At first, being a Seagate product, I thought it would be identical internally to the Maxtor M3 4TB drive reviewed earlier, but it seems to have an updated drive which identifies as an ST4000LM024-2AN17V. Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2015. It can get bogged down during large writes and become very very slow, like 10MB/s on average slow. Literally moments after I bought the Toshiba Canvio Basics drive reviewed in the previous post, Seagate fired back by matching the price on their Seagate Expansion Portable 4TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive. Reads are fine it is only writing that is affected. I have digital photo of my family dating back to the mid 90s. Seagate Rosewood HDDs – ST2000LM007 / ST1000LM035 – Is this the worst HDD ever made? It reported 11 Command Timeout events – it seems that the UASP-based chipset is not too happy with my front USB 3.0 ports and was causing a connectivity issue. I've been working in the computer industry since the 1980s so I'm well aware of system operations and what can cause damage. Summary: pay $20 extra and get something better. Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2016. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2017, This is my first try with Seagate in a long time (mostly a HGST guy). See all details for Seagate Expansion Desktop 4TB External Hard Drive HDD – USB 3.0 for PC... © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Moreover, in the majority of cases, the HDDs arrive with failure of the head-assembly. Seagate 4TB Backup Plus Portable Drive Review written by StorageReview Consumer Desk July 10, 2015 Seagate's Backup Plus line of external drives will expand mid-July to include the 4TB portable drive (2.5-inch). Went to Seagate warranty online requesting a replacement powersupply. At almost 5 inches tall and over 7 inches long, this is not a small drive. This page works best with JavaScript. Since the Expansion 4TB USB drive comes with it’s own power supply, it will work with any open USB port, even one found on an unpowered hub. It technically could be used with other devices, especially after being reformatted to the correct format, however I suspect this might not make their other “specialised game drives” sell as well. First thing to note is that these are SMR drives. (read about the Archive drive on Seagates website), Don't stand behind their product / warranty, Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2017. Quit Working After One Year of Light Use, and warranty is only for a year, Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2017, Well it worked fine for a while and then it gave out with no notice at all. Wow, what a disappointment. That was an interesting comment about the USB 3.0 connection. Both sequential speeds best that of the Toshiba Canvio Basics, but only by a few MB/s. ST2000LM015 – 2TB ‘Barracuda’ branded HDD Just click one of the handy social media sharing buttons below. Another thing I’ve noticed while using this drive is how cool it remains to the touch. ” … these new models of Seagate HDD really stand out. It basically is the Seagate-branded updated version of the Maxtor M3 reviewed prior. The cable that came with the hub was much better quality but was poorly assembly – one of the conductors was not soldered to the connector and was only held in place by the potting material. In this case, I suspect the bridge dropped the USB link mid-command, causing timeouts to be registered. The file benchmark was completed successfully, although the I/O graph for various block sizes does not display the expected characteristic, instead being rather lumpy and random. It turned out all my USB 3.0 cables were faulty. Click here and send it in! I saw other reviewers on here say the same thing happen to them and i was hoping it didn't happen to me. Many of our customers present these disks after owning them for only a few weeks or months. On-Demand & Opal Connect: An Audacious Trial Misrepresented? It means Shingled Magnetic Recording, basically the data on the drive is written overlapped like shingles on a roof. These ‘Rosewood’ disks are frequently found as portable external hard drives …”. It seems to perform consistently enough with none of the quirkiness of the Toshiba Canvio Basicsand has an arguably more interesting visual design even if the casing feels a little flimsier. Click here to check out the Newsletter archives. I wonder whether this unit (ST4000LM024) would succumb to issues or not – but I don’t think it’s worth returning on a hunch. It seems to perform consistently enough with none of the quirkiness of the Toshiba Canvio Basics and has an arguably more interesting visual design even if the casing feels a little flimsier. Deciding to hedge my bets, I picked up one of these from Officeworks for AU$139 which arrived next day in the same small box with no void fill. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. With a 3-year warranty, I suppose it’s worth taking the chance as I’m not sure any other drive would necessarily be better …. The side of the drive says that it is compatible with Windows, USB2.0/3.0 and for use with computers. Seagate Expansion 4TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive. There's no switch -- it is supposed to activate with power and when the USB3 is plugged in. Best of all, it supports UASP, allowing for command pipelining and improved performance over drives which use Bulk-Only Transport (BOT) modes. Nothing. https://www.cheadledatarecovery.co.uk/2018/02/st2000lm007-st1000lm035-worst-hdd-ever/. This means that there were 14 command timeouts, 3 of which were longer than 5 seconds, and 3 were longer than 7.5 secs. The G-sense error rate also reports 1, although the drive had only been handled with care. The Seagate Expansion 4TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (#ad) will likely hold everything you can pack on to your computer’s internal hard drive, and a whole lot more. The box itself is made of a thin but rigid corrugated cardboard, sealed with holographic seals for tamper protection. Testing