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

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.

I hooked this hard drive (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TKFEEBW/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) with USB 3.0 to its USB Micro port. It transferred data like I expected - maybe 40Mbs transfer rate. I figured this would be a nice storage unit for my ArcGIS Imagery files which, in order to actually use tiled imagery in a live ArcMAP application or serve it to the public (which I am planning on doing) - I needed to utilize my IBM blade servers and all the fun it is to maintain any virtualization blade technology. Well, little did I know my brand new Lenovo ThinkPad P50, I7 Skylake, with 64GB of DDR4 RAM, 4GB 3-channel RAM with GPU technology. I thought if I beefed up the laptop with RAM, CPU, and Video card I would be set... WRONG! My P50 came with an Intel Thunderbolt 3 port onboard. I did some research an purchased a USB 3.1 TYPE-C adapter (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013G4D0GC/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) for $10. (Compatible with my Thunderbolt 3 port or course.) I hooked the USB 3.0 into the adapter and WOW! The data transfer speeds increased by 5X. I then purchased a $15 Thunderbolt USB power hub and a 20GBs USB TYPE-C cable to attach it to. I have 4 devices running on ONE thunderbolt 3 HUB - 1) Samsung EVO 850 PRO SSD using the SATA III adapter. 2) This 5TB External Hard Drive. 3) 1TB SATA III 2.5 HD I had laying around - using the same SATA-USB adapter as the SSD. 4) An cheap USB 3.0 DVD writer (Laptop Didnt come with one). All devices are powered by the TB3 port. My point is: when you purchase your next computer - get an Intel thunderbolt 3 port onboard. I am cancelling my cloud service with ESRI (that hosts my data) and am going to daisy-chain four Thunderbolt 3 external hard drives. My data transfer rate will be a minimum of 220mbs for each device. That is fast enough to serve my GIS data and FTP service for all my clients. I am switching my P50 to Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter edition. That will allow me unlimited VMs and external drives that are fast enough to host them on the TB3 external drives. For the first time, I can install my Oracle service and point the tablespaces to external sources - take the load off my CPU and let the INTEL chipset transfer data to my web server @ 40Gbs - and let the client machines do the rest.

Removed from external enclosure, used as internal drive, dead after 3 months... Seagate says no to warranty. UPDATE I contacted Seagate about a warranty and they said I should not have used an external drive as an internal drive. I not only used the external drive as an internal drive but I had all of my steam games on it and it was running constantly. Seagate first said they would not replace it that it was not their policy. I wrote back and told them it was not my policy to purchase another drive from the same manufacturer when this one only lasted three months. This was when they wrote back and told me that external drives were not designed to withstand the rigors that drives designed to be internal were designed to withstand. Then they kindly said they would, this time only, replace my drive with a refurbished drive and they would also replace it with a refurbished internal drive designed to withstand the data reads and writes that I was subjecting the drive to. So I learned two valuable lessons... Lesson 1, dont trust your data on a drive that was sold as external re-purposed for internal when subjecting that same drive to other rigorous use. This is also why external drives usually cost less even though they have an extra enclosure included. The 2nd lesson is that Seagate is a great company and they go out of their way to keep you as a customer as long as you can be reasonable and understand things also from their point of view too. If I ever do re-purpose an external drive internally, it will only be to store data and not to use it with constant video streams and loading and unloading gaming data for hours on end. I hope this helps others avoid the same mistake I have made. I have another internal Seagate drive that I bought 6 months before, this internal one is still going strong. Dont try and save a few bucks by re-purposing an external drive internally. Dont use an external drive for gaming unless that is all you use it for, and your games are also saved cloud based. Definitely do not use an external drive for both your data and gaming. That is a recipe for disaster.

Archivo

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.

I bought 8x of the 5 TB drives. I have used 3 of them so far and will be using the rest shortly. After formatting they have 4.54Tb of usable space which is expected. I have been using the drives to backup my network server for off site archival purposes. The three I have used so far, I immediately ran a CHKDSK /f/r to determine the health of the disk itself. No bad sectors reported on them. I will test the remaining drives once the first three are full. I have not yet seen any issues with these drives and am very happy with the price point. after seeing so many people talk about dead or failing drives, with 8x of them purchased, I will make sure to update this review with more details as I get them. edit: 2/28/2019: still no issues with all 8x drives Edit 4/10/2019: I upgraded my computer to one with usb3 and I can now properly review data speeds. I use these drives as backups of my multi TB nas. I copy sustained data rates of 108 to 115 MB/S during the entire 4.5 TB of usable space on the disk. I am only being limited by my GB Ethernet network connection. Very happy with these drives that I just bought 2 more today.

This is an excellent storage device. I have had no problems with it. It is reasonably fast, quiet, runs cool and has been very dependable with not an issue during the months I have had it. I have used 4 terabytes so far on this drive without an issue. It has been very dependable and a very good drive. My understanding (through a Youtube review) is that this is the same drive sold for internal use in computers. It has been fitted in a case and plugs into an adaptor within the case for use with a USB in my computer. Initially being an internal computer drive it can be removed from the case and used as an internal drive should you wish to do so. Mounting screws are included on the drive. To keep it cool I have removed the top part of the case to allow better circulation (which voids what warrantee it has I am sure). My understanding is with drives such as this is that they become very hot inside their cases and so I removed the top part of the case to keep it cool. After hours of use it is barely warm to the touch, just a very small amount of heat...just enough to be slightly warm to the touch. This is an excellent drive and I highly recommend it.

First thing to note is that these are SMR drives. What is SMR? It means Shingled Magnetic Recording, basically the data on the drive is written overlapped like shingles on a roof. This means you can get more data on each disk platter, hence less platters for a given size and thus the drive is cheaper. Ok thats great right? Well the problem is this DRASTICALLY slows down the write speed for long sequential writes. It can get bogged down during large writes and become very very slow, like 10MB/s on average slow. Reads are fine it is only writing that is affected. That being said, the SMR technology does make this drive one of the best for $s/TB on the market, just dont expect amazing performance from it. You definitely get what you pay for, and for its intended purpose as a backup drive it works fine. I cant speak for the long term reliability as I havent had them for very long, but it has a 1 year warranty (most drives have a 2 or 3 year). The warranties are specifically calculated to balance between how cheap the manufacturer can go on the components and how many RMAs they will get when a certain expected % of the components fail. I wouldnt expect to get 5 years out of this drive, not that its not possible but you are relatively lucky if you do. Summary: -SMR = slow writes -Only 1 year warranty = components of meh quality -For the price and purpose, not a bad drive

I bought this over 6 years ago and its still going strong without showing any signs that its going to fail soon. The key to making it last is to not move it while is running and keep it away from vibrations. (Like having it on a desk that you drop stuff on. Any jolt like that has the potential of damaging it over time) I have mine on a separate shelf with my battery backups to avoid problems.

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.