Seagate Expansion Desktop Hard Drive 8TB HDD External - PC Windows PS4 & Xbox - USB 2.0 & 3.0 Black (STEB8000100)

Pros: Plug and play simple setup Internal drive: Seagate ST2000DM001 which uses 1 TB platters The activity light is a dull blue that isn’t bothersome or overly bright while in use The setup.exe file on the drive loads a page to register your drive with Seagate very easily and quickly. Performance results: Crystal Disk Mark: • Sequential: Read = 190.0 MB/s, Write = 146.9 MB/s • 512k: Read = 64.21 MB/s, Write = 95.23 MB/s • 4k: Read = 0.752 MB/s, Write = 6.547 MB/s • 4k QD32: Read = 0.638 MB/s, Write = 7.896 MB/s ATTO Disk Benchmark: • Read: 190.88 MB/sec • Write: 155.32 MB/sec HD Tune • Minimum: 88.0 MB/s • Maximum: 153.26 MB/s • Average: 109.9 MB/s • Access Time: 14.7 ms • Burst Rate: 122.2 MB/s Power Consumption • Idle – 5.2 Watts • Load – 8.6 Watts Maximum Temperature while testing: 107.6 °F

Cons: The drive makes a noticeable and possibly annoying humming sound when powered on. No rubber feet on either side for horizontal placement only vertical. One year warranty isn’t very good considering if you bought the internal drive this unit utilizes it would have a 2 year warranty. Wish they used a regular USB type B instead of a micro type B as the micro version is very weak, flimsy and easily broken compared to the non-micro version. As others have stated a power button would be a nice change to this device as it just powers on once you plug in the USB cable. So if it stays at one computer it’s always going to be on with your computer which may or may not be desirable.

Overall Review: Overall this external drive offers very good performance for reads and writes in a pleasant looking and small package. I would definitely recommend this drive if you have a USB 3.0 connection as it gets the job done well at an affordable price. *All tests were conducted three times to ensure accuracy and repeatability of results.

Pros: The Seagate Expansion 2TB USB 3.0 drive is a fantastic unit. With digital photos, games, movies, tv shows, mobile device backups, and much more to store on modern-day machines, it's nice to know that you can plug in a drive as additional storage or for redundancy of data as is my case. This drive is advertised as working with Windows 8/8.1 but it's a USB controller connected to an HDD so it will work with any machine with a USB port regardless of OS. The drive runs cool to the touch even when running my Mac OS X Time Machine backups. I also transferred 1.2TB of data in bulk between my machine and then copied all of the data onto other redundant storage --the transfer was exceptionally quick. I was actually surprised how fast the drive read and wrote over USB 3.0 since it is a standard spindle drive and not an SSD. The unit is simple, plug it in, format to desired file system, and off you go. I've reformatted this unit 5 times now (Mac OS Journaled, Mac OS Journaled Case Senstive, exfat, FAT, and NTFS) and each iteration worked as expected. I ran CCleaner's free space cleaning on the device and it performs as well as internal drives on most of my other machines. Would definitely buy a higher capacity drive in the future should the need arise. A+, Seagate!

Cons: No native ability to upgrade/replace drive. I'm sure you could pop the unit open and put in a new HDD if you wanted to increase capacity or replace it with solid state storage but that's a known factor going into purchasing this unit and not worth taking away any stars. The only real complaint I have is the size of the power plug. The transformer is enclosed in the plug itself which means the plug becomes a huge monstrosity taking up multiple slots on my power strip. Having the plug either be modular (think laptop power supply) or formatted like a slim plug adapter (eg. macbook pro charger/netgear power plugs) such that the unit would only take up one space and just would end up being tall, this would be much better.

Overall Review: Overall I'm very happy with the unit. I currently just leave it as extra storage on my CloudStation NAS which seems to be the best use for me. The CloudStation has 2.0TB as well, so this is a simple redundant drive. I would definitely recommend these units to friends and family looking to expand storage capacity on a laptop or otherwise.

