe for disaster because after the drive gets filled up, those files suddenlybecome unavailable right when you dont, of course, have an even-larger drive to move them to before the drive fails because you just bought the largest drive available. This is also known as a storage disaster. My sage advice: format that puppy when you first receive it - and avoid mucho-heartburn down the road. My pleasure,

I liked many thing about this external hard drive by Seagate. I used this device on my Xbox one for almost 4 years. It treated me well and stored all the games I could ever want. My only two drawbacks I have with the device was that it required a power source in the form of a plug from a wall not just the connection to the device and the fact that this device is not a permanent type storage option for my device. What I mean by that last statement is that after these almost 4 years my device has suddenly and unexpectedly died on me. I have no known reason for this issue other than 4 years of regular use. This leads me to believe that this product hits a point in its life where it will eventually give out. Hopefully you have a new storage device by then and are not left suddenly without all the data that was on the device and the countless hours of redownload time it will take to reinstall the games I had on the device. Just know when purchasing this option that it requires power to the device and a connection to the device you are adding storage and that this storage option is not long term, even if it is 3TB or more like mine.

I used the 3TB drive with my Xbox One to store installed games. The drive worked perfectly for about 3 weeks of regular use, then suddenly stopped being detected by my Xbox. Eventually (after 1-2 hours) my Xbox would seem to find the drive and show my games, but could not start any of them up and would not allow me to move, copy, or delete any data on the drive or to reformat it. Connecting the drive to a PC would immediately crash it. Ran down the list of troubleshooting strategies but could not save it. Amazon is processing a replacement. Im not as mad as others here whove had similar outcomes with the drive, since amazon has made the exchange process mostly painless and all of the data on the drive can be re-installed fairly easily, but I cant recommend this drive to anyone hoping to utilize it for professional purposes or storing valuable data. Im hoping I just got a bad drive, as the positive reviews seem to far outweigh the reports of failure, but the fact that a problem like this is common at all for something as important as a hard drive means you should probably save up a bit more money and get a better drive for anything relatively important. Ive had other drives last nearly 10 years before showing any signs of dying - I knew from the price it was listed at (and other facts I gleaned from reading reviews, like the enclosure being made of plastic rather than something like aluminum) that this drive probably wouldnt go quite that long, but less than a month is pretty ridiculous. Ill update this review a few months down the road after I get the replacement and get some use out of it. Hoping I wont have to return it again, as next time Ill likely have to deal with Seagate directly. --- Update (3/7/17): Amazons listing for the drive sold out before they could get my replacement order in so they just refunded me and let me keep the defective drive. Figured I didnt have anything to lose with the old drive, so I decided to try the manufacturers warranty/RMA process. Besides some slightly annoying shipping policies (paying shipping one way & having to send it back in a box lined with 2 inch thick rubberized foam on all sides) the process went smoothly and the drive has been working well for just over a month of moderate usage. Hoping this continues, but still holding onto the box the drive came in in case I need to RMA it again. Adding a star for now.

Part 1. When I purchase a product from Amazon I always check 1 Star certified purchases reviews to evaluate any issues reported. So I will start my review by saying that I received today (well before estimated) a well packaged and well protected device, after unpacking it there are not any external damages. The USB 3.0 and AC ports and cables are in perfect condition, so the drive (Seagate Expansion 3 TB external USB 3.0) is already connected (plug and play) to my PC running and recognized by Windows 10 (64 Bits). Files (documents, pictures, videos and music) are being transferred to it from my internal HDD Data disc as I type this. There isnt any signs of internal troubles: good transfer rate (up to 40 MB/s depending on the type of file) as it is connected to my PCs USB 3.0 port, there is only very slight write sound but you really need to rest your ear on the drive to be able to hear it. The auto start program (for registering your drive on Seagate) tries to open a web page that doesnt appear to exist (or theres a typo on the command line). But you can also register bu going directly to: [...] and entering your e-mail and product serial Number (on the case and on the Package).