11.1.2019

This review is for the 4TB Expansion Drive (with the 'diamond square cut' plastic case).Great compact enclosures. I would suggest putting on some small rubber 'feet' on the base to lift it up and allow any heat to dissipate more freely. The HDD is easily powered by the supplied USB cable. I have had two other Seagate Expansion drives running for almost 4 years with no problems.Please remember, just because these (or any other) portable HDD's are 'portable' doesn't mean that they should still be moved or knocked around too much. Always handle with care if you're carrying it from one location to another to prolong its longevity.If you're purchasing this drive to use as the manufacturer intended (as an external USB HDD),then it gets 5/5 stars and you need read no further._______________________If you're looking for a 2.5" HDD to use inside a laptop, in a Disk Array enclosure, inside a PS4, or other 'internal' device, then read on...This 'Expansion' drive can easily be opened up to remove the actual Hard Drive inside.And it's a far cheaper option than buying a bare 4tb 2.5" HDD.I purchased two of these 4TB drives to use in a 2.5" RAID enclosure.[Please Note: The 4TB HDD is 15mm thick. Lower capacities are variably thinner. Always check the max bay height of the device you are thinking of inserting the HDD into].The HDD can be removed from it's plastic casing by gently prising away the top lid (which is clipped in). Some of the clips WILL break, but if you're careful, the plastic casing can still be clipped back together again and reused (if you need to). Once inside, gently lift up the drive (it's only slotted in place by 4 silicone screw covers), then slide out and peel off the sticky silver foil on the connector end. Make sure you peel off the foil on both sides of the drive. The USB/SATA connector can then be gently pulled off. You will also need to remove the 4 side holding screws to enable you to slot it in and secure it to your new bay location.The end result is that you now have a Seagate Barracuda 4TB drive, exactly the same as you would if you bought a loose ('bare') Seagate drive. The main advantage being - that you've just saved about 30-50% of the cost compared to buying an identical "bare" internal 4TB Barracuda HDD on Amazon!What are the disadvantages? You've likely voided the warranty.BUT, before you shoot off elsewhere thinking the warranty factor is a deal-breaker, consider the following two points:1) If you're buying a bare HDD (no matter what capacity) you should NOT be buying it off of Amazon if its being 'SOLD' or 'DISPATCHED' by Amazon - especially those that come without any retail packaging.Hard Disk Drives are sensitive little things and don't take very well to being mishandled or knocked about. Amazon packaging staff DO NOT know how to handle or package Hard Drives - this is not some off-the-wall claim, BELIEVE me, it's highly substantiated! Despite Amazon having complaints on this subject stretching back over the last 8+ years, and despite always promising to correct things, Amazon are still today sending out hard drives in insufficient packaging.The majority of Hard Disk Drive failures that people report and complain about were caused because of how they were handled before they got to you (not the manufacturer's fault) - and if you've purchased one that's been 'handled' by Amazon - you're playing a gambling game of roulette! By the time you receive that drive in your hands, it's possibly been rattled around more times than an ice cube inside a cocktail shaker. Is it really any wonder why you see so many 1 and 2 star reviews (irrespective of brand)?2) A lot of bare Hard Disk Drives being sold on Amazon (especially those that are 'competitively priced') are actually sold without a manufacturers warranty anyway.They were either imported from somewhere where the Warranty is not valid. If your drive doesn't fail on arrival (or shortly afterwards), you will never know this unless you attempt to register it. Or because they are surplus drives that were originally intended for use inside an external enclosure (such as these 'Expansion' ones being sold above) -there are actual reports and reviews that Seagate have informed customers of this fact.And even if your drive does come with a warranty - if the drive fails, it's only going to cover an exchange. You will need to return the failed drive (most likely at your cost) and the warranty will not cover any data recovery. Meaning that essentially, once you send it back to get a replacement, you will never be getting the chance again to have your lost data back._______________________My final advice is, be aware of the 'handling' risks in buying HDD's from Amazon. And if doing so, ALWAYS buy RETAIL packaged drives. REJECT EVERYTHING ELSE.If you choose to accept this mission....then, good for you!.... This message will not self-destruct in 10 seconds...

