(OLD MODEL) Seagate Expansion 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STBV3000100)

So far, I don't have a whole lot of time spent on this specific external hard drive. (received it 10-15-2014,). However, I will update this review as I use it. Keep in mind that so far, this review is based off of first thoughts and may or may not change as I use the product. Out of the box, the hard drive is packaged very well, so you can expect it to handle the abuse of shipping, not to mention Amazon adds its own packaging which helps even more. The hard drive has a very solid feeling build to it. The cables are of good quality and fit snugly into the external hard drive. This hard drive is extremely quiet, you wouldn't be able to tell it was on unless you saw the light or felt the drive spinning. I have also noticed that this hard drive doesn't produce very much heat, at least it stays cool to the touch. Keep in mind that I have mine in my basement which is consistently between 57-65 degrees F depending on the time of year. I bought this expansion hard drive specifically for my Xbox One. I plugged it into one of the rear USB ports on the Xbox One and the drive was detected instantaneously. It has a blue light at the back indicating whether or not it is on. It turns on and off with the Xbox One, so you don't have to worry about the drive running all of the time. It shows 2.7 TB of available space which is my only gripe so far. I am not sure where the 300GB is from the advertised 3TB, but either way, I don't see myself needing to add another one in the near future. It is matte black, so if you are using for an Xbox One like I am, it matches perfectly. I will try to install Halo: Master Chief Collection on the hard drive to see if there are any problems with data transfer for gaming. I would expect that everything will be fine since it has USB 3.0. Update 11/12/14 I have officially downloaded Halo: Master Chief Collection to this hard drive. So far, I have yet to run into any problems whatsoever. The game runs smooth, loading screens are short, and the drive still runs cool even after hours of continuous play. I found out that if data is being accessed from the external hard drive, the little blue light will flash. If the light is solid, the hard drive is on but isn't being accessed. Update 01/03/2015 I have now been using this external hard drive for a few months. I got an ACL reconstruction on the 2nd of December which means that I had nothing but time to play games. I was using this hard drive for 8-10 hours a day between myself and my fiancé for about two weeks. I have zero problems to report on this drive. When playing matchmaking on the Halo 5 beta, I always load the game faster then my friends do by about 10 seconds. I am not sure why that is, but my point is, you definitely do not have to worry about data transfer speeds using this hard drive. I still couldn't be happier with my purchase.

I bought this review as I was quickly running out of space on my other, smaller USB drives. My main use for the drive is for home theater storage- I use a media center PC that is connected to my HD-TV. So, for me it was important to find a drive that is fairly "future-proof", ie, with a high capacity, which is why I opted for the 3TB edition. After reading many online reviews (Amazon reviews are a great way to assess a product for purchase!), I opted for this new Seagate drive as it is the latest model and seems to perform well. I was considering purchasing a network drive, such as the Western Digital model, but I was put-off by its lack of USB support (I worry- what happens if my network is down or the networkable part of the drive stops working! -No way to retrieve my data), and the Seagate model was getting unfavorable reviews also. I was also concerned whether my home network would be able to handle the streaming of high definition video files.. It seems that maybe the technology just isn't ready for home NAS yet, at least for my purposes? Upon receiving my drive, I noticed how light on packaging it is- more environmentally friendly. Also, I notice how small the drive is. I have a 500GB Western Digital desktop drive I bought a few years ago, and this new Seagate drive is around half the size! Its really amazing how much storage they can pack into such a small device. So I've already moved many of my media files onto the drive and have not run into any problems. Transfer speeds are about average- My PC only supports USB 2.0, so I cannot comment on USB 3.0 speeds. The drive does feel a little warm, but no more so than any other electronic device- it doesn't alarm me. Also, the drive is incredibly quiet! I had to check the first few times using it to make sure it was actually powered! I will update my review in the coming weeks, as I've only had the drive home for one day, so time will tell if this was a good investment. Also, I'll probably at some point purchase a new network router that can accept USB storage.