Pros: First off, it has a nice design that blends into your desk without sticking out like a sore thumb. It is extremely quiet even while transferring files. My older Freeagent drive is noticeably louder because it clicks and then spools up...this one makes no noise at all that I can hear. As far as speed, writing a large video file to the drive using USB 3.0 port bounces between 190MB/sec and 210MB/sec. Transferring the same file back to my SATA 6.0Gb/sec internal drive it bounces between 300MB/sec and 350MB/sec. If this drive holds up, it is way faster than any other external mechanical drive I have owned.

Cons: The only con I can come up with is the USB 3.0 cord is only 3 feet long...your computer better be directly under where you place this on your desk, or it won't reach!

Overall Review: Seems to be a very solid, fast-performing drive.

Pros: Sturdy packaging. It’s a hard disk drive, an item not well known for it’s tolerance for shock and impact. The packaging reflects this. Clean elegant aesthetics. The enclosure has a very nice look to it and doesn’t use that awful high gloss plastic that’s only marketable use is for collecting greasy fingerprints. The single LED DOES look nice, and fits with the uncluttered look of the enclosure, but it’s positiong is problematic (see Cons). Plug and play. Pretty self explanatory. The quick set up guide lists two steps: 1. Attach power cable, 2. Attach data cable. Up and running in about 30 seconds. No gimmicky applications included, just a preconfigured external hard drive.

Cons: Indication LED is top mounted, rather than the standard front mount. Why even put an LED on it if it’s just going to dictate where you’re able to place the drive in order to be able to see it? Housing feels like it’s made of very cheap plastic. Very rarely do I receive items for review that I have to give negative marks on quality, at worst, it’s a split, but this whole drive’s housing is made of some very flimsy plastic. I seriously think one major impact to the housing would shatter it. I own another Seagate external drive which is made of much much sturdier plastic, it is a year older than this one however. Only has rubber feet to support it being stood up vertically. Maybe they want to discourage people stacking stuff on it? I don’t know, but depending on where you maybe forced to place the drive, it would be highly advantageous to not force you into one positioning option. Running the included setup application fails to take you to the Seagate product registration page (which is where I suspect it’s attempting to take you based on the URL). Fairly easily worked around, but why do I need to do that? 1 year warranty is a joke. I started buying hard drives back when they came with 5 year standard warranties across the whole industry, a 5 year warranty today would be absurd, but I don’t see the average user using this drive up and throwing it away even inside that span. I certainly don’t think it’s OK for Seagate to throw their hands up and say “Well, we can’t guarantee the lifespan of this product for more than 12 months!”. That kind of rationale speaks volumes more to me than my other (fairly) petty gripes with this product. On top of the above point, the drive enclosure has no visible hardware indicating how it can be opened up. Appears to be non user serviceable, in other words.

Overall Review: Some real world benchmarks. The files transferred consisted of a mix of large single archival files, and lots of small media and data files. The typical mix of things that a user would want to transfer in the real world. My computers C:\ was used for the transfers. It is a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro series SSD. 100GB transfer onto the drive at an average speed of 75MB/s over USB3.0 100GB transfer onto the drive at an average speed of 12MB/s over USB2.0 100GB transfer onto my C:\ drive at an average speed of 90MB/s over USB3.0 100GB transfer onto my C:\ drive at an average speed of 30MB/s over USB2.0 My final thoughts on this drive are simple: the warranty is not to be trusted. The drive I received is perfectly functional and has been working flawlessly for the better part of three weeks, but in a culture of planned obsolescense, I don’t have a great feeling about only having one year of protection for something that easily has a five year useful lifespan, minimum. I went and looked at Seagates offerings for standalone 8TB drives, and they all have the (current) industry standard 3 year warranty. Considering that, my advice would be to buy a stand alone drive and an external enclosure. It’s unforunate, because I like the all in one plug and play package, and besides my beef with the warranty, my other complaints were fairly minor. However, considering the fact I’m sacrificing two years of warranty protection for the plug and play simplicity, I would go a different route.

