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

Normally I dont review things until Ive had them for a long enough time to make useful comments. In this case, I wanted to comment on a couple things about it working with Windows 7 and Windows Backup. First, the disk is formatted MBR (I just bought this June 2015 from Amazon) Im running Window 7 Home Premium, Service Pack 1, with latest updates (as of 7/3/2015). I plugged the drive into a USB 2.0 port and Windows Explorer told me there were 3.63 TB available (no 2 TB limitation on how much Windows 7 can access). -File backup works fine. After completing, Im able to browse for files in the back up that were part of those selected for backing up. I havent tried a restore, but it looks like it would work. -Image backup fails with an I/O error. Time to try other software--Ill start with Macrium Reflect Ive now added a USB 3.0 PCI-e card (Anker USB 3.0 PCI-E 4 port card) to my desktop system and tried copying a couple 2 GB files to check what speeds I see: -USB 2.0 built into my Gateway DX4840: 27-40 MB/sec -USB 3.0 (Anker USB 3.0 without UASP mode): 60-80 MB/sec -USB 3.0 (Anker USB 3.0 with UASP mode on): 98-102 MB/sec -Copying 160 GB of picture files (75K files in 2.5K directories), started about 30 MB/sec and rose to 59 MB/sec after a couple minutes. These speeds are probably more dependent on what USB 3.0 card you have and what you are copying than the capabilities of the Seagate disk.

Up to this point Ive owned Western Digital MyBooks. Many of them ranging in capacities from 500GB to 8TB. However they changed the design of the new 8TB and it sucks. Their new enclosure is cheaply made, top heavy (tips over easily) and lacks any indicator light whatsoever. I also realized that in the years Ive owned the MyBooks Ive had to warranty replace three of them. So upon recently buying the most recent 8TB MyBook, being very disappointed and returning it, I decided to try this. Id been hesitant because of the negative reviews Ive read. Honestly, I love it. The enclosure feels more substantial, is smaller, the drive is oriented on its side, not end, so it isnt top heavy, has an LED status indicator, is less expensive, and is fast. Here is the unexpected best part... The MyBooks have a very buggy power management/sleep function. Maybe Im missing something but they dont wake up until you try to access them. They go to sleep per the power management scheme you choose on your Mac or PC but when you try to access them for the first time, you have to wait for seconds while the drive wakes and spins up. Very frustrating. With this unit, all that is gone. When I open the drive within Windows file explorer/My Computer its there ready, accessing as fast as any internal drive. As for long term durability well see but so far so good.

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.

I use this hard drive as extra storage on my PS5 and it works excellent. Holds tons of game titles from its large capacity, if your looking for a good gaming drive this is it!

I’ve had this product for years and it’s absolutely amazing. I have it setup for my Xbox one and download all my games on it. I have well over 100 games and still have at least 2TB of storage left. I’m still looking to either upgrade to a larger 8 - 10 TB hard drive but this thing is absolutely awesome. I’ve traveled with this and it fits great in my backpack with all my other electronics. I haven’t had any issues with it at all. The price point is what really made me purchase this one over anything else. It was way less than anything else on the market for the size of storage and I still haven’t found anything that beat the price point when I bought it. I haven’t used tech support because I haven’t had any issues so I left that blank. Everything is 5 stars.

I am using this extra drive to store pdf files to reduce paper storage. This is the second Seagate drive I have purchased so far and I absolute love the ease of use for me.

