Seagate® Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB

Comments about Seagate� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

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� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

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� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

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� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

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� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

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!

Comments about Seagate� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

After buying this I was told by a friend who has the 1T model that his files sometime just disappear. He said that it seemed to happen when he moved files from one location to another. I was hoping that this was just an issue with his unit but unfortunately after less then and hour moving family photos it deleted everything and I mean EVERYTHING. I'm so mad right now.

I started by making a new folder and then putting four folder under this one labeled "Movies", "Photos", " Videos", and "Music". Then I added a folder in the photos folder labeled "Our Family". I added another folder in our family labeled with the date the photos had been taken and where. These were our family portraits for 2012. I then added several other photos just in the our family folder. I had around 50 or so at this point.

Next I was going to move over a video and made a folder called "Our Family" in the video folder. It started to transfer the video and then after about ten minutes it errored out and then POOF everything was gone. I'm so glad I didn't load more onto this piece of junk.

You've been warned. This hard drive will delete your files without warning. There one second, totally gone the next.

Comments about Seagate� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

I bought this because Seagate is bar-none the cheapest manufacturer of hard drives and it turns out you get what you pay for. The drive failed completely only have three months of intermittent use. It deleted all my family photos, 38,000 songs and every personal document I'd written in the past 9 years.
This was purchased as a replacement for another Seagate hard drive that failed, and it is safe to say that they have lost my business entirely. The only reason to buy this brand is because of the price, which is absolutely not worth it.
Please do not buy this, or any other Seagate drive.

Comments about Seagate� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

Have had a mth. Purchased a 2nd one. Back up my DVD Collection after loosing some Orig dvd went bad and a BUNCH of Memorex RITEK BACKUPS are bad after 12/24 mths old. Can put about 500 to 550 dvd movie only, on one drive leaving 15% space. I dont get why the guy who says drive died after 1 mth did his own repairs when it has a 1 yr warranty

Comments about Seagate� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

Windows 7 built-in Backup And Restore does not function with external drives larger than 2.2 TB. If you try to run Windows 7 backup with this 3 TB drive, it will run for an hour or more before returning error code 0x8078002A. Google this error code, and you will find:
A) 2.2 TB is a hard limit for external drives when used with Windows 7 Backup and Restore.
B) Microsoft knows this to be true, and offers no solution.
C) Seagate knows this to be true, and offers no solution.
D) Western Digital knows this to be true, and supplies a software patch, but it only works with Western Digital 3 TB drives.

This product is advertised as being compatible with Windows 7, but it is not. You can drag and drop files to it, but it will not function as a backup device.

Yes, I tried partitioning, reformatting with different sector sizes, and wasted a day running chkdsk to make sure the problem wasn't my internal drive. This drive works fine as external storage, but if you want external backup, get a drive no larger than 2.2 TB.

Comments about Seagate� Hard Drives; Expansion Desktop, 3TB:

I bought this external hard drive to use for backing up my video files. The drive stopped working after 1 month of light use. I found out that the case that holds the drive quit working. I was able to install the drive internally in a desktop computer. I had to reformat. The drive itself is working fine now, but I bought it as an external drive that I could use to move from computer to computer and it no longer has that ability.
In the future I will go with another brand. I would only purchase this again if it was on deep discount and even then I would't count on using it as an external drive.