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

Removed from external enclosure, used as internal drive, dead after 3 months... Seagate says no to warranty. UPDATE I contacted Seagate about a warranty and they said I should not have used an external drive as an internal drive. I not only used the external drive as an internal drive but I had all of my steam games on it and it was running constantly. Seagate first said they would not replace it that it was not their policy. I wrote back and told them it was not my policy to purchase another drive from the same manufacturer when this one only lasted three months. This was when they wrote back and told me that external drives were not designed to withstand the rigors that drives designed to be internal were designed to withstand. Then they kindly said they would, this time only, replace my drive with a refurbished drive and they would also replace it with a refurbished internal drive designed to withstand the data reads and writes that I was subjecting the drive to. So I learned two valuable lessons... Lesson 1, dont trust your data on a drive that was sold as external re-purposed for internal when subjecting that same drive to other rigorous use. This is also why external drives usually cost less even though they have an extra enclosure included. The 2nd lesson is that Seagate is a great company and they go out of their way to keep you as a customer as long as you can be reasonable and understand things also from their point of view too. If I ever do re-purpose an external drive internally, it will only be to store data and not to use it with constant video streams and loading and unloading gaming data for hours on end. I hope this helps others avoid the same mistake I have made. I have another internal Seagate drive that I bought 6 months before, this internal one is still going strong. Dont try and save a few bucks by re-purposing an external drive internally. Dont use an external drive for gaming unless that is all you use it for, and your games are also saved cloud based. Definitely do not use an external drive for both your data and gaming. That is a recipe for disaster.

Ordered the 8TB, 5 days ago and the first drive failed to allow me access although I installed the software specified by Seagate. Disk Utility wouldn’t work nor Zero’ing out the drive via commands in console... Thank goodness I bought it via Amazon and did a RMA same day. I waited another two days to receive the replacement and it worked fine. I ran the new 8TB drive for 19 hrs straight on the fastest transfer speed via usb 2.0 transferring 2TB of film data. (Bottleneck of the transfer was the old drive max speed) The Seagate is NOT made for constant use say Mac Pro editing. But it’s a great way to backup your work and tuck it away. FYI The Mac instructions are, 1) Attach and power up your computer/Drive. 2) Go to the Seagate website for the Mac Fat32 app/driver. 3) Run Paragon 4) Make sure you can read and write to the drive. 5) Use Paragon or Diskutil to convert the Seagate drive to ONLY OSX extended Journaled. (After this first reformat you can choose EX, etc. This Drive is very slow so don’t expect speed performance at this price point. Overall great. Maybe I will update this with video and a 90 retrospective. Update June 6th 2019 The 8TB drive has been working out great. USB 3 speed is more than decent and working well as a backup device...

