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

I purchased this USB drive to be a Time Machine Backup of a Mac OS X Server for a marketing company. This drive was pleasantly surprising on several levels. The case seemed solid and compact, and the textured plastic really helped with the confidence of a one-handed grab. The USB cable seemed of reasonable quality. But what was really interesting to me was that the drive came partitioned with the GUID partition scheme, which is the default for Macs (though it is supported on newer Windows systems and hardware for data drives only not for boot drives). Up to this point, all of the external USB drives, unless they were a specific Mac model, would come formatted with the older MBR (Master Boot Record) partition scheme. This meant no re-paritioning necessary to use it on my Mac, just a volume reformat. While this might not seem like a big deal, it is a nice bit of progress, because I have seen far too many Mac users mistakenly use an MBR partition drive when they should be using a GUID partition drive. Pros: • Nice case, good feel and solid plastic - much nicer than the case for a WD external drive, for example • Comes formatted with GUID partition scheme, full support for Macs, more realistic for use as an external drive with Windows • Seems nice and fast • Reasonable price Cons: • Comes with a wall wart style power brick. By now, manufacturers should know better, but I cant take a star away for this….

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

Well, I purchased this particular drive solely as a backup drive for an extensive music collection, not as a daily driver. I have to give kudos to Amazon for quickly sending a replacement for the one which obviously showed up at my door the other day but didnt wind up in my possession. I live in a 3 flat building directly off of a very busy road where we get an awful lot of traffic as well as guests coming into the building. I have had packages disappear before and while its never a great situation, I have been fortunate enough to have recourse and I have received terrific support. So once again, thank you to Amazon! This is a BIG drive. Its the biggest that I have ever owned. Hard drives are hard drives, they either work or they dont and everything mechanical is going to stop working eventually. That being said, I had the box opened up and drive connected within minutes and am copying files at this time. Its pretty fast on the transfer speeds as I can see given that its an external hard drive. While I havent had enough time with it to see anything of its durability I havent had a lot of issues with hard drives in the past. External drives tend to disappear at times from my system, meaning that they show as being connected and then they dont. Never understood that. I wouldnt recommend an external drive as a source of sharing between two computers because of this. I would prefer to copy to a thumb drive or burn a disc in order to share with my wife or son. I can only hope that this one will complete the desired job and serve its backup role in a good way. I havent owned a Seagate product in quite a while as I try them all out from time to time. I used to buy Toshiba drives. I have a few Western Digital drives and have had some others so well see. The price was excellent so I took a chance on it. It needs only to copy music and be able to return it to me if my primary drives decide that they are too tired to continue playing nice with me.

Been a year and 8 months now. I still have it but I use a WD now because its a little quieter. But I still use this drive and it stop works flawlessly, of course I dont use it each day anymore but it does still work. Now Im thinking I may hook it up to my ps4 soon 5th month now, still no issues, it may have disconnected once i think but went right back. Still loads as fast as internal, i hardly use the internal for anything. I dont transfer stuff alot on it, but when i do my photosand videos i send them right to the drive and its very fast. I only currently have about 500gb on it but i just got a new cam and using lots of RAW files and my camcorder creates big files at 60fps so i needed this. I also should mention a few things again: 1 i formatted my drive before i transfered anything that way my pc can be more compatible per se. 2. Its only been hooked up to my one pc, if i wanna get something off another i use a flash drive between the two. 3. I dont move it, it sits on the floor where its basically been since i got it, again i dust it and lift it to do that but thats it. Remember its a desktop external its not made to keep moving, get a portable for that. So its been 4 months now and the only thing that has happened is it seemed to disconnect twice but reconnected immediately, although that could have just been my computer but doubt it. Other than that its still working perfectly fine. I keep up with what others write just to look for any red flags. I should also note that I hardly ever move or touch this drive, i moved it twice to dust it and that was minimal, its been sitting in the same spot laid on its front for the whole time. My data still loads as fast if not faster than the internal drive and has no lag. Seems this drive is hit or miss with other users. I saw these drives at walmart as well but didnt see the 5tb. This is my first external and have nothing else to compare it to, so buy at your own risk I rated 5 because its the first day. So I will explain as much as I can. First understand this device is as good as the device you connect it to. I use it for my pc, its a great pc if you have a slow older pc it may not perform at its best. Alot of reviews complain the speed is slow but you have to format it so that your computer can format it to its settings, once I did that my speeds went to about 179mbps i transfered about 410gb in 20 min it flew by, also I used the 3.0 port which is 10 to es faster than 2.0. The drive doesnt have many vents, ut I laid it on its side with the bottom facing out so that it can breath, it only gets warm, hasnt gotten hot. Also I read some complaining about the cords, well my port is very tight so the cord stays in and I have the drive sitting by the power cord so I mever even had to unwrap that. Seagate claims to have a file online to turn off the LED light. As far as noise, its low to me kinda like a light fan sound, its relaxing, I like it, some dont. Other reviews clai ed once you format it to xbox u cant use anything else with it...unless of course you reformat it to whichever device youre trying to use. Now with ,y computer the device shuts down when ,y computer shuts down and it boots up right along with it. I also noticed after just leaving my computer idle for awhile the drive seemed to go into standby (indicated by the blue light going off) but i could still access the files on it and 2 sec later the light came back on. So next thing I did was I wanted to see if I could access the files as quickly as my internal drive, I had a bu ch of HD videos and pics...in case you are wondering I used a HP slimline desktop very great computer and fast. Anyway, I was able to open my video just as fast as when I use my internal, same with pics, it actually seemed like it may have been faster at times. Now i dont know if its because the drive is that good or because my computer is fairly new but like i said its as good as the device you hook it to. I also want to note that contrary to another reviewer this device has not slowed down my pc whatsoever. I forgot to mention I have the 5tb model. Last thing I will say is, there was some reviews stating not to leave the drive running. Like i said it seems to spin down when not in use for awhile but i am ot 100% sure. Regardless hard drives are made to be used and running, my old crappy computer from 2009 i still have and i us3d to leave it running 24/7 for the better part of 6 years because i dont like restarting unless I have to and it still works. My current computer I also leave running 24/7 and no issues whatsoever. Lastly, understand this is a desktop expansion hard drive NOT a portable drive, meaning its not meant to bounce around from place to place or even room to room in my opinion, desktops are stationary as should any desktop external drive connected to it. If you plan to switch between computers etc, should probably consider a portable drive. If you have any questions feel free to ask me. UPDATE: So it has now been a month and this thing is still running smoothly, I havent moved it it has been on its side the whole month, has handled transfers smoothly, spins up rather quickly, quiet for the most part and still very fast. I really think the bad reviews come from people who move it around alot, like I said its a desktop external not a portable, so if you get this get it woth the intention of keeping it stationary as opposed to moble. If any questions, just ask

