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

I purchased this USB drive to be a Time Machine Backup of a Mac OS X Server for a marketing company. This drive was pleasantly surprising on several levels. The case seemed solid and compact, and the textured plastic really helped with the confidence of a one-handed grab. The USB cable seemed of reasonable quality. But what was really interesting to me was that the drive came partitioned with the GUID partition scheme, which is the default for Macs (though it is supported on newer Windows systems and hardware for data drives only not for boot drives). Up to this point, all of the external USB drives, unless they were a specific Mac model, would come formatted with the older MBR (Master Boot Record) partition scheme. This meant no re-paritioning necessary to use it on my Mac, just a volume reformat. While this might not seem like a big deal, it is a nice bit of progress, because I have seen far too many Mac users mistakenly use an MBR partition drive when they should be using a GUID partition drive. Pros: • Nice case, good feel and solid plastic - much nicer than the case for a WD external drive, for example • Comes formatted with GUID partition scheme, full support for Macs, more realistic for use as an external drive with Windows • Seems nice and fast • Reasonable price Cons: • Comes with a wall wart style power brick. By now, manufacturers should know better, but I cant take a star away for this….

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.

This review is for the 8TB hard drive. Included with the external hard drive are the instructions, a power cord, approximately 65 inches in length and a 3.0 USB cable, approximately 45 inches in length. This is one of the few times that I don’t have to complain about short cables provided with external drives as these are plenty long enough. I got this drive to use as extended storage for my PS4. I have previously been using the Seagate Expansion 1TB external drive for extended storage but after a recent game buying splurge, I have run out of space with that drive. I have two of those drives and both are approximately three years old ago and are still going strong (one as the PS4 drive and one as a security cam drive) with no issues. Both of those drives were great for portability as well because of their small size. This 8 TB isn’t quite as portable as the smaller Seagate drives at approximately 7 inches by 5 inches by 2-inch thickness and this drive requires a power supply unlike the smaller drives but considering the space that this has and that it is primarily being used on my PS4, it is less of an issue. Like all extended storage drives for the PS4, it has to be formatted by the PS4 but that is quick and painless to do. The transfer of files from my main PS4 and the 1 TB drive to this drive took a bit of time but that is mainly because there is no easy way to move the game files from expansion drive to another expansion drive in the PS4. The file transfer was fairly speedy otherwise. I have use a variety of brand name drives, including WD, Toshiba and these Seagates. I have not had any issues with either the Seagate drives or the WD as they both make very reliable drives and I expect the same from this drive. With this drive priced at about 18 dollars per TB, it is a reasonable cost for this size drive. Although I am not using it for that purpose, with this drive being USB 3.0, I expect this is just as speedy as most USB 3.0 drives on a Windows based computer. This has a power/hard drive light in the back-left side of the case. Although I am not personally a fan of the light in the back, it does make it less distracting and since I am using this as a drive for the PS4, being able to see the light isn’t a huge issue. Oddly, these drives only have 1-year warranty, unlike the 1TB Seagate expansions that I bought that had 3-year warranties. Maybe that is a trend with manufacturers for lesser warranties, but I hope that doesn’t indicates its drive reliability. I will update my review if I have any issues with durability. Overall, I like the drive for my PS4 expansion drive and it is so far working as it should with no slow down or stuttering when playing a variety of games. 4 stars

I read some of the complaints about this drive so was a bit concerned about purchasing it. Because of the price I decided to take a chance. I initially experienced speed and drive flakiness issues. Now that I sorted these out, the answers to the issues seem so obvious but it did take me a bit of time before I understood what was going on. DRIVE SPEED: Initially I noticed as I bulk copied files to my new drive that the drive did not appear to be very fast. The reason for the speed problem was simple. The older drive was the limiting factor. I tested the copying speed with two different older drives. One was very old and the other was not nearly as old. The oldest drive was noticeably slower. The other drive was able to throw a lot more data at the Seagate. The Seagate was able to consume it at a rapid pace. FLAKEY DRIVE: I also had initial problems with the drive acting a bit flakey. It would periodically freeze up and didn’t show files in the folders created on the drive. The fix here was to remove a USB 2.0 extension cable from between the Seagate and the USB 3.0 port. Once that was done the drive has run flawlessly. This drive does not appear to like being connected to a USB 2.0 port. The problem may have been my USB extension cable so the idea of the drive not working well with USB 2.0 may not be accurate. At this point I have copied many TBs to this new drive with no further issues.

I just add another when it gets cheap enough and keep building my system storage library. Since my first Seagate drive in this series in 2014, all are operational and doing what they were designed to do. Pros lowest cost per GB compared to others reliable within context of use, all my drives are mirrored but sleep when unused, so wear and tear is minimal, I have drives over 10 years old in active service; you will need to download and run the free Seagate drive setting utility from their website to set the default sleep time of drives as they ship default NO SLEEP works as designed whether USB 2 or 3 newer models can be disassembled with just a spudger, and its snap together Cons Over years position of LED, power and USB port change around the chassis; makes it hard to coordinate stacks on racks of these drives, make up your mind and keep ports and LED in the same place in the chassis USB ports may loosen with repeated insert/extract cycles, varies by model and years not all, if they do its imperative to disassembled and tighten the port or it will lead to r/w errors, the drive is OK but the data will be corrupted; never bump or drop an active drive even ONCE as it will ruin the drive [ Seagate honored a warranty on 1 drive so injured years ago], thus these drives are relatively delicate and shouldnt be used as travel media, better to use a faster USB dongle and reserve these for archive storage at a fixed and protected location

