Seagate Expansion Desktop Hard Drive 3TB HDD External - PC Windows PS4 & Xbox - USB 2.0 & 3.0 Black (STEB3000200)

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.

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.