31.7.2019

Received this drive today, thought I would provide some speed test results whilst I'm running SeaTools in the background, a long test which will take just under 20 hours for this 8TB drive!BackgroundI was looking to backup almost 4TB of photos from my NAS which is running out of space and needs an upgrade soon. I'm a hobbyist photographer fed up burning archival blurays in chunks of 25Gb and then having to use an outdated tool (Octopus DVD indexer) to catalogue which files are on which disks. I have a spindle stacked with almost 100 blu-ray disks; retrieving a RAW file from an older disk is a real pain in the bum!So it was time to invest in a 8TB drive to backup all my data,which I could then place in a fireproof safe. I was very hesitant to get a SMR type drive as I've heard so much about their slow writing speeds. I was debating for several weeks whether or not to go for this drive given the price, or a bare Barracuda Pro drive which I could hot-plug into my computer. Yesterday, as I was browsing amazon, the price of this external drive dropped 25%. So without hesitation, I bought it. This is the cheapest 8TB you can get today!--- Out of the box ---The first thing I checked were seek errors and rewritten sectors using Crystal Disk Info. Then ran some DST tests using SeaTools. The drive passed with flying colours (please note that with Seagate drives, Crystal Disk Info appears to report errors, in fact you only need to be concerned with the first 4 digits (on the left) of the RAW results and not the last 8 (on the right) which are hexadecimal values of how many times a drive was accessed. You can read this up online.--- Speed tests ---I initially plugged the drive into a USB 2.0 port and realised this as soon as I ran Crystal Disk Mark which was reporting transfer speeds of 42 MB/s. My ASUS A87-A motherboard has dedicated USB 3.0 ports so I immediately relocated the connection.First test, straight out of the box, gave me sequential 184.5 MB/s read and 142.5 MB/s write.I then read this thing about my motherboard having USB 3.0 boost, so tried it out (after installing older win 8.1 drivers) and sure enough, performance jumped to 210.8 read and 204.8 write. But, any queued and threaded tests were halved - which are more realistic tests given that I will be transferring hundreds of thousands of smaller files. So I uninstalled all the turbo boost (also probably one of the reasons they never produced drivers for windows 10).I then tested standard windows file transfers from my SSD to the Seagate. Writing a large 3Gb file from SSD to Seagate gave me 176 MB/s. Reading the large file produced 184 MB/s.I then transferred 10Gb of smaller files (realistic example) and this gave me 108 MB/s SSD to Seagate, and 176 MB/s back from Seagate to SSD (note that with USB 3.0 Boost (a feature of my Asus mobo) these file transfers dropped to around 70 MB/s).Now that might not be super speedy, but given that I need to backup files from my 2 bay NAS which has no space for a third drive, and only has USB 2.0, the max speed I will ever get is over 1Gbe network from NAS > PC > Seagate and that will be 105MB/s max. So the Seagate write speed of 108 MB/s is sufficient for the task. And given that it performed so well reading files at 184 MB/s, this drive is as ideal for my purpose!--- 3 year recovery option ---To top this off, I followed the link to the registration page (link is on the Seagate drive) and I was taken to a page offering me a 3 year data recovery plan - should the drive stop working - for 14.99 USD (or £12.31) ! That's peanuts compared to what prices I've seen quoted in the past. This was a real cherry on the top and without hesitation I purchased the 3 year plan.--- Summary ---All in all, this is a fantastic piece of kit (for the price) and would highly recommend as a secondary backup option (to a NAS) for photographers and videographers. I've attached screenshots of all the relevant speed tests.

18.1.2017

OK so I have seen other reviews about failures etc. but hey....things fail...that's why we back up in the first place isn't it (and I never trust just one backup for precious files)?? Anyway, I already have two 2TB portable Seagate expansion drives for my movie and TV collection, and for my backups. However, an ever increasing movie and TV collection meant I needed even more capacity. I decided on this one purely because of the price point, the capacity, and the fact it was a Seagate! Straight out of the box it feels like quality. It is nicely heavy and comes with a decent length Mains adaptor and USB 3.0 cable (if you are new to USB 3.0 be aware that a normal USB cable does not have the same fitting at the equipment end as a USB 3.0 cable).

21.2.2018

These drives are great, my second one. But if you are a Mac user you may have the same issue that I and others have had, in that the reformatting of the drive using Mac's Disk Utility initially failed. I thought it was a faulty drive and nearly sent it back.The issue was that after reformatting, my iMac wouldn't recognised the drive and Time Machine also said there was not enough space on it. Yet it's a 4TB version! I have a 3TB version I bought last year and didn't have this problem when I set that up....for tech wizards out there this may be obvious, but for those of us who are a little more technically challenged, I hope this helps.

15.10.2015

It doesn't get any simpler than this. As its a 2tb drive windows finds it without any bother, so it really is just plug it in and away you go. On the drive is included files for I presume, installing the drive on machines that don't recognise the 2tb, although it doesn't say anything about what they are for. I should say that I am one of those people that don't read instructions unless absolutely necessary, in this case they are not needed, I expect it probably does mention in them what the file on the drive are for, but I didn't need them, I have however kept them for possible future use, and this is what I would recommend you do too. The drive is connected via the USB port and it is USB3 that is also backward compatible for USB2 use.