So far so good. I've been reading a lot of bad reviews for the smaller drives, but mostly positive reviews for the 5TB version. So far the drive has been a great weight off my shoulders as I've nearly maxed out the 3 1TB drives I already had. I do have some worries though. It's not loud, yet as a spinning drive it's not quiet either. I'd expect that. But what has me worried is the occasional quiet ping sound. I'm not sure what that is. Maybe it's the head snapping back into neutral position? I've heard other drives this happens to and it sounds more like a knock than a light ping. But as to why it's snapping back to its neutral position, that worries me as that can often signal that it's trying to prevent data loss because of some sort of physical problem (typically you get this on MacBook laptop spinning drives in the case of a drop, on others there's a physical scratch on the platter). I hope I'm wrong. Another is the sound it makes on occasion where it sounds like a tiny floppy drive making a large read or write action. That buzzing sound. It's not loud and it's not long. Just sometimes a short buzzing sound that gets my attention. Not sure what that is, but it puts in mind that I should buy another 5TB hard drive ASAP from Western Digital or a Drobo that I can put my old drives in to back the data up. Other than that there seems to be no other downside. It works as expected, it's fast (as fast as USB 3.0 over 2.0 can be), faster than my old portable Seagate 1TB USB 3.0 drive, and spacious. I'm glad I bought it. It's just a few tiny problems that might not be problems that worry me. For all I know that's how ultra large format drives sound and I'm worrying myself too much. Edit: I just realized that the buzzing sound was the couple of pens I had inadvertently set on top of it. They were rocking back and forth loosely on top of the drive and whenever there was a lot of activity in the drive those two pens would buzz against each other. lol Ok, so that's solved. Also, and I might be speaking too soon, the pinging is gone. I dunno what I did. Maybe it was running JDiskReport on it to see what files were taking up the most space? You get it to read the entire drive and the pinging stops? I dunno.

I bought this drive because it was pretty much exactly what I was looking for: a small size profile, very large capacity(4TB), and USB 3.0 connection. It was also an excellent value for the $ per GB. I have had very good success with Seagate drives in the past, and when it came time to purchase an external HDD for expanding the storage capacity of my gaming system this was just what I needed. Construction of the drive seems solid and operation has been quick and precise with no issues and minimal heat-up. The drive does get a lite warm at times when in constant use, though that is to be expected. I made sure to orient the drive so that there is adequate room for ventilation through the ports, though these could probably have been designed a bit better so that the burden of ventilation is not so heavily on the consumer. Also, the drive is a little bit loud, such that I can clearly hear it from across the room if there is no other ambient noise. It is also a slight bit louder than the internal operation of the game system that it is attached to, again, mostly when being accessed, though I honestly don't really have a problem with the sound. Lastly, it would be nice to have an 'on/off' switch on the drive rather than having no other option than to just unplug the power cord. In all, this is an excellent drive, especially for the money, that if you are aware of its few shortcomings and can accept them, it will be well worth the price. (I have had the drive for two months now running almost constantly, with no issues at all. I will be sure to update this review if any changes occur. If not, then assume that it is still going strong).

Fact: This 3TB jobbie is the first-ever brand-new drive I have ever bought. My 3.3GB dual-core cyber-box is direct-from-the-street, built-up like an old-time Ham Radio rig from Other People's Discards. I use Mepis Linux because I like the philosophy that stands behind the distro. I build my own because A) I am not made of money and B) I know what I like and the Corporate Operating Systems do not deliver it. Fact: I LIKE what this Seagate Expansion box did for my rig! Straight out of the box. She hooked right up and integrated right in like she was born for the job. Usage: The Seagate Registration software, although written for the High-Priced Operating System from Redmond, came right up under WINE. The registration process went flawlessly; less than thirty seconds after pressing the big green "REGISTER" Button my Gmail Notifier let on that Seagate had responded and recognized the unit's serial. Perfect! :) Then I fired-up two iterations of the File Manager known as Thunar. I highlighted EVERYTHING that resides within my User Space - "invisible" files and all. Then I dragged and dropped the load into the second iteration which I had pointed to the /media/Seagate Expansion Drive/ directory, wherein the new Seagate Mass Storage was located in the System. Within a half a minute the time-to-completion estimate had settled down to a believable number. The process churned on at a transfer rate of up to 33MB/sec when the new drive was being written-to; that action proved sporadic as the near-antique 200MB IDE drive struggled to keep up. ;) Heat? WHAT heat? I did mount the unit just a tad bit unconventionally, to be fair. Rear-end-up, pressed into the cavity of a conveniently flexible molded-plastic CD tower that I have owned for many years. With plenty of ventilation space thus created for the molded box's underside grille, and plentiful consequent convection out the "back" (where the connectors are located), the thing barely even got warm to the touch. MY CPU chip gained ten degrees fahrenheit during that backup run; the drive unit hardly cracked three. Moreover, the little blue activity light is now perfectly visible, solving yet another minor complaint from other owners. (Perfect again!) Tech Note: As delivered, this unit is formatted to NTFS spec, presumably for the sake of Big Name System compatibility. Nothing wrong with that; NTFS is stable and efficient as these things go. Moreover, my Mepis 11 suite includes a NTFS compatibility layer that drives the Seagate unit just dandy, thank you so much! I *might* try reformatting the thing to Linux-native EXT3 standard next shot for the theoretical increase in efficiency that one might expect from that move... Or I just might hold off and have that go on the next one of these that I buy, just to compare performance numbers side-by-side. Maybe I'll pull the drive from its case and hook it up to the remaining SATA port on my mainboard... Someday post-warranty, most likely. Bottom line: I for one think that there is NOTHING to be afraid of from this low-end, high-value beauty. As one who remembers a time when a mere ten megabytes of Rotary Mass Storage was a multi-hundred-dollar cash investment with three to four hours install-time inevitable post-purchase, I am deeply impressed and very happy with the product in every initial respect.