Pros: First, the basics. This is an "archive" grade disk in a plastic, fanless enclosure. It is not intended for gaming, video editing, high-demand NAS applications, etc. If that's what you need, just go right now and search for something else. (Hint: It's going to cost you more -- that's just how it is, you'll have to deal with that or blame yourself when you set this drive on fire because you didn't listen to me.) This drive is a good place to put weekly backups, old DVD images that you just want to archive, maybe video editing projects AFTER they're done that you just need to store. If your application sounds as demanding as this sort of thing, then this is a drive you might consider. The pros here are easy: speed and size. I'm listing speed as a pro because this is not an SSD or even an internal drive. This is a USB 3.0 external drive, and for my tests, under ideal circumstances, it makes good use of that bandwidth and performs as well as you could expect. The size is, of course, 8TB which is as big as these things really get right now. Here are the test results. Parts of what is listed might be considered negative; I'll discuss those parts in the cons section below. This was all using Crystal Disk Mark. 9 rounds 100MB test: Sequential Read: 190.1 MB/s Sequential Write: 142.4 MB/s Random Read 512KB: 83.6 MB/s Random Write 512KB: 20.5 MB/s Random Read 4KB: 1.7 MB/s Random Write 4KB: 7.4 MB/s This first test seemed to go haywire on the 4KB read, so I tried again: 5 round 50MB retest: Random Read 4KB: 16.5 MB/s Random Write 4KB: 7.3 MB/s It was clearly a fluke, something made the drive hang on one of the nine passes bad enough to throw the average way off. It is clear that this drive struggles to do things like random R/W, especially smaller chunks. It's not designed to do that. It's a massive, inexpensive hard drive. What did you expect? Even when it struggled through the tougher tests, it didn't get too hot (36 C). I did a few more tests just putting some stress on it. A file transfer of about 85GB of mixed media files (music and movies) ranging from 2MB to 4GB each. This test was constrained by speed of the older external HDD source, maxing out at about 35-40 MB/s steady ideally. The transfer ran at about 25-35 MB/s for larger files, about 15-20 MB/s for smaller, with regular peaking at 50ish and 8ish. It hit about 40 C about 5-10 minutes in, then slowly climbed to 50 C for the rest of the transfer. That's where I got a warning from disk monitoring utilities that the drive is getting close to serious heat, but not into critical levels. The 85 GB transfer took about an hour, but as I said, this Seagate was not the bottleneck. Verification took about 25 minutes at 2.7 MB/s (that's just a read through for checksum match). Even after an hour, sitting still and powered off, it was still at 46 C -- there is no fan, and even the passive cooling on this thing is awful. Another file transfer, 6.6GB file copied from an internal SSD took 2 minutes, pretty steady at 100+ MB/s. This is what you expect from a USB 3.0 HDD like this. I then formatted with encryption, the whole drive manually (including empty space). It took about 24 hours (which is typical and reasonable), and the temp plateaued at about 54 C. Then I reformatted back to nonencrypted and loaded it up with a huge volume of mixed file types / sizes. From a slower external USB drive, it managed 19 MB/s average (200 GB transferred). From an internal drive, it got up to 103 MB/s average (500 GB transferred). So it's doing fine on transfer speed, although during both of these tests, when the drive is really going for a couple hours, it will hit 55 C or even a bit higher.

Cons: So first, I'll point out that Seagate itself says its drives should not operate higher than 50 C. I think running at 55 C is probably not a death sentence or even a big worry, but it is an issue. Keep in mind, this was a brand new drive with more than adequate ventilation. Stack up a few of these, or accidentally drop a hand towel on top of it, the heat will become a serious issue. But, frankly, this drive runs hot. If you are writing out a big set of data, doing large backups, etc. -- even tasks this drive is meant for and in idea conditions -- this drive will get quite hot. Hot enough to have a meltdown and die? Probably not. But hot enough to shorten the lifespan of the product and/or increase the risk of data loss or other issues in the future? Maybe. I guess Seagate didn't want to raise the price of drives by $5 each by putting in just a little fan or anything. That brings me to problem number 2... This drive has a one year warranty. An external drive, put together in a nice little package, something that Seagate should be entirely responsible for. They can't back it up for more than one year? Maybe they are going to fail too often, or maybe somebody doing the actuarial tables over there thought they'd save enough money denying RMAs in month 13 to lower the price on this thing. But as a consumer, I don't care about statistics or bottom lines, I care about the quality of the goods. This warranty is just plain not good enough. The fact that the item doesn't even appear to exist anywhere except a couple online retailers. If Seagate doesn't list this product and doesn't offer much of a warranty on it, that makes me worry. I've been on the wrong end of RMAs and I think Seagate has a mediocre track record, at best. (Not that there aren't WAY worse ones out there, but I won't name names.) The speed (see above) is not great for random R/W, particularly in small chunks. This disk is what it is -- good for archival uses. However, higher quality 8TB drives exist, and external enclosures for such drives exist. I find it hard to argue that this drive has a special purpose that justifies its less-than-average performance if the value isn't there. The price on 8TB drives is coming down, and I'm not seeing much value here, especially considering the other two points I've made (heat/bad enclosure and warranty length). So I've listed speed as a pro and a con. It's up to you to decide how you want to split that hair. Again, it's a matter of value vs. quality, or maybe it's a bit of luck -- choosing a brand, model, size, speed, etc. for a drive is tricky but sometimes it comes down to luck when it comes to DOAs or early drive failures. If this product is the right product for you, that's good, but it might also be that some other product can do the job (or even better jobs) at a similar price. That's the "shopping" aspect of this that a single-item review like this can't help you too much with...

