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

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!

Fouth one I have bought in last couple years. Run them 24/7 with no failures so far. Seagate has been more durable than other manufacturers.

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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

Seagate usually makes reliable external drives and this is very the case with this version. I was looking to expand my PCs memory for gaming given I dont have a sizable ssd and I knew an external hdd would do well enough. With the price of the 6tb version youll definitely be getting you moneys worth. Plus with its easy installation the matter of moving and installing large game files to this thing was extremely smooth and simple. To be more specific to its installation, the ex drive is a model that requires to be plugged in order to operate so dont expect this thing to be portable with just a simple USB plug in. Which something I dont mind as that was what I was expecting from, you know, a pc thats intended to stay in one place. Overall, Id give this a recommendation if your looking for a sizeable external hdd

First off, I like the product, at least from the one I am borrowing after the same model of mine malfunctioned. I would have given the product itself a 4, until the model failed completely, and I dealt with an aggravating experience with the company, now ongoing for 18 days. Seagate is becoming synonymous with irritation for me as of late. After specifically purchasing model STEB5000100 due to A) the reviews about overheating and B) needing a vertical design to reduce encroachment of my desk space; I found that model malfunctioning with a drive that failed to start. Upon trying to return the item, I went to Seagate rather than Amazon returns. First, they wanted me to pay for shipping on their faulty product. Alright, its only a few bucks, and I dont have time to deal with it, so I bite the bullet on that one. Since I need to pay for the shipping now, that requires an extra stop on my end to UPS. So much for saving my time. Then I receive their shipping guidelines. One multi-page PDF with instructions for every product they carry, instructing me to either return in calmshells wrapped with foam or rubber. Never mind that I received it in an Amazon box, nestled between bike accessories and a couple new t-shirts, no special packaging. Still, I want no issues, so I call customer support, wait on the line, give me personal info, my model, my issue (twice) even though my return has already been filed online. Finally Im able to ask my question on shipping, to the brilliant advice or (Im not sure, you should have been send shipping guidelines. Nearly 3 weeks later, of not having an external drive and having to borrow one to use on the project I originally bought this for, and I receive my replacement. Or so I thought. Instead of the model I bought, without advance notice, they replace it with #STDT5000100. The model I avoided in the first place at the same price point but seemingly inferior. And it is. The first thing I notice is the aesthetics. Instead of the clean and modern look I liked from the other model, this one has rigid lines and a gaudy baby blue underbelly. Then I notice the material. The plastic FLEXES. This is not the quality of the original model I purchased, and feels cheap. I did not power it on, as I will be returning this in the morning. Likely with a request to pay for shipping (again) and stop by UPS out or my way (again), and NOT have the item in time for a trip that was my 2nd reason for purchasing when I did. I used to love Seagate products, and customer service was great last time I upgraded my items 2-3 years back...but now I feel like they are using bargain rate outsourced support without a proper knowledge base while pushing inferior products. I certainly hope if they

I kept running into an error where Disk Utility could not reformat the drive and gave me an error . Theres obviously nothing physically wrong with it. Just bizarre formatting that arrives preset from Seagate. The solution can be found by googling, but I am alas unable to post a direct link here. I can post a few terminal commands that will be helpful, but please use these carefully and make sure to name the correct disk in the commands (where it says diskX) because otherwise you will wipe your system drive. First run: diskutil list to get the name to the disk youre trying to format. The below commands assume this is diskX, but replace diskX with the correct disk: Now unmount the disk: diskutil unmountDisk force diskX and then write zeros to the boot sector: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskX bs=1024 count=1024 finally attempt to partition it again: diskutil partitionDisk diskX GPT JHFS+ My External HD 0g Careful, cause you could wipe your system drive if you type those commands wrong and name the wrong drive in Terminal, but this did the trick for me, and this drive is now formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) just like I want it for Time Machine use :)

It does what its supposed to. Its not super fast through the USB 3.0 but its adequate. Quiet. Took a little longer to start up than other Seagate drives I have used in the past. Has over 7 TB of useable storage. Its a monster. The case feels real cheap in your hand when you hold it. I found myself laughing. Yes it feels that cheap. I once took apart a Seagate external drive from six years ago and the drive was inside a vented metal enclosure mounted within the thick high quality plastic housing. It was a superior design. I guess those days are long gone.. If youre like me and like to pop the case open and see whats inside, I found an ST8000AS0002 archive drive inside. Which when sold has a 3 year warranty as opposed to a 1 year when its sold as an external hard drive. When plugged into the motherboard it performs better. Getting the case apart was simple, some of the locking tabs will get damaged but if youre careful the case went back together nicely. If you need a boatload of storage, this drive is great for that. Just be prepared if you decide to move a large amount of data to this drive, it will take some time. Overall this has been a good purchase for me.

With data storage becoming more and more necessary with everything under the sun becoming digitized, Ive had in recent years been forced to switch from DVDR platters and Caseline cases to external hard drives. My first external HDs were Seagate and WD USB-powered drives and these (pairs of at 2 and 4 TB) have been fairly reliable. I eventually ran out of space and decided to centralize my storage into 2 8 TB external drives, each with independent power, thinking that would make these have faster access. Long story short, these work just fine after 3 months, access time is exactly the same as the USB models, however every time I need to read one of these drives it takes about 20 seconds for it to wake up (unless Ive accessed it in the last 20 minutes or something). My old USB drives used to sometimes need a few seconds of wake up time as well, but only 5 seconds. This is disappointing since I was hoping that the independent power source would negate this spinning up time. Oh well, at this point Ill just stick with these until the SS drives become practical for normal consumers.... Btw I always have 2 sets of external hard drives as a precaution against failure. Also more and more of those old DVDrs are starting to fail. I have a feeling well all be back to vinyl and self-stick photo albums in a few decades...

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.