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.

22.12.2018

Ordered this yesterday as a way of shifting a few TB of rarely accessed data from my recently upgraded main PC, which gained a couple of M. 2 drives and, as a consequence, has fewer SATA ports available for larger traditional hard drive storage to be attached.It arrived at 09.30 this morning - ordered on the 21st December, arrived on the 22nd. Given the time of year and the fact that delivery services are doubtless at pretty much full capacity, I can only express my delight at this kind of service.Well done Amazon, especially as I snaffled this drive at a very much reduced price, I only paid £129.99 and free postage.Pleased with that, very pleased.As for the drive itself.......mixed impressions.Looks wise,think of a miniature TMA.1 from '2001: A Space Odyssey', and you've pretty much got the idea.Fingerprint magnet, but pleasingly minimalistic.There is a very slim, very subdued ( invisible in daylight ) blue light to show the thing is powered on, a power cable with a large number of plug adapters and an adequate - but only just adequate - in length USB 3 connector cable.You will need an extension cable if you intend to pop this on a shelf away from the PC.Plug it in, Windows 10 finds it, and off you go.Write speeds are slow, slow in the way a mogadon addicted sloth is slow.....but that was to be expected, really.I'm shifting around 5 TB of data to this device and at an average write speed of around 100 MB/s, sometimes only half that, peaking at around 170 MB/s, even after disabling hot swap in device manager, so I can see that this little operation is going to take a wee while to complete.Oh well, it'll soon be Christmas.Count on having to wait for around three and a half minutes to shift 10 GB data from your existing storage via the USB 3 cable and set your expectations to that level.Once the data is shifted, the read rates aren't too shoddy, coping with video playback perfectly well, although I cannot emphasise enough that this device will be highly unsuitable for game storage and play.All of which would make it seem like I'm complaining.I'm not. I'm really, really not. I'm delighted.This is a big drive.This drive, and the enclosure, cost me less than £130.That is insanely good value for money.The disk is spinning at 5425 RPM, and is, according to CrystalDiskInfo, an ST8000DM004 - 2CX188 model, with 8GB capacity, runs at 47 degrees C, and is dead quiet in operation.The enclosure feels ever-so-slightly warm to the touch after a period of extended hard use, but remains very quiet.You cannot get a naked drive with anything like this capacity for less than £170 retail, so, if like me, you are intending to shove a bunch of data onto it and only access that data once in a blue moon, this is a hell of a good buy.I personally rate Seagate drives quite highly, having owned numerous examples that have performed flawlessly over long periods of time.If this drive comes up to the durability standards of my previous Seagate drives, this will have been the perfect purchase for my needs.I'm actually struggling to see quite how Amazon and Seagate are managing to shift this unit at this price.If you can get this at the price I paid, go for it without even thinking. Just click.

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).

2.2.2019

Once or twice over the years I've wished that I had redundant copies of some important files (such as large libraries of photographs I've taken, and manuscripts of books I've written). I fixed this by using RAID disk arrays that make data a lot more secure, but in the event of disk failure they can be hard to get at without specialised software - so I opted to make other safety copies and backups on disks that are easier to access - which is where this comes in.High-capacity HDDs are also a worry of course, because when they fail they take away a *lot* of data in one go, so these are only used for remote copies of data that is mirrored elsewhere on entirely different devices.

19.3.2019

I bought this to back-up a home server. It came formatted in NTFS ready for use with Windows but it is also ready for use with other operating systems as well such as OS X and Linux. I connected it via the USB cable provided to a USB 3 port and mounted it in Linux where I proceeded to copy data to it. Unbelievably it only took around 5.5 hours to transfer almost 2TB of data onto it. I ran some tests in Windows afterwards and got some mixed results which seem to show that the drive is significantly faster at reading than it is at writing however since the speeds at which I was transferring data to the drive at surpassed that of the tests I can only assume that some caching happens in the process and that it varies a lot in speed depending on the size of the files being transferred to it.

1.6.2020

I'm always wary of things that say you can plug it in and use it straight out of the box... nothing to do with computers is that easy, is it? You have to turn this on and agree to that and read all kind of stuff, right? I'm not a new computer user and can handle the day to day use of a computer, but still have to pick the brains of my husband about things most days but I was determined to do my best to get this set up totally alone if I could, after all they made it sound really easy in the description so this would be a big test for it as far as I was concerned.I nervously plugged the two leads into the right holes,

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.

12.11.2019

An early Christmas present of a PS4 Pro console for the family saw me looking to buy another external HDD. Have already bought the same Seagate 6TB external HDD earlier this year when my son's X-Box One became full, and had no hesitation in coming back to buy another one. I even got a better deal as while I paid around £110 for the last one, this time I found one in the Amazon Warehouse for £85 simply because the packaging was damaged.Now while HDDs can fail, the simple fact is any brand of disc will give up over time, and some will be faulty straight out of the box. Nothing in life is perfect or lasts forever, but Seagate has been one of my go-to brands for many years. I have rarely had issues with any discs,

25.9.2016

This is about as simple as an external drive gets. And that's mostly a good thing, because for most people (using a modern version of Windows) it will be plug and play. The extra software supplied with more fancy drives for things like backup and encryption is at best unnecessary (since there are better alternatives freely available) and at worst a source of errors and frustration.My only criticisms, and why it loses one star, are where the simplicity and cost-cutting has perhaps gone too far. Unlike my previous Toshiba external drives, these have no power switch on the unit, which means (after using your operating system's Eject function) power down relies on you physically pulling the power plug or,

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

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,

18.3.2019

I bought 4 of these... 2 to store stuff, and two more to act as back-ups (if you're going to store upto 8TB of data, you really need to back it up in case the disk fails and all disks will one day fail as they have moving parts)...I store all my family photos and family videos etc. in RAW formats, not jpeg so one photo can easily be 100MB or more, and 4K family videos are usually several Gigabytes big, so I need the storage, and that means two drives, to upgrade from the dozen or so smaller drives I presently use!I ripped open two of the cases, and placed them inside my PC case, and they work great. Formatted to 64k per sector and the first drive took about 12 hours or so each to fill when attached via SATA cable,

5.4.2019

I want to begin this review by commenting on some of the bad reviews that this product has received.What needs to be understood is that hard disk drives fail. They can fail for any of a number of reasons, very few of which are to do with poor quality control by the manufacturers. Hard drive failures are just a fact of life.Now we come to all of those reviewers who have lost data due to a drive failure. Take if from me, with 20 years in the IT industry, you NEVER, NEVER only have a single copy of valuable data on a single hard drive.If the data you want to backup is so valuable to you, then make sure it is backed up on more than one drive.Buy two external drives (of different makes if you want to be really safe)

1.11.2018

I've given durability a 4 only because I've no idea how long it will last. I've had it for a couple of months now, without a hitch (touch wood), and I use it as an external drive for my PS4 Pro. It was so simple to install, even for a fool like me! I just watched a YouTube video to see what I had to pick on the PlayStation to install it, left it to it and it did the rest. I was back to gaming within a very short time, and having bought the 4Tb version, I'm hoping it will last a while with regards to memory space. Even the new Red dead redemption 2 didn't put a huge dent in it, and that file was just shy of 200Gb.It makes a small whirring when on, but not loud enough to be heard unless the room is silent,

Seagate Expansion Desktop 4TB (STEB4000200) - Reviews

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