Overall Review: I had a tough time deciding between 3 and 4 stars, but I eventually made my decision because this drive is new and already seems like it's going to get made obsolete before it's even useful to somebody. Wait a month and buy something better, or put together something better yourself for an extra $20. I don't see this drive becoming a staple of people's desktop PC tech before it's already too slow, unreliable, or unnecessary compared to better options, which are already creeping down into the same tier of affordability. That's -1 egg. The other -1 is for the warranty, not just because such a warranty automatically gets you -1 egg. Really, it's how that 1-year warranty appears in this situation. The "optics" if you know that new use of the term. This is a value-priced item that has nearly cutting-edge size. It comes in an enclosure that has poor passive cooling and no active cooling (and as we see, a heat issue). Replacing (or even opening) the case voids the warranty. Operating the drive above 50 C doesn't void the warranty, but it's not what Seagate recommends. So it's a little box of contradictions, and that worries me, especially given that we know it isn't the most mechanically adept device (hence the low speeds on the random R/W 4KB chunk tests). And, to be honest, the DOA reports I see when I look at reviews in aggregate make me think that the -1 for insultingly short warranty period says something about how little Seagate expects you to get out of these drives. For a drive that might serve as a backup, keep that in mind. Back up your cat photos here, and when it dies, your PC will survive long enough to get a replacement external HDD. Don't back up critical stuff. And let's be real. We all have 8TB of cat photos, right? Maybe that's just me. If I could, I'd give it 3.5 eggs, because together, I don't think these two issues are worth a full egg each for -2. There's enough good going on here that it's better than the average 3-egg review I might give. But I can't say it earned a full 4 eggs. (Shouldn't egg-based reviews be out of 6 or 12? That's how I buy my eggs.) Newegg EggXpert reviewers like me receive this item for free, so keep that in mind. We try to keep our reviews honest, and I hope this one has been honest. This is an item that's trying to split the difference between low-budget consumer needs and hitting that nearly-cutting-edge mark of 8TB. That's tough, and you can't blame Seagate if this isn't a perfect product -- if you buy this, you aren't willing to pay for the most perfect item out there (which would be some sweet $600 8TB drive that has stellar support, great QC, 5 year warranty, and an extra $90 for the most awesome external enclosure that exists). There are other options, with Seagate or otherwise: You can always try Seagate's other lines (e.g. "Backup Plus") which now also come in 8TB. Or buy a Seagate internal drive ("archive" grade or regular) and throw it in an enclosure. But for the price, if you think this works for you, and you've read my review (and others) and think you want to go for it, I wouldn't recommend against it. This drive could very well be what you need. Just be sure you've thought it over, because it's not general purpose and it may not be up to the task (or might be too much of a rolling-the-dice situation in terms of quality). That's for you to decide. Keep in mind we EggXperts also can't wait too long to review. I'd love to run this product hard for a year and let you guys know that it lasts long, but I've only had it for about 20 days. For all I know, every single one of these lasts 100 years ... or maybe every single one dies on day 21. Longevity is very unpredictable for products that are new to the market or are hitting new high marks in size, speed, etc. (or low points in price). And if you're wondering about this "line" of drives, you can always uncheck the box that says "Item Specific Reviews" and you'll see all the ratings for this drive in every variation (in this case, in every size). For some things (e.g. headphones that come in different colors), this is a MUST when you want to read reviews right. For these drives, it gives you a good idea of how reliable or good the NON-drive parts of this product are. It won't tell you about this 8TB drive though, which itself is VERY different from its 2-5TB cousins. Oh and one final thought -- the software that comes with drives is, and has been for 20 years, totally irrelevant. Don't even bother. Some of the diagnostics are mildly useful, but the backup software etc. are not worth your time. If you are serious about backups, you need to pay for the software separately. Don't make your decision based on what comes with the drive.

