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

As with anyone reading this review, I store and backup many large files - in addition I need quick access to them and this drive delivers. The primary quality I look for in this type of product is dependability and this drive has yet to let me down. While this external drive is not as small or portable as a laptop unit - it does require its own power supply (provided) it is perfect for everyday use plugged in to my laptop. I have yet to see a USB powered 5 TB drive that I would trust. I use it primarily to store large photo and video files once Im finished working on them but have never had any issue pulling a file straight from there into PhotoShop, Lightroom or Illustrator working on it and resaving. Transfer speed is really impressive for a drive of this size. That being said, Id definitely recommend having a filing system that makes sense to you as searching through 5 TB (actually just under due to system files) for the file you need would be daunting. Ive had my current drive for quite a while, in use everyday without a single issue, so when I realized I was down to only having 340 GB available yesterday I ordered another without hesitation. In my experience this is an awesome external hard drive that will deliver all you need it to do.

Part 1. When I purchase a product from Amazon I always check 1 Star certified purchases reviews to evaluate any issues reported. So I will start my review by saying that I received today (well before estimated) a well packaged and well protected device, after unpacking it there are not any external damages. The USB 3.0 and AC ports and cables are in perfect condition, so the drive (Seagate Expansion 3 TB external USB 3.0) is already connected (plug and play) to my PC running and recognized by Windows 10 (64 Bits). Files (documents, pictures, videos and music) are being transferred to it from my internal HDD Data disc as I type this. There isnt any signs of internal troubles: good transfer rate (up to 40 MB/s depending on the type of file) as it is connected to my PCs USB 3.0 port, there is only very slight write sound but you really need to rest your ear on the drive to be able to hear it. The auto start program (for registering your drive on Seagate) tries to open a web page that doesnt appear to exist (or theres a typo on the command line). But you can also register bu going directly to: [...] and entering your e-mail and product serial Number (on the case and on the Package).

So originally I wrote a positive review of this drive. Ive now had it probably less than a year. Originally, it had stupid issues where if it went idle for too long it was difficult to get it to actually work again without a complete power cycle, reboot, and reseating the cables. Within a couple months after that, disk utilities started throwing errors that there were bad sectors on this drive, once it got to about 1.63tb left. Ive exclusively bought Seagate for the past 15 years since the last time a WD drive killed itself on me and this is the first time Ive ever had an issue. Still, at $139.99, its dirt cheap and Ill probably just buy a new one, move the data, and toss the old one. Other than that, the read/write speed is what I expect from an eSATA drive and for those who are too lazy or lack the room to keep installing unlimited internal drives, this is an insanely good value. Obviously I wouldnt recommend putting any software or games on it - thats incorrect. Ive used it to move several tb of data on to so I can consolidate and it has worked perfectly fine every day since.

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.

Writing this review has been a roller coaster ride. I got my original drive from Amazon, plugged it in to an XP system and essentially Nothing. The Seagate product specs say that its plug and play compatible with Windows XP, but it didnt work on my XP system, but read on. Normally, XP cannot handle drives that are bigger than 2TB because XP does not natively understand how to handle the GPT (GUID Partition Table) format. The GPT format is necessary for drives over 2TB. So at least in theory, XP cannot access this 5TB drive, but keep reading. I called Seagate tech support, but hung up after 30 minutes on hold. I went through Seagates online troubleshooter and it said to return it which is what I did. Now the punch line. My replacement drive from Amazon arrived. I plugged it into my XP system and bingo, there it pops up into My Computer as a 5TB drive (4.54TB usable space). WTF??? Its not supposed to work on XP!! Yet there it is, and I loaded no special drivers either. It turns out that the Seagate 5TB USB Expansion drive really is Plug and Play for Windows XP. The original drive that I received from Amazon was simply a bad drive. The replacement drive is working just fine so far. How do they do the impossible? The Seagate Expansion drive is actually two drives (from the USB ports perspective). The first is a small drive that is a standard MBR format that Windows XP can read without any problems. The contents of that drive get autoloaded by XP which contains a GPT driver for USB drives. Then that drive is switched off and the main 5TB volume gets loaded. The result is that the drive really is plug and play for Windows XP. And not only that, but its the full 5TB volume and not split into multiple 2TB volumes. So while the DOA Seagate drive did not impress me, the working replacement seems to be fine. I should also point out that while XP now works flawlessly (as far as I can tell) with this drive, Windows 7 was a bit flakey. That was remedied by installing SP1 for Windows 7. I do recommend SP1 if you have Windows 7 and of course SP3 for Windows XP if you want this drive to work optimally. UPDATE: The drive continues to function well. I tested it on Linux Mint and also Tomato. Tomato worked at first, but then crashed. The problem is with Tomato as it just couldnt handle the large 150GB file I sent it all at once. Had I sent a series of smaller files, I think it would have been fine. I also tested it on a Win7+SP1 machine using a USB 3.0 port. I dont believe the drive supports USB 3.1, but the 3.0 speeds were awesome. UPDATE 2: I see that other people are having similar problems with this drive not working properly on XP. Because this drive needs to have its pseudo-drive autoloaded, I will suggest that they make sure that autoloading is enabled. Some people, and possibly anti-virus programs, will turn off autoloading for security reasons. I would suggest trying the drive with autoloading enabled and then disable it again once the drive comes up. Also, Im not sure where Seagate keeps this hidden pseudo-drive with the XP driver. It is either in firmware or on a hidden partition. If its the latter, then repartitioning the drive can ruin its XP compatibility.

this is much faster then the 2.5 hard drives that dont have its power most 3.5 hard drives have 12v dc plug i am using it on my xbox one no issues it format easy and isnt lagging on games like my 4tb 2.5 usb 3.0 did i am going to only buy 2.5 hard drives for computers use to back up data then disconnect it and put it in my fire safe so if my house ever burns down i will not lose what is more imported to me house is a house but i know so many people that have lost all photos, videos, mp3s of family member i want to make sure that when i get old and start forgetting thing that i have all my family photos video and songs i am the one at every family get together that has everyone put them video and photos into my dropbox my computer has never want down i dont download free games or software and i am the only one in my family that doesnt every 3 to 4 month i have to fix one of my family computers because of spy-ware ad-ware and viruses if you are going to get a hard drive then i would say get this one it doesnt cost to much 5tb for 129 that only 26 a tb great price one more thing i only use 2.5 usb 3.0 because if we go on a trip i can hook it up and watch or look a photo and video of my family with out having to worry about having a 2rd plug in the van and this means less cables to get messy

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’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.

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