This external drive has SMR (Single Magnetic Recording) media and THAT means.... I opened one of mine up to find the actual disk drive inside the box. My 8TB drive had Seagate (no surprise here) Archive line of products. This drive was initially (and still sold as) enterprise level drive with very low power consumption on stand-by and quick retrieval. Here and there, Seagate literature states write performance is limited. However, this write limitation is for bare drive only and not-at-all mentioned for this external version marketed for consumers. I have this drive installed on Linux box as internal drive. Everything works great in write mode until I accumulate about 370GB in one go. (it works fine if you do this little bit at a time. Im doing copy operation in one go.) Until this point, I cannot tell anything is different. BUT, at around this amount, write slows to few kilobytes per second. Yes, KILOBYTES! Basically crawls to slowest possible speed! Now, granted, I am using this internally and it wasnt how it was sold, but I can also see why it wont make any difference as the same drive is also sold for internal use for enterprise customers. This is an archive drive. TO ME, that means huge amount of data is written to it and the product goes to sleep, only to wake up later for retrieval. BUT the problem is, this data must be written to this drive first, and thats where it isnt acceptable. Yes, I read it is slow-write drive but few kb per sec is extreme. I dont know how this is going to be useful for enterprise customers and even for consumers. It is not unusual these days for ordinary folks in home setting to have tera-bytes of files today. This limitation isnt mentioned anywhere on advertisement either. In fact, this device being SMR appears to be an open-secret, but still a secret. Maybe if this was a backup drive and back up is done per-small-transaction basis, it may be fine. But thats really not what archive is typically done. Amazon was wonderful in letting me return untouched drives, so I am left with just one. Further, Amazon gave me a price concession on this drive. So Im not upset with Amazon. But Seagate and by representation, Amazon, should have disclosed this pertinent data PROMINENTLY and avoid this issue. I bought my set (two drives) for my personal use at home but I also am an enterprise level IT guy. I went through my installation and I can find nothing wrong with it. I also confirmed bottle neck isnt anywhere else. I cant really say I am not going to recommend it as in some uses (basically small writes at a time), its fine. Its what I expect it should do, being a HUGE drive, is the problem. So buyers should be aware before getting excited about this low price in shuck-able configuration.

I bought this hard drive in February when I read that a soon to be released update for the PS4/PS4 PRO would support external hard drives to install games and applications. Then i waited... well that day is today. PS4 received update, I installed this drive, had PS4 format drive (simply follow the prompts) and there you go. You then have a much needed expansion for your games for the PS4. Yes I had already switched to larger internal hard drive quite some time ago. I installed several games to this hard drive today and there was NO issues. No lag, no slowdown, even when in game movies played... ran great. ***** IMPORTANT INFO ***** You HAVE to have the PS 4.50 update in order to use this drive. If you do not have the 4.50 update installed on your PS4 then this drive nor any other drive will work to install GAMES. You can still use an external hard drive for photos and music before the 4.50 update. Again you HAVE to have the PS 4.50 update to install games to this drive. * EDIT * One more thing I just found out. If you put your PS4 into rest mode and you leave your USB ports on (for charging headsets or controllers) this hard drive will NOT go into sleep mode. The blue light on the drive will remain on and heads will continue to spin. This will lead to early end of life. If you just unplug the USB from the PS4 the drive will turn off even while power is plugged in. If you dont place your PS4 in rest mode nor leave the ports powered while in rest mode then this is not an issue.

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.

On USB 3.0 Port, Windows 7 I get the following speeds (8GiB file 9 times in test) - READ SEQ = 193 MB/s, WRITE SEQ = 133 MB/s Here are the total results from CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- * MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s] * KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 193.082 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 133.095 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.439 MB/s [ 107.2 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 6.495 MB/s [ 1585.7 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 192.335 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 130.246 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.228 MB/s [ 55.7 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.317 MB/s [ 321.5 IOPS] est : 8192 MiB [E: 99.8% (7435.3/7451.9 GiB)] (x9) [Interval=5 sec] Date : 2017/12/18 12:24:41 OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64) Also I tested these six drives I purchased in IOMETER - heavy testing, with full load, for over a week and did not have one drive failure. Also I see many people, on YouTube, remove these hard drives from the enclosure - there is one single 8TB drive in this enclosure and that drive can be used directly but you of course would be voiding the warranty. Overall very happy with p-r-i-c-e, 1_4_9_.00 & performance desertrider

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 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.