I really have no complaints about the drive itself. It's everything it claims to be. It stores large amounts of data, it can retrieve that data very quickly (espectially if your computer has a USB 3.0 port), and doesn't get so hot that you wonder if it's going to melt. So why a four-star rating? *(See edit below) Because, for whatever reason, it may not actually work with your computer. I used this to backup my media collection on my Linux desktop, then carried it to a friend's house to watch some movies. Their TV wouldn't recognize it as a USB device. Their Macbook wouldn't detect it, either. We did get it to work under Linux on a different laptop that was set up to dual book Linux and Windows. (It would presumably have worked on that laptop under Windows, but we didn't try it.) On the other hand, my $35 Raspberry Pi had no problem with it. Go figure. I don't know if the problem is with using USB 3.0 on devices with only USB 2.0 ports (although USB 3.0 is supposed to be backwards-compatible, and the RPi's USB port is 2.0) or if those devices had a problem with the size of the drive. Either way, you should be aware that this drive might not work with you computer, even if it's not a problem with the drive itself. *** EDIT: I've changed my testing to five stars. After a bit of poking around, I discovered the file system identifier was set incorrectly. I don't know if the drove shipped like that or whether it was something I did inadvertently. However, after fixing this (using either fdisk or ntfsfix -- I don't remember which -- on my Linux laptop) the drive works fine on every computer I've plugged it into. I would recommend Windows users format the drive before you start using it just in case. Other than this easily remedied (if not entirely obvious) issue which may very well have been my own fault, this has so far been a great drive.

First let me say that this is a review of the 4TB Seagate Expansion Drive. Whatever problems people have had with other drives, this is not those drives. Plug in the wall-wart and the USB3.0 cable and you are up and running. In my case I am transferring/combining the data from a 1.5GB and 1GB drive (Seagate and Samsung respectively). For my purposes I had to split the drive into 2, 2TB partitions (easily done in Win7) to accommodate drive and file naming requirements for the server software I am running. The USB 3.0 interface worked very well transferring from ~60MB/s to ~80MB/s depending on the source drive. Both source drives were older SATA drives, so I was very pleased at the continuous data rates achieved. In addition SATA 3.0 is not resident on my mother board, but accomplished via an add-on PCI-E card. During the lengthy transfer process (several hours per partition) I was impressed with how cool this drive runs, barely higher than the ambient temperature of the room, and definitely better than former 3TB external drives that I own. I have no quams about this drive running 24/7. Compared to any other drives I own this drive easily is in the top 2, and assuming that it runs fine for several years, it could be the best external drive on the market, as well as the lowest cost 4TB drive as well. To add to the favorable nature of this review, Amazon has achieved a new milestone in shipping (free or not), accepting the order on a Saturday, and having the package on my doorstep before noon on Monday. The Prime membership just continues to pay off. I will update this review if needed in the future. Well done Seagate, and well done Amazon. Update: 6 months of 24/7 and doing fine.

I have another external HDD from Toshiba. It is only 1TB and it too requires and external power source rather than just being powered through USB. That Toshiba get's incredibly hot. I don't use it on hot summer days because how hot it gets. This Seagate gets hot but not enough to worry about. It plugs in and works right away and it doesn't have any annoying software on. It had some backup utility but that didn't pop up and annoyingly and it was easy to remove. The drive works fast and it doesn't have any connection problems. Start up from rest is very fast. It functions pretty much like an internal drive. I'm used to USB drives resting and then having to spin up but this one works a lot less annoyingly. I only have USB 2.0 right now so I usually don't see speeds any higher than 40MB/s but that is sufficient and I was able to transfer a lot of files without a problem. Whenever I put together a new computer I'm sure this thing will perform even better. This is actually my first Seagate drive. People are always doomsaying this brand but so far it's good. I would buy this again if ever needed. Update: I just remembered that my laptop has USB 3. It is significantly faster even with the slower laptop HDD. I was seeing a consistent transfer speed of around 60-80MB/s. I'm really happy with that. Now I just need to get USB 3 in my desktop. edit 9/5/2013: This thing works with a Nexus 7 (2013). Just by an OTG cable and buy the app Nexus Media Importer. There's some free app that works if you root your device. edit 2/20/2014: Put together a new computer with USB 3.0 and this thing is fast. At a minimum when transferring files I get 100MB/s and that's with a bunch of various files. When transfering something like a single large file like a big video file, I get around 150MB/s. I'm running this in Linux Mint still in it's NTFS format and there have been no hiccups.