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

Ive had this hard drive for 2 years now and it hasnt missed a beat. I use it as a storage expansion for my PS4. With 4TB, I still havent run out of storage. I never experience any freezing, slowness, or hitches playing games off of it. I guess the only complaint I would have with this drive is the size. It is a little big, but not big enough to be a problem. I very much appreciate the indicator light to show me that its powered up. Its so silent that youd never know it was on. Lol I was so impressed with this drive and its longevity, that I purchased another drive from Seagate for my Xbox! Id say absolutely go for it if youre looking for reliability and performance for gaming!

I purchased this drive (5TB) as a redundant backup drive for my Windows Storage Spaces (4TB). I needed an extra level of security so that I could sleep well at night knowing my image files had a double level of backup, and I wanted an external drive I could keep away from the main system in case there was an unfortunate virus attack or other calamity. Cost per TB is so low these days that its hardly worth quibbling about price and value. Im a life-long Seagate enthusiast from way back in the early 80s. I stick with what has always worked for me, I dont ever consider any other brand at this point, just to keep it simple. I dont do speed tests, or any other type of bench testing, because Im just not that kind of end user. I worry about how long a hard drive lasts (they arent supposed to last forever), how well it holds up after endless hours of work, and if the warranty will cover my purchase well enough should it need replacing. To date, Ive never had to use a warranty, my drives always seem to last longer than expected. Im one of those users who lost a fair amount of data ages ago and learned my lesson. I always use a redundant backup scenario now, and having such a large drive (5TB) to simplify my needs makes my life a whole lot easier. So far, not a problem yet, and everything keeps on keepin on!

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.

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...

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.

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

I was hesitant to order this 6TB drive simply because I did not desire to source a longer USB cable than this drive advertises it is bundled with. It states the cable is 18 long. I believe it to be 36 in length which worked perfectly for our use as the drive and the pc are on two different elevations. After backing up over 3TB of precious data I can now say we are pleased with the drive. It is functioning very well. One thing to mention though: We have the drive setting on the desktop in an inverted fashion. The majority of the vent holes on the enclosure are on its intended bottom. We decided to simply face this end of the drive up for improved heat reduction. Ive tested the drive thoroughly and will attach a screen cap of the ATTO results when I can. The option strangely is not available on AMZ right now for some reason.

This is my first try with Seagate in a long time (mostly a HGST guy). Inside this case is Seagates Archive hard drive which OEM bare drive retails for $249. So for $179 its a steal. (read about the Archive drive on Seagates website) USB 3.0 interface was fast. Tested empty drives formatted in HFS and ExFAT, both were a constant 180-190 MB per second read/write. After the drive was 90% full, large files peaked at 100MBps read and write, and smaller files averaged around 64MBps write, 80 read. Decent. Been running 6 of these for a week now 24/7 and have had no problems. All files have transferred and verified. And I performed a complete sector scan verify on one of them with no issues reported using SoftRAID for OSX. Cases are plastic so theyre not the best for heat dissipation, but the drive itself sits in a metal bracket inside the case which helps. The case has vent holes on the bottom for some reason instead of the top, and holes on the back, but nothing on the front. Ive been keeping a small fan on them as Ive been copying and verifying for 24/7 for a few days. Probably not best to run 24/7 unless theres some cooling on them or theyre in a very cold room. But I dont imagine most people will be running them at full tilt for days on end. I would buy these and take the drives out of their cases and put into a NAS. Im curious how theyd perform long term.

I bought this as a replacement for an older Seagate drive that died on me. Its one of three external drives that I use for backup. I gave some thought to the reliability of the old drive, but I really have no way of judging between brands. There arent that many manufacturers of the actual mechanisms, and thats what failed in this case. Ive had plenty of other brands fail on me. I was disappointed that the warranty is only one year. The form factor surprised me. I was expecting it to be bigger, and was very happy that I didnt have to rearrange my gear. Its about the size of a trade paperback. The physical design is minimalist: its a black box with inconspicuous ventilation on the sides (it looks like a diamond texture), a single blue light on the top, and two jacks (power and USB 3) on the back. As for installation, it comes with a picture that shows you how to plug it in. The Start Here program helps you register the drive and brings you to a document describing how to move files to your new drive. You have to know to look on the drive to find that program, since it isnt mentioned in the instructions. The drive is preformatted with NTFS, but there is a Mac version of the Start Here program. I took off one star because I think a novice would not notice the program. Other than the registration helper, this drive comes with no software. If you want SeaTools, youll have to download them yourself. Again, a novice would probably never find them.

This is the best external hard drive out there I started of with western digital that had 2 drives in one box it was suppose to mirror each other so I started putting my photos and movies on it every once in awhile I would check and my items were on 2 separate drive then one day I turned on my computer and the external hard drive didn’t show I called up western digital and gave me to man to go through different prompts that didn’t work they sent me a mailer to send in my external hard drive so I did about 10 days later they sent my a nice letter and a new external hard drive it said in so many words they couldn’t get my items either I lost it all so I was talking to a friend of mine and he told me about Seagate he said what he does it he has 2 separate hard drives and put his items on one and then copies them to another one separate he said a lot of people use the cloud but you pay so much every month he said this way he can take his projects on one of his hard drive to work and plug it into a tv and it shows and this way he has his other one at home so that is what I do now with Seagate and haven’t had any problems keep up the good work seagate