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

Don’t remember when I bought this, but it was years ago & still works w/o any problems. I usually keep it on, however in the last couple years haven’t been using it as much as it just houses mostly movies and tv shows for my digital library that was filled up years ago and more into streaming last few years. However still works fine hooked up to newest PC.

I hooked this hard drive (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TKFEEBW/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) with USB 3.0 to its USB Micro port. It transferred data like I expected - maybe 40Mbs transfer rate. I figured this would be a nice storage unit for my ArcGIS Imagery files which, in order to actually use tiled imagery in a live ArcMAP application or serve it to the public (which I am planning on doing) - I needed to utilize my IBM blade servers and all the fun it is to maintain any virtualization blade technology. Well, little did I know my brand new Lenovo ThinkPad P50, I7 Skylake, with 64GB of DDR4 RAM, 4GB 3-channel RAM with GPU technology. I thought if I beefed up the laptop with RAM, CPU, and Video card I would be set... WRONG! My P50 came with an Intel Thunderbolt 3 port onboard. I did some research an purchased a USB 3.1 TYPE-C adapter (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013G4D0GC/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) for $10. (Compatible with my Thunderbolt 3 port or course.) I hooked the USB 3.0 into the adapter and WOW! The data transfer speeds increased by 5X. I then purchased a $15 Thunderbolt USB power hub and a 20GBs USB TYPE-C cable to attach it to. I have 4 devices running on ONE thunderbolt 3 HUB - 1) Samsung EVO 850 PRO SSD using the SATA III adapter. 2) This 5TB External Hard Drive. 3) 1TB SATA III 2.5 HD I had laying around - using the same SATA-USB adapter as the SSD. 4) An cheap USB 3.0 DVD writer (Laptop Didnt come with one). All devices are powered by the TB3 port. My point is: when you purchase your next computer - get an Intel thunderbolt 3 port onboard. I am cancelling my cloud service with ESRI (that hosts my data) and am going to daisy-chain four Thunderbolt 3 external hard drives. My data transfer rate will be a minimum of 220mbs for each device. That is fast enough to serve my GIS data and FTP service for all my clients. I am switching my P50 to Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter edition. That will allow me unlimited VMs and external drives that are fast enough to host them on the TB3 external drives. For the first time, I can install my Oracle service and point the tablespaces to external sources - take the load off my CPU and let the INTEL chipset transfer data to my web server @ 40Gbs - and let the client machines do the rest.

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I purchased this HDD on 8/10/2020 to extend the storage capacity of a PS4 Pro. As of 2/08/2021, the drive is now frequently disconnecting, resulting in corrupted data that needs to be repaired. This literally just started happening yesterday evening. There were no accumulative failures or warning signs leading up to this point. So, at just shy of 6 months, the drive is rendered useless for its intended purpose. I am seeing a lot of reviews mentioning garbage power supplies. I will be looking to procure a replacement power supply to see if that resolves the problem, but as it stands right now I cannot recommend this drive based on the reliability. I will concede that I have used Seagate drives exclusively for over 20 years, and this is the first one that I have had problems with, but its not looking promising considering the similar widespread issues that others are experiencing. All that being said, at 8TB this drive gave me what I needed, with plenty of room to spare. Setup was hassle free, and it worked perfectly fine up until now. If it hadnt suffered this premature failure, I would have given it a 4 star rating (one star docked due to the fact that this drive is not particularly quiet, and can easily be heard from 12 feet across the room). ** Edit 04/19/2021 - I replaced the power supply 2 months ago with an OMNIHIL (OMNI0811170166), and the hard drive has regained normal functionality. I have not experienced a single instance of the previously mentioned problems since then. It would appear, as others have said, that the included power supply is junk and should be considered a likely culprit in the event of similar issues arising with your drive. ** ** Edit 05/04/2022 - This drive is still going strong over a year after I replaced the faulty included power supply. The drive is heavily used, as its the default install location on my PS4 Pro, and I am an avid gamer. **

Well, I purchased this particular drive solely as a backup drive for an extensive music collection, not as a daily driver. I have to give kudos to Amazon for quickly sending a replacement for the one which obviously showed up at my door the other day but didnt wind up in my possession. I live in a 3 flat building directly off of a very busy road where we get an awful lot of traffic as well as guests coming into the building. I have had packages disappear before and while its never a great situation, I have been fortunate enough to have recourse and I have received terrific support. So once again, thank you to Amazon! This is a BIG drive. Its the biggest that I have ever owned. Hard drives are hard drives, they either work or they dont and everything mechanical is going to stop working eventually. That being said, I had the box opened up and drive connected within minutes and am copying files at this time. Its pretty fast on the transfer speeds as I can see given that its an external hard drive. While I havent had enough time with it to see anything of its durability I havent had a lot of issues with hard drives in the past. External drives tend to disappear at times from my system, meaning that they show as being connected and then they dont. Never understood that. I wouldnt recommend an external drive as a source of sharing between two computers because of this. I would prefer to copy to a thumb drive or burn a disc in order to share with my wife or son. I can only hope that this one will complete the desired job and serve its backup role in a good way. I havent owned a Seagate product in quite a while as I try them all out from time to time. I used to buy Toshiba drives. I have a few Western Digital drives and have had some others so well see. The price was excellent so I took a chance on it. It needs only to copy music and be able to return it to me if my primary drives decide that they are too tired to continue playing nice with me.

First of all, i dont understand why microsoft doesnt have an external hard drive out if they make it so the built in one fills up so fast. Mine was filled in less then a year, and i was constantly deleting games everytime i got a new game, which sucks because it takes hours to download a game (especially since i buy mostly digital copies). I was weary about buying a hard drive that wasnt made for the xbox one, but It had to be done so i went with this one, and im happy i did. You just format it to the xbox one (it asks you if you want to when you plug it in) and set it so all new downloaded games will go to the external harddrive. I have about 25 games and I am only using about 10 percent of the hard drive, it will be a long time before i fill this up and i buy a ton of games. and even if i ever do fill it up, theres room on the xbox to plug in a second one at the same time! the only somewhat downside (doesnt bother me what so ever) is that you do have to plug it into a power outlet, its not powered by the xbox, and sometimes when the xbox is off you can here the hard drive working, i think its only when there is a game downloading or updating though. besides that, no complaints!

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.

I had high hopes my second one would turn out great as my first one. Nope. Everytime I turn it on or access any file, I hear loud clanking and ticking noise. Obviously that is not a good sign.

I am a small business owner and part of owning a business is backing up your precious files. I was running out of storage on my older external hard drive and a friend pointed me towards Seagate. I did not really need a 5 TB hard drive but planning for the future I decided to get it anyway. The first thing I noticed about it when it arrived was how nice it looked. The packaging it came in made me feel it was well protected during transport. Once I had this bad boy hooked up and powered on the setup was literally automatic. I plugged it into my PC and the rest was automatic, my PC installed what it needed to and I was good to go in less than 2 minutes. I began to back up my files as soon as I could and to my surprise I hadnt even made a dent in that 5 TB capacity. All in all I have not one problem with this product and if I ever need another I will definitely be coming back to Seagate to purchase that one as well. Thanks for reading and I hope my review helps you in your decision. Disclaimer - I purchased this product at full retail price, I was not given it in exchange for my review nor did I receive a discount on the price.

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).