Been a year and 8 months now. I still have it but I use a WD now because its a little quieter. But I still use this drive and it stop works flawlessly, of course I dont use it each day anymore but it does still work. Now Im thinking I may hook it up to my ps4 soon 5th month now, still no issues, it may have disconnected once i think but went right back. Still loads as fast as internal, i hardly use the internal for anything. I dont transfer stuff alot on it, but when i do my photosand videos i send them right to the drive and its very fast. I only currently have about 500gb on it but i just got a new cam and using lots of RAW files and my camcorder creates big files at 60fps so i needed this. I also should mention a few things again: 1 i formatted my drive before i transfered anything that way my pc can be more compatible per se. 2. Its only been hooked up to my one pc, if i wanna get something off another i use a flash drive between the two. 3. I dont move it, it sits on the floor where its basically been since i got it, again i dust it and lift it to do that but thats it. Remember its a desktop external its not made to keep moving, get a portable for that. So its been 4 months now and the only thing that has happened is it seemed to disconnect twice but reconnected immediately, although that could have just been my computer but doubt it. Other than that its still working perfectly fine. I keep up with what others write just to look for any red flags. I should also note that I hardly ever move or touch this drive, i moved it twice to dust it and that was minimal, its been sitting in the same spot laid on its front for the whole time. My data still loads as fast if not faster than the internal drive and has no lag. Seems this drive is hit or miss with other users. I saw these drives at walmart as well but didnt see the 5tb. This is my first external and have nothing else to compare it to, so buy at your own risk I rated 5 because its the first day. So I will explain as much as I can. First understand this device is as good as the device you connect it to. I use it for my pc, its a great pc if you have a slow older pc it may not perform at its best. Alot of reviews complain the speed is slow but you have to format it so that your computer can format it to its settings, once I did that my speeds went to about 179mbps i transfered about 410gb in 20 min it flew by, also I used the 3.0 port which is 10 to es faster than 2.0. The drive doesnt have many vents, ut I laid it on its side with the bottom facing out so that it can breath, it only gets warm, hasnt gotten hot. Also I read some complaining about the cords, well my port is very tight so the cord stays in and I have the drive sitting by the power cord so I mever even had to unwrap that. Seagate claims to have a file online to turn off the LED light. As far as noise, its low to me kinda like a light fan sound, its relaxing, I like it, some dont. Other reviews clai ed once you format it to xbox u cant use anything else with it...unless of course you reformat it to whichever device youre trying to use. Now with ,y computer the device shuts down when ,y computer shuts down and it boots up right along with it. I also noticed after just leaving my computer idle for awhile the drive seemed to go into standby (indicated by the blue light going off) but i could still access the files on it and 2 sec later the light came back on. So next thing I did was I wanted to see if I could access the files as quickly as my internal drive, I had a bu ch of HD videos and pics...in case you are wondering I used a HP slimline desktop very great computer and fast. Anyway, I was able to open my video just as fast as when I use my internal, same with pics, it actually seemed like it may have been faster at times. Now i dont know if its because the drive is that good or because my computer is fairly new but like i said its as good as the device you hook it to. I also want to note that contrary to another reviewer this device has not slowed down my pc whatsoever. I forgot to mention I have the 5tb model. Last thing I will say is, there was some reviews stating not to leave the drive running. Like i said it seems to spin down when not in use for awhile but i am ot 100% sure. Regardless hard drives are made to be used and running, my old crappy computer from 2009 i still have and i us3d to leave it running 24/7 for the better part of 6 years because i dont like restarting unless I have to and it still works. My current computer I also leave running 24/7 and no issues whatsoever. Lastly, understand this is a desktop expansion hard drive NOT a portable drive, meaning its not meant to bounce around from place to place or even room to room in my opinion, desktops are stationary as should any desktop external drive connected to it. If you plan to switch between computers etc, should probably consider a portable drive. If you have any questions feel free to ask me. UPDATE: So it has now been a month and this thing is still running smoothly, I havent moved it it has been on its side the whole month, has handled transfers smoothly, spins up rather quickly, quiet for the most part and still very fast. I really think the bad reviews come from people who move it around alot, like I said its a desktop external not a portable, so if you get this get it woth the intention of keeping it stationary as opposed to moble. If any questions, just ask

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

Bought to add to an XBox One for additional storage. Easy plug and play, the Xbox will auto detect and allow you to format device. It does require a power supply plug, make sure you have enough sockets to go around. USB cord is adequate length. I have not noticed any stuttering or extended loading times, I moved almost all games to this drive. Also works seamlessly with the remote downloads from game pass. It’s the perfect drive, you plug it in, format, change the download setting in the Xbox, then forget its even there. The box is black with a blue led light, I have it in a open face console so the light isn’t intrusive. The box has a subdued diamond design so it would be fine if placed where it can be seen. 4TB for this price was a great deal, made better with my Prime visa.

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.

I bought 2 of these drives as a in-case of emergency backup for my 9.07TB Plex server. They way I had these setup was that anything that was written to my raid 10 array was then copied over to the external drives, filling one then the next. Kind of like a USB JBOD setup. Log story short one of the drives failed during the initial backup. The drive was running for about 36 hours straight and just gave out. I re-formated it and it read in the computer but if I try running dban on it it will fail at about 58% which means it has bad sectors. I am impressed that It lasted 36 hours of non-stop writing before it failed though, that is extreamly impressive to me and the fact that the second one I bought still works. I think the drive I have was just faulty (had a bad sector from the factory). Anyways I called amazon because I have not even had them a week yet and amazon is shipping me a new one. Will keep you informed if the other one dies or not. BTW Thank you amazon for your amazing customer service. I do have to remove 1 star though because it failed within the first 30 days. Edit: 5 months later and all 3 plus the 4th one I bought about 3 months ago are all still going strong.

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.

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.

UPDATE: Okay, so I waited a long while to update this review. Im switching from 1 star to 5. I know, thats drastic, but Amazon did send me a replacement and in theta time, this hard drive has worked marvelously. Im pretty sure I got a lemon, but no issues at all since I got the replacement, and I use my Xbox pretty consistently. Needless to say, Im pretty happy with it now as I have over 3TB of games on there. Im still a tad weary and backed all my saves to the MS cloud, but so far, I couldnt be happier with how this is working over the last year. Im a little furious here. I was using this for my external hard drive on my Xbox One for extra storage. It was working marvelously for about 3 weeks, then all of a sudden, it stopped. Not sure exactly what happened, but thats almost 2TB of games AND game saves gone... The hard drive was never moved or anything, just sat next to the Xbox One working as a hard drive should, and then it has completely stopped working for me. Needless to say, Im a little furious. It was working marvelously prior to, but I guess I knew it was too good to be true. Amazon is graciously sending me a second one, I will change my review should it function as intended, but so far, Id beware. I shouldnt have to back up my back up drive...