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

This is an older drive that has been in daily use for several years. I bought it when the 5 TB drives first came out. I gave it four stars for capacity because now there are many drives with much more capacity. When I decided to switch operating systems with the next computer I bought, I stopped buying internal drives. The PC that I was using when I purchased this drive was finally replaced a few years ago with a Mac. One of the nice things about a USB drive is that when you switch operating systems you just plug it in to the new machine and reformat it to use on the new system. (back it up first). I like the way Mac OS manages the Seagate USB drives. When they are not in use, my Mac totally powers them down. As I have several external hard drives for different projects that is nice. I keep my operating system and program files on the internal SSD drive so even with my data on USB drives my machine is still fast where it counts. If you have other data that is mission critical and you need instant access, you can keep that drive spun up all of the time. As my drives are idle 90% of the time, I like that they are not wearing out while I am working on a file in RAM. I have a couple of Western Digital USB drives that I use to back up my critical data. The Mac OS does not seem to power them down. So when they are idle (even unmounted) they stay on standby. I back up once a week so afterward I power down my computer to make sure the buffers are written to the hard drives then turn off the surge protector for those drives. Otherwise the flashing lights bug me all week until the next backup. This Seagate drive has been a workhorse and has had no problems for its entire life so far.

Very Nice XBOX or PS5 storage device

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...

You were brought to this product because you are in search of a new extended storage. Well, the Seagate Expansion 5TB Desktop External Hard Drive is fast, mobile, durable, and very cost friendly. While the primary purpose of the expansion is to be used for desktop computers, I use mine for my PS4. After having just a few games downloaded on my PS4, my storage was already getting full. This is when I started to search for a new type of storage, and stumbled upon the Seagate expansion. A few aspects that can sway your decision when buying this product are, as stated earlier, speed, mobility, durability, and cost. 1. Speed is a very important aspect for external hard drives. I was surprised at how fast this product could transfer over games from my current hard drive. Depending on the speed of the Wi-Fi, it would take about 10 minutes to complete a transfer. For a comparison, if you have a baseline 65 mb/s internet speed, the average game would take you 30 minutes to download. 2. Most external hard drives are not easy to move around since they will most likely sit in once spot. The length, width, and height of the expansion are 7.1 x 4.7 x 1.5 inches. It also only weighs 2.1 pounds, where competitors usually weigh more. I move this product from my hometown house to my college house frequently and it is very easy to find space for it. 3. I do take very good care of products that I purchase, but I have dropped this product a few times. It did not skip a beat when I would start it back up and it ran as quick and as smooth as it had previously. 4. The cost is what makes this product so appealing. I bought it for $130 at the time, and have had it since the beginning of May 2017. You will find princes for 5TB extended storages ranging anywhere from $100 to $500. The price of the Seagate 5TB extended storage is very reasonable, especially for the quality of the product. If you are searching for a new extended storage for your PlayStation, or any system, I would highly recommend purchasing the Seagate Expansion. This product is Fast, mobile, durable and very cost efficient. It will be very tough to find a product as good as it on the market, with the same functions.

I have a confusing assortment of external hard drives of different sizes with different backup sets distributed among them--family photos in some; business photos in another; documents in a third--a real mess to keep track of and to remember to back up. To add insult to injury, each time Windows 10 does a significant update, my system stops recognizing an old drive and you stand to lose whats in it if you dont have an old Windows 7 computer somewhere to rescue the contents. The last time this happened, I decided to get a drive big enough to put everything into. Everything fits in here and backing up, while still a hassle, is more manageable. I dont use their automatic backup software because 1) it isnt particularly good and I seldom hear of anyone happy with it; and 2) I end up with redundant copies of files all over the place (which could quickly fill up even this drive). Anytime you re-name a file (say you change the camera-assigned number for a descriptive name) or re-name a folder or move a file or folder from one place to another, the original copy remains where it was unless you remember to physically remove it. Without their software trying to manage my files, Im able to manually rename and control what goes where and what its called. The drive works fine. Its silent and doesnt get hot. The two USB slots in the front are a big help. It is a little slow in the initial seeding of my backup files, but that might be because many of my image files are pretty huge.

Fouth one I have bought in last couple years. Run them 24/7 with no failures so far. Seagate has been more durable than other manufacturers.

This was actually my second Seagate external hard drive. My first was only 2 TB so when looking for an upgrade I was expecting the same reliability I have seen in the past. This was actually a gift from my wife to me for my birthday so I really appreciate it. Ease of use: Extremely easy as its plug and play on my windows 10 pc. All I had to do was plug in and it was ready to use. Reliability: Here is what got me to 5 stars. First in general its just plain out fast. A lot faster than my older model. And im not only referring to moving data back and forth but also coming out of sleep mode easily less than 3 seconds give or take. The sole purpose for me having this drive is for my media center. Im using it as storage for all my music, movies and pictures for my Plex server. As I have particular libraries shared with my family I have multiple people streaming at any given time and have yet to see any issues with drive performance. I have to say that I would def recommend this to anyone looking for an upgrade at a reasonable price for storage. I do have one negative comment, and that is a usual one for external drives so it should come as no shock. The reason I got an external for my media center rather than internal was the fact that when I travel especially out of the country I take my movies with me. That being said, this unit requires it own power supply as other smaller drives utilizing USB 3.0 can take power from whatever they are plugged into. Again, that being said, still doesnt take away from the performance gains I have see with the drive, let alone the capacity upgrade.

First off, i was wary of the number of review stars on this drive since A) its a seagate which seems to get a bad rap as of late, and B) most of the 5-star reviews are vine voice reviews of free products. Over the last year or so ive come to the conclusion that these elite reviewers would rather keep their free stuff coming than provide honest reviews... but who am I to judge... id probably do the same. Rant aside, this drive is fast as hell. I was surprised how quickly it comes out of sleep mode (~ 2 seconds vs the 10-15 it takes my old(er) WD 3.0TB drive). I ran a long SMART check that came back clean and ive copied about a TB of stuff over to it. Zero complaints so far... but as others have said, well see how it fares in the long-term. If I needed another 5TB right now, I wouldnt hesitate on buying another one of these. Amazon packing was a little sketchy... the air bags stopped the HD from moving horizontally in the box, but not vertically. Other than that, im happy with this purchase. (Update 06/29/2016) Drive is used daily and still comes back clean with long SMART tests. Still very satisfied with this drive. (Update 02/16/2018) Now being used as a nvr drive for 10, 4MP ip cameras -- pretty much constant writes for over a year and still going strong. Id comfortably say this drive has exceeded my expectations.

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.

My Apple Time Capsule failed a few weeks ago. I went to the Apple Store to get another...only to find out that Time Capsule is a discontinued product. This did not leave me pleased, since we have a number of computers in this home that use the time capsule to access the internet and backup data. So, I bought a new router and this 6TB hard drive from Amazon to recreate the Time Capsule function. After a few minutes of reading, I was able to configure the router to recognize the hard drive. A few clicks in the Time Capsule applications, and computers started backing up to the new drive. I think I am all set...and I have enough capacity that I will not worry about local storage for many years. Yes, I also back up in the cloud, but I have become accustomed to relying on the Time Capsules ability to go back in time to recover files that may have been changed incorrectly or corrupted. BTW: For computer historians, I bought a 20 MB hard drive in 1986 for $1,295. So this drive cuts the cost per bit by over 3 million times!