I purchased this drive (8 TB Seagate Expansion External Hard Drive) in September 2020, but didnt get around to opening up the package until it was needed - i.e. today (October 20th, 2021). Thats when I realized that the drive was fake. Realizing that took a bit of troubleshooting. When I first plugged in the drive, it reported its size was 465.76 GiB (or 500 GB). This was perplexing, and after initializing the drive in Windows in the hopes that the missing storage would appear, it still didnt show up even on other OSes such as Ubuntu or OS X. Moreover, nothing could be written to the drive. And, it didnt have any S.M.A.R.T. functionality. Since the drive was already out of its return window (October 2020) and was also likely out of warranty, shucking the drive from its plastic shell was the only resort left to satisfy my curiosity. Shucking the drive was easier than I thought and it opened up relatively easily (that should have been my first clue). Upon doing so, the mystery was solved. Lo and behold, instead of a 8 TB Seagate drive being in the case, there was a 500 GB Western Digital drive in its place that was manufactured on April 27th, 2014 (!). Attaching that drive to an external SATA drive connection and attempting to read from it or query its S.M.A.R.T. status yielded nothing. To add insult to injury, not only had the 8 TB drive been replaced with a smaller drive of a different manufacturer, but it was also dead. Granted, had I used the drive when I first bought it, I wouldnt be here writing about this misadventure. A Google search on this suggests that this problem isnt as uncommon as one would like to think, and it appears in situations such as the unpowered external hard drives despite official packaging, and so on. Simply search for fake Seagate expansion drive on Google and youll see. It still boggles the mind how something like this managed to make its way through the quality assurance process to be sold via Seagates official Amazon store. Nonetheless, it did - which is why Im here. I paid $140 for an official product but got nothing except lost time as well as a fake and dead drive without any recourse. Seagate should be ashamed and embarrassed for allowing atrocities like these to occur. Dont make the same mistake that I did. Please use my experience as a cautionary tale to check ones drives immediately upon purchasing them. If somehow you also experience something like this, at least that you could replace it within the return window.

I bought this disk in 2015, it worked reasonable well, and it lasted until 2023 as my daily backup disk. Now Im zeroing it out before recycling it, and its PAINFULLY SLOW for the large sustained write -- Im seeing varying sustained writing speeds of 10-50 MB/s writing zeros, with an average of 25 MB/s overall after 24 hours, and Im less than 1/2 way thru overwriting my 5 TB disk. Thats only 200 Mb/s, well below the USB 2.0 speed, for example. I gave it 2 stars because it is so much slower than expected; otherwise, for value, I would have given it 4 stars -- the price was right, and it did work, and I did use it.

Really, really fast delivery. Product as advertised. One of the largest drives you can buy at an affordable price point. There are 8TB drives out there as of this writing but the cost-premium does not make as much sense because prices on those even-larger devces have not dropped yet due to the relative infancy of these new device product cycle. Simple installation (the installation guide is a single picture), and the device booted and formatted within minutes. Only 4.5TB available after formatting but adequate for moving files off of several lower-capacity drives into this newer, more-reliable device - and that should allow most users for a few more years of reliabilty for their storage needs. The connector wire appears to be a USB 3.0 Type A Male Connector 2 on the computer side to a USB 3.0 Type Micro B Male on the drive end. The cable is backward compatable to older USB formats such as USB 2.0 which was my application. Write speeds were around 18MBs/sec while drive was still relatively empty, but this was on a USB 2.0 port. The drive is slightly smaller and lighter than previous versions of consumer external storage devices. The performance appears to be fast and solid. The properties showed that the device was pre-formatted NTFS. I always copy the pre-loaded files that come with the drive to another location and then do a quick format with NTFS before moving the files back. I learned the hard way that filling a humongous drive on the factory format is a recipe for disaster because after the drive gets filled up, those files suddenlybecome unavailable right when you dont, of course, have an even-larger drive to move them to before the drive fails because you just bought the largest drive available. This is also known as a storage disaster. My sage advice: format that puppy when you first receive it - and avoid mucho-heartburn down the road. My pleasure,

I have a confusing assortment of external hard drives of different sizes with different backup sets distributed among them--family photos in some; business photos in another; documents in a third--a real mess to keep track of and to remember to back up. To add insult to injury, each time Windows 10 does a significant update, my system stops recognizing an old drive and you stand to lose whats in it if you dont have an old Windows 7 computer somewhere to rescue the contents. The last time this happened, I decided to get a drive big enough to put everything into. Everything fits in here and backing up, while still a hassle, is more manageable. I dont use their automatic backup software because 1) it isnt particularly good and I seldom hear of anyone happy with it; and 2) I end up with redundant copies of files all over the place (which could quickly fill up even this drive). Anytime you re-name a file (say you change the camera-assigned number for a descriptive name) or re-name a folder or move a file or folder from one place to another, the original copy remains where it was unless you remember to physically remove it. Without their software trying to manage my files, Im able to manually rename and control what goes where and what its called. The drive works fine. Its silent and doesnt get hot. The two USB slots in the front are a big help. It is a little slow in the initial seeding of my backup files, but that might be because many of my image files are pretty huge.