I just purchased my 3rd one. 1st one is over 3 years old. 2nd one is a little over 2 years now. Both are working without a problem so far. *knock on wood* Both are always connected and on. I do fair file transfers on both back and forth to internal HDDs. So I would say intermediate use. I knew from day one that these werent intended to be a heavy use externals. A friend of mine informed me that these were designed more so for archiving and storage with occasional file retrieving purposes. And despite what information was available online at the time over 3 years ago, he told me these are 5400RPM range HDDs. (I used Crystal Disk Info not long ago and result is 5980 RPM). Some advertises as 7200 which is false information. Of course this information is not available anywhere on Seagates website, manual, booklet, so no lawsuit can be filed. Seagates playing safe. (The friend used to work for a law firm specializing in filing lawsuits pertaining to false and misleading advertising products. Simply, he buys products in question, take it apart, research/diagnose/investigate and file report based on his research). Simply put, I pretty much knew what I was/is buying. I have to agree with someone else that mentioned about HDDs are hit or miss. Sometimes even with top name brands, you can end up with an issue. Even more so then those of lesser name branded. I must say I am very lucky to have this unit lasting so long compared to others. I am a die-hard WD. All my internals (5) are WD Blacks. But the 1st Seagate Expansion 5TB I purchased was on special sale for $90 at a different website. So I figured I try my luck. $90 for a 5TB external HDD. I thought that was an amazing deal. I had second thoughts after reading others comments but having experienced with 2 units, I decided to push my luck even further. I will update if my luck ran out on this unit. :) UPDATE: 06/02/18 At the time of 3rd unit purchase, I began using a

I just experienced internal drive failure on a 2014 iMac running Sierra. After days of continued OS re-installs and crashing - and trying to reformat and first-aid the 3TB Fusion drive, it failed completely and left me with 121GB of working drive space, leaving the remainder unrecognizable. I installed High-Sierra onto that portion of the drive and Im utilizing my 3TB WD backup drive as my file disk. But at least I have a working computer. Anyway, I ordered the 8TB Seagate Expansion and plugged it in yesterday. I went to format it using High Sierra and I experienced the same problem in Disk Utility - the drive split into two drives - but this time, neither partition could be formatted by Disk Utility in High Sierra. I tried everything but to no avail. I immediately requested a replacement drive from amazon and they shipped it out yesterday. FANTASTIC support from Amazon, as ususal. This is where it gets tricky - the replacement drive is on its way and my return label all set to go...............and then I got a brainstorm to try and plug the 8TB drive in my my 2009 Macbook Pro running El Capitan. Guess what!!!?? It recognized the drive in Disk Utility and formatted it in a few minutes. I plugged the drive back into my iMac and Sierra sees and utilizes the drive flawlessly - at least SO FAR. Im uncertain whether this is an incompatibility with High Sierras Disk Utility - or my iMac running a partial fusion drive with possible errors. If I had to guess, I would go with High Sierra - but I could be wrong. But be warned - if youre using High Sierra - be CAREFUL!

I love it!!!! Now I finally have enough storage for my increasing PlayStation 4 library.... for those of you that said it didnt work with your PS4 try these steps it should work Go to the Settings menu from your PS4 home screen. Scroll down to the Devices menu. Choose USB Storage Devices. Select your external HDD, then choose “Format as extended storage”. I find that the drive is fast enough to play games directly off of it with no lag issues. Plus it looks great sitting next to the PS4... There isnt any bad things that I can truly say about it. As soon as I hooked it up to my PS4 I installed Infamous: Second Son which is about 30 GBs and it didnt even dent it it barely showed up I recommend this to any new PS4 owners... because games are getting larger and larger by the day. But as I said before I love this hard drive !!!!! You can never go wrong with Seagate hard drives. I have been using them for over 20 years. I had a 500 GB in my PS3 from them and it never messed up. I Highly recommended this brand of hard drive and this particular model.

I usually proactively replace drives after 5 years. For years now Ive been running Western Digital Black drives and Ive never had a failure during that time. This Seagate drive failed faster than any drive Ive owned in 27 years of PC ownership and that has taught me a few valuable lessons. 1. Temperature is important. When this drive started performing erratically I downloaded CrystalDiskInfo and found that this drive ran hotter than any of my internal drives. Unsure if thats because of the drive itself (wouldnt think so due to the low RPM) or the external enclosure -- Im assuming the enclosure since its not actively cooled. 2. Raw uncorrectable sector count is also an important number. While I have uncorrectable errors on my oldest WD Black, it has 0 values RAW meaning theyve been mitigated. In contrast this Seagate had 600 errors when I scanned it right before it failed completely. I now have CrystalDiskInfo scheduled to run weekly on all my drives so I keep active tabs on this data before Im in this situation again. 3. External enclosures like this have regular hard drives inside, but are often cheaper than their internal counterpart. Its odd but true. Thats why I bought this one. However, when this drive started randomly disconnecting I tried removing it from the external enclosure and plugging it in directly but the drive wouldnt read properly. From researching I found that these enclosures do some translation of the data that means once its initialized externally it cant be read outside of the enclosure. So if this issue was with the usb adapter but the drive was otherwise fine, the data on disk would still be unrecoverable without some pay for data recovery tool. 4. Backblaze is a wonderful backup service and cheaper insurance than maintaining redundant disks for RAID - if / when you need it to recover your data youll be happy you have it... BUT recovering 4.5TB of data is going to take a week+ no matter how you go about it. Be advised. Ive already ordered a replacement for this bad drive, an internal Western Digital Black 6TB. I considered some of the Seagate options since theyre lesser cost, but why test that brand again when for a few bucks more I can get a brand thats never failed me? No more externals for 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!