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

I run a small business studio where I keep my clients footage from years passed. This has been a reliable storage unit that doesnt rely on power from my computer.

I bought 8x of the 5 TB drives. I have used 3 of them so far and will be using the rest shortly. After formatting they have 4.54Tb of usable space which is expected. I have been using the drives to backup my network server for off site archival purposes. The three I have used so far, I immediately ran a CHKDSK /f/r to determine the health of the disk itself. No bad sectors reported on them. I will test the remaining drives once the first three are full. I have not yet seen any issues with these drives and am very happy with the price point. after seeing so many people talk about dead or failing drives, with 8x of them purchased, I will make sure to update this review with more details as I get them. edit: 2/28/2019: still no issues with all 8x drives Edit 4/10/2019: I upgraded my computer to one with usb3 and I can now properly review data speeds. I use these drives as backups of my multi TB nas. I copy sustained data rates of 108 to 115 MB/S during the entire 4.5 TB of usable space on the disk. I am only being limited by my GB Ethernet network connection. Very happy with these drives that I just bought 2 more today.

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 bought this over 6 years ago and its still going strong without showing any signs that its going to fail soon. The key to making it last is to not move it while is running and keep it away from vibrations. (Like having it on a desk that you drop stuff on. Any jolt like that has the potential of damaging it over time) I have mine on a separate shelf with my battery backups to avoid problems.

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...

First thing to note is that these are SMR drives. What is SMR? It means Shingled Magnetic Recording, basically the data on the drive is written overlapped like shingles on a roof. This means you can get more data on each disk platter, hence less platters for a given size and thus the drive is cheaper. Ok thats great right? Well the problem is this DRASTICALLY slows down the write speed for long sequential writes. It can get bogged down during large writes and become very very slow, like 10MB/s on average slow. Reads are fine it is only writing that is affected. That being said, the SMR technology does make this drive one of the best for $s/TB on the market, just dont expect amazing performance from it. You definitely get what you pay for, and for its intended purpose as a backup drive it works fine. I cant speak for the long term reliability as I havent had them for very long, but it has a 1 year warranty (most drives have a 2 or 3 year). The warranties are specifically calculated to balance between how cheap the manufacturer can go on the components and how many RMAs they will get when a certain expected % of the components fail. I wouldnt expect to get 5 years out of this drive, not that its not possible but you are relatively lucky if you do. Summary: -SMR = slow writes -Only 1 year warranty = components of meh quality -For the price and purpose, not a bad drive

This works well but be careful when you set it up, and make sure you do it according to the directions. There are only two steps -- plug it into the power source and the plug the USB cable into the computer. I did it in reverse order and it did not come on. I thought it was dead, but then I did it correctly, and it works. Another issue I had was it was really slow in the beginning. However, I found out that my computer port was corrupted, and all I had to do was switch to a different port. Now it runs fast. As for noise, this little guy is nearly impossible to hear when it is idling. When you are reading or writing to it, it makes a barely audible sound but no more than the internal one in my computer. It has a nice blue glow light on the top to let you know when it is on. It goes to sleep when my computer sleeps and wakes up when my computer wakes up. I did not know which end of the unit was up until I ran my hand over it and felt the tiny black rubber feet on the bottom. I am very pleased with this unit. It is easy to setup and use. I highly recommend it.

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.

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.

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.