This is my first try with Seagate in a long time (mostly a HGST guy). Inside this case is Seagate's Archive hard drive which OEM bare drive retails for $249. So for $179 it's a steal. (read about the Archive drive on Seagates website)
USB 3.0 interface was fast. Tested empty drives formatted in HFS and ExFAT, both were a constant 180-190 MB per second read/write. After the drive was 90% full, large files peaked at 100MBps read and write, and smaller files averaged around 64MBps write, 80 read. Decent. Been running 6 of these for a week now 24/7 and have had no problems. All files have transferred and verified. And I performed a complete sector scan verify on one of them with no issues reported using SoftRAID for OSX.
Cases are plastic so they're not the best for heat dissipation, but the drive itself sits in a metal bracket inside the case which helps. The case has vent holes on the bottom for some reason instead of the top, and holes on the back, but nothing on the front. I've been keeping a small fan on them as I've been copying and verifying for 24/7 for a few days. Probably not best to run 24/7 unless there's some cooling on them or they're in a very cold room. But I don't imagine most people will be running them at full tilt for days on end.
I would buy these and take the drives out of their cases and put into a NAS. I'm curious how they'd perform long term.
Seagate is doing everyone a disservice by advertising this as a standard-duty desktop expansion drive. It's not.
The drive inside this is a Seagate Archive drive. It's meant for long-term archival of data, and it's designed to spend most of it's time in spin-down idle.
Every operation, except for sequential reads, is slow. For backups, this isn't a big deal, but for normal use as an expansion drive it's not good.
Unplug this drive from the computer when you're not using it to make sure it spins down. They aren't meant for 24x7 operation - put your backup onto it, then stash it somewhere.
Easy to shuck and works great in my Unraid server. If you're looking for a lot of space this is probably one of the best options to get the most "bang for your buck". This is about $100 cheaper than buying an internal 8TB SATA drive...yet that's exactly what's inside. Not much else to say except that I didn't use the USB functionality of this device so I can't comment on that. The USB interface, however, is relatively small and can easily be attached to another SATA drive, so you could use it to interface with other SATA drives over USB if you wanted.
This drive offers a great price in terms of capacity. The price you pay is in performance. Since the drive uses shingle technology the read and write performance suffers as shown in the images. If performance is not important it is a great value.
So I do shuck these drives. I don't use them in their external enclosures. So if you want to know how they perform as external drives, I unfortunately can't offer you any assistance there. But if you remove the hard drives from these enclosures for internal use. I can help you.
These drives are amazing. I've been buying them when they go on sell from Amazon and other retailers. I've purchased about five total and so far they have all been Barracuda or Barracuda Pro's. I also test the drive before I shuck it (remove it from it's enclosure).. and have yet to get one DOA. They've been going very strong in my unraid server which primarily runs Plex, but I also use it with programs like handbrake. So they do receive a constant amount of data being written and modified on them. They stay cool. They run quiet. And lastly, they run perfect. Will continue to buy these for all of my large storage needs.
Feature Product
- Enjoy enormous desktop storage space for years to come for photos, movies, music, and more
- Designed to work with Windows computers, this external USB drive makes backup easy with a simple drag-and-drop
- Setup is easy! Just connect the external hard drive to your Windows computer for automatic recognition-no software required
- Includes an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and 18W power adapter
- Enjoy long-term peace of mind with the included one-year limited warranty
Description
Ideal for the home, office, or dorm, Seagate Expansion Desktop offers enormous desktop storage for photos, movies, music, and more. Backing up and transferring content is incredibly easy—just drag and drop! To get set up, connect the USB hard drive to a Windows computer for automatic recognition—no software required. For Mac computers, simply reformat. Included is an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and 18W power adapter.
I just experienced internal drive failure on a 2014 iMac running Sierra. After days of continued OS re-install's and crashing - and trying to reformat and "first-aid" the 3TB Fusion drive, it failed completely and left me with 121GB of working drive space, leaving the remainder unrecognizable.