20.4.2019

I needed a couple of extra drives for an Unraid server which only had remaining physical space for 2.5" Drives.Shucking or removing the plastic outer is a much cheaper way to acquire the drives than buying retail as it works out about 60% of the cost. Buy three new drives for the price of two. The downside is that you lose the 2 year warranty, however if one drive fails you're no worse off.Keep in mind these are 15mm drives so too thick for installation in most laptops, game consoles etc.Delivered mid April 2019 and the 4TB version still contains a standard SATA ST4000LM024. Some brands and the smaller sizes are increasingly moving to integrated USB on the board which makes them useless for

13.7.2016

This drive came a lot faster than expected, 2 days before its estimated arrival. So far, had it a few days, it's great. Using it primarily as an Xbox One storage upgrade and it's working like a charm, can practically install my whole game library on this thing with reasonable space left over. It's loading everything perfectly fine, and takes little time to move things from the internal to this drive. I'm not sure if it's made a difference in writing/loading times, I realise there are very detailed and specific writing times which can only be millisecond differences to other drives, which, in my opinion, doesn't matter. As long as it loads everything without problems, which it does,

16.10.2018

This was just great. Solid and reliable and easy to use, until it suddenly, according to my PC, ceased to exist. Now, I realize that I've had it just over two years, and I've taken it for granted. It was just there, in the background, saving all my stuff, lots of it. As I said above, I don't know how long I was supposed to think it would last. It was my main backup. I've still got most of my stuff, almost all of it, scattered about on small external drives and the hard drives of an old PC and laptop. I'd like to put all that stuff back on the big one, but I can't even format it. My computer just tells me to insert a disc into drive I. The only hopeful sign I see is a post by another user who had the same experience as me.

17.5.2020

There does seem to be quite a few negative reviews for Segate drives in general here.I have no connection with Segate nor any other vested interest, but I would say I've had literally dozens of their drives over the years and only ever had one failure.Also worth pointing out that almost every other make and model have similar comments, if not quite as many. I guess people are more likely to post negative comments when they have suffered a failure of some kind?More recently, I've been using these 2.5" USB 5TB drives for video library use. They don't get hammered, but do cope perfectly well for this fairly demanding use.No storage device is ever 100% reliable nor lasts forever. So,

11.5.2020

Ideal for the Xbox especially at this size and price point. I bought this for the Xbox one X but first transferred all the data from my one S, over 2.5TB of it. While the read and write speeds are nothing spectacular this drive is a good work horse and ideal for gaming. It's 6TB and in this day and age where games can be 100GB in size there seems to be no point in buying a smaller drive, any games you own are always available anyway, you only download a game to play it.When you get to the point that you've got 500 games including game pass games then you need the space this drive provides. I ran this drive for 24 hours non stop and had no problems with noise or overheating and to set it up on Xbox was easy,

29.3.2019

This is the only sealed style backup USB drive I have bought so my reservations may be something it has in common with other similar drivesThe supplied cable is short and has a standard USB for connection to the computer but a non standard (crimped in the middle connector) which slots into the driveIf the cable gets damaged then that looks like it will be more tricky getting a new cableOtherwise it seems a decent enough drive although you cant see what is inside because the case is fully sealedI looked at the price of a 2.5" sata drive as an alternative using a USB to Sata cable but that was a a little more expensiveThe plastic is hard and shiny but has the raised pattern to help with gripping

8.11.2018

I bought this to back up a largish folder of pictures and videos. After receiving it I unpacked it and let it acclimatize for a few hours. Then I connected it using the supplied cable - the end that plugs into the drive is like a squashed '8' so you can't make a mistake when connecting to PC. My PC runs Win 10 and once the drive was attached it was visible in 'File Explorer' and I could use it like any other drive. I created a new folder and copied all of my picture and video folders (110 Gb in total) into it. It took about 20 minutes using my USB 3 port. You can also use USB 2 but that will be slower. Once complete I copied some random files back to the desktop to make sure they were ok (they were).

21.1.2016

Bought this two days ago. Estimated delivery date was four days from now, so I have no complaints at all with the shipping of the product. Especially since it was out of stock when I placed my order.The device's power plug comes with a detachable plug-part. You can choose between a UK plug for a standard Europlug one, which I thought was very handy, especially considering I travel back and forth a lot.Other than that, the HDD is formatted NTFS, which means that if you use a Mac like me, you will not be able to write anything to the device before formatting it to either FAT32 or some other supported format.Over all I am very satisfied with it. I am a little worried about the fact that it is designed to stand upright,

16.6.2020

This is a review of the 5TB version. It comes with the usual problem of manufacturers specifying capacity based on base 10 rather than power of 2. As such it shows as 4.54TB in windows.There also is a permanent 249MB "in use" shown in windows even after a complete format of the drive. No files show so I'm not quite sure what that is?A bigger issue though is the drive is supplied with several files already on it. A warranty PDF and mac and windows executables called (in the case of win) start_here_win.exeWhat is this software? There is no documentation in the box or files on the drive?Sure I can look online and find out that is to register the drive with Seagate and link it with an Amazon Cloud account,

23.5.2018

Out of all the manufactures of external Hard Drives I have used over the years, Seagate for me is the most reliable. Reliability is the most important fact for me in my line of work. I need to save evidence, videos, photos and other data for many years, it all depends on the Law specification.This is my 4th Expansion 4 TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive but I have 7 more ranging between 1TB and 5TB capacity. The first I purchased in 2007 and have never looked back. All are going strong.As the listing shows you can use them vertical as in the picture or you can place in horizontal. It all depends on the location, room available or just your choice. I have mine both ways according to the space available on my shelves.

Seagate Expansion Desktop 10TB (STEB10000400) - Reviews

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