with CrystalDiskMark produced good results, with sequential read of 136.5MB/s and sequential write of 122.8MB/s. Bought in August, dead in November - Seagate says no warranty! The advantage of UASP is seen in the 4kB transfer tests with greater queue depths and threading taking advantage of this to boost small-block performance. The stringent signal quality requirements of USB 3.0 are not always met, especially by older machines or cases, as evidenced by my testing of various USB 3.0 enclosures. This attribute is usually a harbinger of troubles to come. I contacted seagate and all they did was have me run test with their program and send them screenshots showing the test failed and then told me its nothing they can do cause its out of warranty. That one was rewritten, resulting in no reallocation, and life continued on from there with no significant issues. The trade-off however, is that the case feels like it’s made of thinner material, sounding hollow when tapped. First off, i was wary of the number of review stars on this drive since A) it's a seagate which seems to get a bad rap as of late, and B) most of the 5-star reviews are vine voice reviews of free products. The top of the box has a plastic hanger tag and details of warranties – in the Asia Pacific region, including Australia, the warranty is three years. Bonus tip #1: One of the best uses ever for large external hard drives such as this one is creating regular System Image backups of your Windows installation. Testing was performed on my current workstation based on an overclocked AMD Ryzen 1700 @ 3.8GHz on an Asus PRIME X370-PRO with the latest version of Windows 10. Top subscription boxes – right to your door. It’s an SMR drive, as you probably expected. If the drive is locking up or dropping out, there’s a good chance that using the rear-panel port would solve this. Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2017. The PC’s USB port connector is also important. This is the first portable SMR drive. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Which Managed WordPress hosting plan would you recommend for a high-traffic blog? While there are larger external hard drives on the market, I’ve found that the 4TB of storage on this drive is plenty for storing those ever-important System Image backups. The housing is tinny. The Seagate Expansion Portable 4TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive is pretty much what you can expect from a no-frills external drive. – Head Cleaning Cassettes, Sony Dynamicron Durable & Excellent Quality, Week 1: DSE, Tandy, Acer, IBM, Apple, Microsoft and Sony, Week 2: Apple, SEDA, Foxtel, Global Comp. It has a UASP-capable bridge chip with a three year warranty for Australia, now at the same price as the Toshiba. Capacity: 4TB Verified Purchase This drive is junk. Extra tests were performed, but did not show anything noteworthy. The sides of the drive are straight, giving the drive a “boxy” feel despite the subtly rounded corners. It won’t take up a huge amount of your desk space, but if you have a small desk to begin with it might be something for you to consider. Click here (#ad) to read more about the Seagate Expansion 4TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive on Amazon, including hundreds of overwhelmingly positive user reviews. Please make sure that you are posting in the form of a question. I did not bother with these as they are not necessary for the operation of the drive. That being said, it doesn’t seem to tolerate my front-panel USB 3.0 port, possibly due to longer cable length and poor signal quality. I can understand if it was because it fell or i was careless but it was never moved and then went bad. – Gough is in Nara, Japan, Notes: R&S NGM202 Battery Simulation for Charging (feat. Interestingly, you mentioned the issue with the drive – the former Maxtor M3 4TB unit (ST4000LM016-1N2170) of a prior family passed commissioning but failed a sector into pending while I was overseas on holiday. Write speeds followed a similar characteristic, with an average write speed of 104.5MB/s. Had this drive for about 6 month then powersupply started making noise then later failed. Just to be clear it worked fine for the first year no problems at all and i never moved it, it was stationary with ample air flow and nothing around it. BTW, your most recent Command Timeouts raw value is …, 12,885,098,510 = 0x30003000E -> 0x0003 0x0003 0x000E. It only works reliably when plugged into rear ports and using both the normal data cable and a second power-only cable. Unlike the Toshiba, however, the case is more ornate, being decorated top and bottom by a faceted design. Despite this, the drive completed the benchmark successfully and in a good time – which is not something that can be said about the Toshiba Canvio Basics. I’m Dirty, Wash Me! Ok that's great right? Adding an external USB hard drive to your computer really makes it easy to create full backups of all your programs, photos, music and other files that reside on today’s massive hard drives. A Buggy Opal Travel App Update, Quick Review: Kingston A400 960GB SATA SSD (SA400S37/960GB), Early-Access Review: Epishine Light Energy Harvesting Module Evaluation Kit, Review: Generic LZ-681 QC 3.0 + 5V/3.1A Dual-Port USB Car Charger, Note: Capturing VGA Analog Component Frames with an Oscilloscope, Notes: Mains Power Quality, Grid-Connected Solar & Switching, Tech Flashback: OzEmail Internet Starter Kit CD-ROM (2000), RoadTest Review: Keithley 2450 SourceMeter with I-V Tracer App, Repair: Colgate Electric Toothbrush (or When An Engineer Doesn’t Give Up! Over the last year or so i've come to the conclusion that these elite reviewers would rather keep their free stuff coming than provide honest reviews... but who am I to judge... i'd probably do the same. The fact that its only 1 year warranty and it breaks a little after the warranty is up is sad. If the connection is slightly loose a USB 3.0 device may appear as a USB 2.0 device. I wont waste my money on another seagate again. This particular drive seems to be part of the August 2019 batch.