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

I bought it cuz I was tired of deleting files that I needed to make space. no issues still working great 5 years and 5 months. buy it you fool!

This review is for the 8TB hard drive. Included with the external hard drive are the instructions, a power cord, approximately 65 inches in length and a 3.0 USB cable, approximately 45 inches in length. This is one of the few times that I don’t have to complain about short cables provided with external drives as these are plenty long enough. I got this drive to use as extended storage for my PS4. I have previously been using the Seagate Expansion 1TB external drive for extended storage but after a recent game buying splurge, I have run out of space with that drive. I have two of those drives and both are approximately three years old ago and are still going strong (one as the PS4 drive and one as a security cam drive) with no issues. Both of those drives were great for portability as well because of their small size. This 8 TB isn’t quite as portable as the smaller Seagate drives at approximately 7 inches by 5 inches by 2-inch thickness and this drive requires a power supply unlike the smaller drives but considering the space that this has and that it is primarily being used on my PS4, it is less of an issue. Like all extended storage drives for the PS4, it has to be formatted by the PS4 but that is quick and painless to do. The transfer of files from my main PS4 and the 1 TB drive to this drive took a bit of time but that is mainly because there is no easy way to move the game files from expansion drive to another expansion drive in the PS4. The file transfer was fairly speedy otherwise. I have use a variety of brand name drives, including WD, Toshiba and these Seagates. I have not had any issues with either the Seagate drives or the WD as they both make very reliable drives and I expect the same from this drive. With this drive priced at about 18 dollars per TB, it is a reasonable cost for this size drive. Although I am not using it for that purpose, with this drive being USB 3.0, I expect this is just as speedy as most USB 3.0 drives on a Windows based computer. This has a power/hard drive light in the back-left side of the case. Although I am not personally a fan of the light in the back, it does make it less distracting and since I am using this as a drive for the PS4, being able to see the light isn’t a huge issue. Oddly, these drives only have 1-year warranty, unlike the 1TB Seagate expansions that I bought that had 3-year warranties. Maybe that is a trend with manufacturers for lesser warranties, but I hope that doesn’t indicates its drive reliability. I will update my review if I have any issues with durability. Overall, I like the drive for my PS4 expansion drive and it is so far working as it should with no slow down or stuttering when playing a variety of games. 4 stars

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...

Let me start this review by saying, if I were operating this device with Windows: Id give it 5 stars. However, Im running Mac OS and I had the sweatiest time getting this thing to work—I actually didnt get it to work at all—I thought that I had bricked it the first night while trying to format it. I actually ended up having to sit down with my friend in IT at work to have him help me. He had to run some command line wizardry just to get the mac to talk to it politely; more-interesting things to format it. After that: its working perfectly. However this is literally the first External Hard Drive Ive seen in ten years to have ANY issues with X-Platform operation. And thats really unfortunate because I love this HD otherwise! With that aside, Ill extol its virtues: Lets start with: its eight damn terabytes! I never thought Id be able to own a hard drive with this much capacity for this price... ever! At just $150 its a steal. Its also gorgeous! I have no problems with this thing standing on my desk. The only thing remaining to be seen is how long it lives. How will it hold up over years of being a system back up? Only time will tell.

The

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.

Archivo

Love this and its super fast just moved almost 50,000 photos to it from my laptop and it took less than 30 minutes!

I bought this drive for the purpose of backing up all my files. Unfortunately, it randomly started disconnecting from USB after I had copied only 21G to it. This drive is completely worthless to me. What good is a hard drive you cant even copy files to without it disconnecting? On the bright side, the problem is with the SATA to USB board, not with the drive itself. If you crack it open and put it in a decent external drive enclosure, they underlying drive seems fine. Heres my kernel log, showing what happened. [Jan16 20:39] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd [ +0.020804] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=3322 [ +0.000001] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1 [ +0.000000] usb 2-1: Product: Expansion Desk [ +0.000001] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Seagate [ +0.000001] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: NA8X3X3G [ +0.001700] scsi host6: uas [ +0.000451] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate Expansion Desk 9401 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6 [ +0.037362] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0 [ +0.000136] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdf] Spinning up disk... [ +1.011494] . [ +1.024019] . [ +1.024045] . [ +1.024006] . [Jan16 20:40] . [ +1.024016] . [ +1.024056] . [ +1.023996] . [ +1.024027] . [ +1.024020] . [ +1.024027] . [ +1.024014] . [ +1.024027] . [ +0.000267] ready [ +0.000321] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdf] 15628053167 512-byte logical blocks: (8.00 TB/7.28 TiB) [ +0.014343] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off [ +0.000002] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 4f 00 00 00 [ +0.000198] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdf] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesnt support DPO or FUA [ +0.133111] sdf: sdf1 sdf2 [ +0.001198] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI disk [Jan16 20:51] sdf: sdf1 sdf2 [ +25.070120] sdf: sdf1 [Jan16 20:52] BTRFS: device label odin-backup-2 devid 1 transid 5 /dev/sdf1 [ +11.666367] BTRFS info (device sdf1): disk space caching is enabled [ +0.000002] BTRFS info (device sdf1): has skinny extents [ +0.000000] BTRFS info (device sdf1): flagging fs with big metadata feature [ +0.034597] BTRFS info (device sdf1): creating UUID tree [Jan16 20:53] BTRFS info (device sdf1): qgroup scan completed (inconsistency flag cleared) [Jan16 21:03] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 5 [ +0.014015] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdf] Synchronizing SCSI cache [ +0.243925] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdf] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK [ +0.232031] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 1, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.009188] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 2, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.009206] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 3, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.009266] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 4, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.009266] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 5, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.009347] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 6, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.009252] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 7, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.009228] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 8, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.003229] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd [ +0.005963] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 9, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.009214] BTRFS error (device sdf1): bdev /dev/sdf1 errs: wr 10, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0 [ +0.005402] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=3322 [ +0.000002] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1 [ +0.000001] usb 2-1: Product: Expansion Desk [ +0.000000] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Seagate [ +0.000001] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: NA8X3X3G

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.