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

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.

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.

Writing this review has been a roller coaster ride. I got my original drive from Amazon, plugged it in to an XP system and essentially Nothing. The Seagate product specs say that its plug and play compatible with Windows XP, but it didnt work on my XP system, but read on. Normally, XP cannot handle drives that are bigger than 2TB because XP does not natively understand how to handle the GPT (GUID Partition Table) format. The GPT format is necessary for drives over 2TB. So at least in theory, XP cannot access this 5TB drive, but keep reading. I called Seagate tech support, but hung up after 30 minutes on hold. I went through Seagates online troubleshooter and it said to return it which is what I did. Now the punch line. My replacement drive from Amazon arrived. I plugged it into my XP system and bingo, there it pops up into My Computer as a 5TB drive (4.54TB usable space). WTF??? Its not supposed to work on XP!! Yet there it is, and I loaded no special drivers either. It turns out that the Seagate 5TB USB Expansion drive really is Plug and Play for Windows XP. The original drive that I received from Amazon was simply a bad drive. The replacement drive is working just fine so far. How do they do the impossible? The Seagate Expansion drive is actually two drives (from the USB ports perspective). The first is a small drive that is a standard MBR format that Windows XP can read without any problems. The contents of that drive get autoloaded by XP which contains a GPT driver for USB drives. Then that drive is switched off and the main 5TB volume gets loaded. The result is that the drive really is plug and play for Windows XP. And not only that, but its the full 5TB volume and not split into multiple 2TB volumes. So while the DOA Seagate drive did not impress me, the working replacement seems to be fine. I should also point out that while XP now works flawlessly (as far as I can tell) with this drive, Windows 7 was a bit flakey. That was remedied by installing SP1 for Windows 7. I do recommend SP1 if you have Windows 7 and of course SP3 for Windows XP if you want this drive to work optimally. UPDATE: The drive continues to function well. I tested it on Linux Mint and also Tomato. Tomato worked at first, but then crashed. The problem is with Tomato as it just couldnt handle the large 150GB file I sent it all at once. Had I sent a series of smaller files, I think it would have been fine. I also tested it on a Win7+SP1 machine using a USB 3.0 port. I dont believe the drive supports USB 3.1, but the 3.0 speeds were awesome. UPDATE 2: I see that other people are having similar problems with this drive not working properly on XP. Because this drive needs to have its pseudo-drive autoloaded, I will suggest that they make sure that autoloading is enabled. Some people, and possibly anti-virus programs, will turn off autoloading for security reasons. I would suggest trying the drive with autoloading enabled and then disable it again once the drive comes up. Also, Im not sure where Seagate keeps this hidden pseudo-drive with the XP driver. It is either in firmware or on a hidden partition. If its the latter, then repartitioning the drive can ruin its XP compatibility.

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.

Want to enjoy the Seagate 6TB External Hard Drive HDD?? DONT DO WHAT I DID! Very first thing I used it for, was a System Restore, which was a plain-dumb thing to do. It converted my 6TB HDD Drive into a 32G Restore Unit, FAT 32. The Tech folks at Seagate were patient with me and my less-than-qualified tech-savvy, and helped me restore it to the 6TB beast it was meant to be. Now, its not only all the good stuff its promised to be...it is a saving grace, and one of the best purchasing decisions Ive ever made. Some of the reviews at the time I bought it were mixed, or seemed so, and I felt obligated to share my pure joy with the Drive, with the Company, with the Support Staff. 11 STARS OUT OF 5.

My Apple Time Capsule failed a few weeks ago. I went to the Apple Store to get another...only to find out that Time Capsule is a discontinued product. This did not leave me pleased, since we have a number of computers in this home that use the time capsule to access the internet and backup data. So, I bought a new router and this 6TB hard drive from Amazon to recreate the Time Capsule function. After a few minutes of reading, I was able to configure the router to recognize the hard drive. A few clicks in the Time Capsule applications, and computers started backing up to the new drive. I think I am all set...and I have enough capacity that I will not worry about local storage for many years. Yes, I also back up in the cloud, but I have become accustomed to relying on the Time Capsules ability to go back in time to recover files that may have been changed incorrectly or corrupted. BTW: For computer historians, I bought a 20 MB hard drive in 1986 for $1,295. So this drive cuts the cost per bit by over 3 million times!

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.

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.

Bought 2 of these (8TB) almost 2 years ago, no problems at all. 1 holds videos, the other is a back up for it. I have a few 5TB other Seagates as well, and over the past 7 years, 1 drive went bad but of course I had a back up running on it. Always buy 2 drives when you need only 1 is my motto. I dont know how Seagate stacks up against other brands, the price per storage cant be beat though. Back in the 90s all the brands had high failure rates, not so much anymore I suppose. Over time theyve gotten better. I must stress that Im running a Plex video server so the slow writing to it isnt a big deal, and reading from it is just fine. Videos play fine across my network and family that streams them once in a while. If youre putting anything important on them do yourself a favor and get an extra drive as a back up and have one of those free software programs do a nightly or weekly back up. Should be done no matter what brand you go with.

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.