Pros: Huge amount of storage! Fast data transfer with USB 3. The drive itself is very light and quiet. The drive case has a pleasant appearance, which is nice if you plan on putting it on your desk. The drive does not get excessively hot (> 50C), even with extensive use. It comes with a 4 foot USB 3 cable.

Cons: Perhaps the only real negative is the fact that it is a little bit expensive, although not for a drive of this size. 8 GB is on the high end of portable drive capacity. The other thing is that it is a 3.5” form factor drive, meaning it needs an AC adapter, unlike 2.5” form factor drives, which can be powered from the USB port. One additional minor complaint is the AC adapter itself. It will almost certainly take up more than 1 spot on your surge suppressor/power strip (up to 3 on mine).

Overall Review: I used the drive to back up every computer in my house, and it functioned perfectly. On computers with USB 3, data transfer was super fast. USB 2 is a little slow, but that is not the fault of this drive. With a USB 3 connection, I was able to back up some computers (including a full drive image) in less than one hour. In benchmarking, the drive compared well with internal SATA drives when plugged into a USB 3 port, and the temperature never exceeded 45C. High drive temperatures have been somewhat correlated with premature drive failure. Of course, putting the drive in an enclosed space with no air circulation would make it run much hotter. Overall I would say that this is a really nice portable hard drive and I would recommend it, mostly due to its massive capacity, portable size and excellent performance (fast and quiet).

Pros: * Performs as fast as internal Hard Drive * Quiet Operation * Inconspicuous Design

Cons: * Only a 1 year warranty * Lack of power button * Proprietary USB cable

Overall Review: The Seagate STEB2000100 appears to be a solid offering from Seagate. Packaging was good. It has a plain exterior which blends in and the LED light is not to bright. There is venting that allows for decent cooling, I personally never saw over 45C temps during testing with extended file transfers. Performance is very similar to my 2TB Seagate internal drive. Pushing a couple dozen large 8-12GB files, both drives sustained average 95-105 MB/sec transfer speeds. Synthetic benchmarks show performance similarities: SEAGATE STEB2000100 External Drive: * MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s] Sequential Read : 181.839 MB/s Sequential Write : 129.614 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 51.059 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 74.765 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.487 MB/s [ 118.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 7.384 MB/s [ 1802.7 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.592 MB/s [ 144.5 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.927 MB/s [ 226.3 IOPS] Test : 1000 MB [I: 0.4% (7.0/1863.0 GB)] (x5) SEAGATE 2TB SATA3 Internal Drive: * MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s] Sequential Read : 176.721 MB/s Sequential Write : 169.357 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 48.094 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 65.060 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.377 MB/s [ 92.1 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.850 MB/s [ 207.5 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.861 MB/s [ 210.2 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.866 MB/s [ 211.4 IOPS] Test : 1000 MB [D: 11.3% (209.7/1863.0 GB)] (x5) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Overall, I am pleased with the drive. My only complaints are the short warranty period, lack of a power button and the proprietary USB connection that plugs into the drive instead of a standard USB 3.0 for both ends. The price of $89 is fair for the capacity and performance.

Pros: I still think this is a good drive but I dropped a star for heat problem.

Cons: No fan for cooling down this drive in my opinion is going to create problems in stability in the future. I just copied a 100 gig file over to this drive and it reached 50c. I just added a fan to the top of enclosure and it is idle at 29c now.I will update at a later date with more updates.

Overall Review: Still a good price for the size of this drive.