I installed High-Sierra onto that portion of the drive and I'm utilizing my 3TB WD backup drive as my file disk. But at least I have a working computer.
Anyway, I ordered the 8TB Seagate Expansion and plugged it in yesterday. I went to format it using High Sierra and I experienced the same problem in Disk Utility - the drive split into two drives - but this time, neither partition could be formatted by Disk Utility in High Sierra. I tried everything but to no avail. I immediately requested a replacement drive from amazon and they shipped it out yesterday. FANTASTIC support from Amazon, as ususal.
This is where it gets tricky - the replacement drive is on it's way and my return label all set to go...............and then I got a brainstorm to try and plug the 8TB drive in my my 2009 Macbook Pro running El Capitan. Guess what!!!?? It recognized the drive in Disk Utility and formatted it in a few minutes. I plugged the drive back into my iMac and Sierra sees and utilizes the drive flawlessly - at least SO FAR.
I'm uncertain whether this is an incompatibility with High Sierra's Disk Utility - or my iMac running a partial fusion drive with possible errors. If I had to guess, I would go with High Sierra - but I could be wrong. But be warned - if you're using High Sierra - be CAREFUL!
Here’s a tip: the drive in this is the Seagate ST8000DM004. Takes 2 minutes to shuck the case, and so this is the least expensive way to obtain massive storage for your media server. The Seagate drives on eBay for $169 are likely out of these cases. Running these drives on a Windows 10 mirrored storage space. Write speed is 90mbps (due to writing the data twice across drives) and read speed is around 250MBps (due to reading off two drives at once). If you were to set up a mirrored Storage space with four of these, write speed would be 180MBps and read speed would be 500MBps! I would not recommend running these in this case as there isn’t a lot of air space, zero air flow, (the case is sealed) and the drive tends to get pretty hot over time.
You will need a USB 3.0 interface, but at 8TB, it is cheaper than bare drives, and will store EVERYTHING.
You need to backup. Cloud? Can you really restore terabytes of data?
Backup needs multiple different media, and saved in different places. With this you can easily buy two and swap between them, backing up every bit of your data on two redundant drives (I'm not even talking RAID here). You don't have to worry about deleting older versions.
Beyond that, it just works. Plug in power and USB and you get a full drive.
Suggestions:
If you are on windows using NTFS, turn on compression immediately so you can store more than 8TB raw, and the transfers might even be faster.
Copy everything to it (even if you are rotating two, you can sync them monthly), even if you don't think you need the old docs, you have the space.
Defragment once a month - it will take a while the first time, but be easier after that.
It is storing very high density, so make sure there isn't a lot of noise or vibration, and watch it if you've left it in a very warm or cold area since it gets confused until it is nearer room temprature.
What a great drive! I bought this 4 TB Seagate expansion drive and also bought a 4 TB WD My Book, both connected to my iMac. I had to reformat both for my Mac, but other than that, setup was easy. I will say the Seagate is about 20% faster than the WD, which is no slouch. With the Black Magic speed test, I am getting around 145-150 MB/s for the WD and ~170-180+ MB/s for the Seagate expansion drive, and the Seagate was about $20 less. bI have had this drive for a couple of months now and have experienced no issues. I did have an issue where it would not always mount on boot up, and I swapped cables with the WD (both have the same interface) and have had no issues since with either drive. At about $27 per TB, you can't beat the value.
I got this because I knew it has a 8TB Seagate Archive HDD inside. I had 1 already and needed another to back up my NAS which has just over 13TB of storage. The thing is, buying this External HDD External USB case was about $40 cheaper then just buying a Bare drive. So I got this and pulled the drive out of it. I actually have a Desktop Case with a slot on the top to handle plugging in base drives. I do this and backup my NAS, I then put the drives into a HDD case and put that case into my Fire Safe. Then every so often I'll pull the drives out and backup my NAS once again.
Seems wasteful, but $40 cheaper is $40 cheaper!!! makes no sense, but that is how it is. Now if they can get their 8TB NAS drives down to this kind of price, I could start swapping out the 6 3TB HDD's that are currently in it.
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