Seagate Expansion 3TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black)

Comments about Seagate Expansion 3TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black):

I have been happily using external HDs by Hitachi, Toshiba, etc. to backup my personal data. Upon hearing that Seagate external HDs were supposed to be among the best, I decided to give them a try and purchased this one. What a mistake it was!

After a couple of weeks of light use, it began making this occasional clicking noise (which I knew was a bad sign) and, within a few days, it died altogether and my data could no longer be accessed.

Luckily, the data loss was not too severe, as I had started to migrate my data to other devices upon hearing the clicking noise. But, then, what's the point of purchasing a backup unit if you need to backup the backup!

Just to clarify, I am the only person who used this unit (correctly, I might add), and no shock or "trauma" was inflicted on it at all.

They offered to service the unit for free (and possibly replace it, depending on the outcome) but there's no way I'd trust another Seagate unit--ever!

Comments about Seagate Expansion 3TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black):

Staples had a great deal on these drives and I got two of them. When using CrystalDisk info, a warning for temperature would pop up when I started backing up data, with a warning the drive was at 122 degrees.

I have since removed the drives from their cases and will be putting them into an air cooled NAS box.

A good plus for those that do take out the drive is that they run great and cool on a regular SATA port, they are model ST3000DM001 and you will have a USB 3 controller card as well from the enclosure to use on any drive (For those who test drives out of the computer case).

Comments about Seagate Expansion 3TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black):

This is a great drive once it is out of the case. While in the case and under test load, Crystal Disk info came up with a "Caution" temp alert. The drive got to 122 degrees while in the factory case. It really needs to have a fan or something to help the air flow.

Comments about Seagate Expansion 3TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black):

Using the USB 3 cable included, my Mac sees the drive as a 3 TB external device. After removing the drive and placing it in an actively cooled enclosure with a fan (this was intended to be used as an all-day, every-day Time Machine drive for four computers on the network and would get too hot in the stock Seagate enclosure), it wouldn't mount and Disk Utility sees it as a 800 GB drive. So what happened to the other 2.2 TB?
Turns out it's a problem with the Seagate drive, not the USB3 or the enclosure.

The drive gets too hot to be used in the supplied housing, and can't be removed to a better housing, so I give it one star.

Comments about Seagate Expansion 3TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black):

Dislcaimer: I purchased this knowing that I would remove the drive and place this into my desktop computer.

That being said, I did plug it in with the supplied cord/cable to make sure that windows 8 saw the drive and ran chkdsk to make sure the drive did not have any errors. After confirming that there were none, I gleefully opened up the case and extracted the 3tb drive: ST3000DM001. 7200rpm.

Enclosure was easy to open with a box cutter and a credit card to shimmy the clips. Start at the top middle of the case (the bottom would be where the seagate logo is) and work your way around the edges. If you use a credit card, you shouldn't break any plastic clips, thereby allowing you to reuse the enclosure for an older 1tb drive while still being able to use the USB 3.0 transfer speed. (roughly 80 mb/sec) USB 2.0 is around 30-40 mb/sec)

I tested the drive using crystal disk mark in my desktop PC using the sata cable and here are my results

Read: 167.1 Write: 166.3
512k: 55.63 Write: 89.50
4k: .461 Write: 7.430
4kQD32 0.574 Write: 0.767

There are always chances of failures with mechanical hard disk drives but I've had a seagate 1.5tb external hard drive from 4 years ago that is still going strong.

I didn't test the drive using the USB 3.0 with crystaldiskmark so the 80mb/sec is what I've read elsewhere.

Heat will shorten the lifespan of a hard disk drive and this drive does get pretty warm if it is being used to transfer large amounts of files. This is where most drives tend to fail.

Summary: using the drive internally with a sata cable is twice as fast than using USB 3.0. Convenience plays a large factor though as you can't move your internal drive and connect it to another computer for shared usage.

Also: if you pull this drive out, you will need to reformat it as windows will only see 349gb.

search "Change a Master Boot Record Disk into a GUID Partition Table Disk" to allow windows to see the full 2.789tb.

Awesome buy!