Seagate Expansion Desktop 14TB External Hard Drive HDD - USB 3 0 for PC Laptop - 1-Year Rescue

I bought 2 of these from Amazon for the purpose of shucking them & using inside my case as internal SATA drives. To my great delight the drives inside were "Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB NAS" 7200rpm Internal Hard Drives! (See pics. I numbered my drive & blacked out identifying #s. for pics here) ...The drives were NEW and Pristine. The model externals I bought had the STEB14000402 model number, but I notice those don't seem to be available right now on Amazon since my last purchase. The 14TB external available now is: # STEB14000400. So maybe the STEB14000402 models, at least right now, may have the IronWolf Pro's in them. ...I believe this just varies at any given time though depending on what Seagate has available at the time of manufacture. But you will get I think, either these 7200rpm IronWolf Pro's OR an Exos 7200rpm drive in these externals no matter what the model # is for the 14TB external. ...It seems to be just "Luck of the draw"! In any case, shucking took 5-10 minutes and the drives do not need any special partitioning or formatting etc. once shucked and installed as bare drives. Windows 10 recognized them the same as when they were attached via USB 3.0 and they are VERY fast! ...The NEW Ironwolf Pro's are around $200 - $250 MORE if you buy the bare drives. By shucking the externals, you will save a BUNDLE. However, as most who would attempt this know, you will VOID ANY WARRANTY on the drives. The case tabs are going to break when they are shucked/removed from the external enclosures (They are designed that way!) ...So you COULD still put it back together to use for yourself for other drives etc., but you could NOT put the original drive back in and send back to Seagate for warranty repair. They would KNOW it had been shucked is the point. But any drive failure would most likely occur after the 1st year anyway, and that's all the Externals are covered for. ...Just be sure to check your new external using "CrystalDiskInfo" and maybe "Seatools" before shucking to check for any issues or bad sectors etc. that it could have left the factory with. Check them BEFORE you remove from enclosure! ...These do work great and very fast as just USB 3 externals btw. But if you're brave enough I say "Shuck it"! Read more

This hard drive is fast! 12tb Of Space!! for less than $370!! This is a great deal! Yes it makes noise, and that is a indicator of a hard drive failing, but I've had this for 10 months now and Haven't had any issues. My only concern is how long it will last me. I hoping for at least 5 years. Read more

I’m not sure how all these people made it this far without knowing for the past 20 years the difference between advertising or base2 vs base10. Yeah it’s a shady practice but it’s been that way for 20 years and with every drive I own that isn’t a SSD. Due to mathematic differences, every 1GB you lose 70MB thanks to stating it in base10 for us but computers use base2. Next, yeah the drive is loud. It’s annoying. Luckily I am using it around noise so it’s mute to me. Performance is good. Not sure on reliability yet. Read more

The #1 area that this excels is in reliability. It doesn't fail. I've owned many flavors of the Seagate external drive over the years, and they are workhorses. This one tends to be loud, rather slow (around 5 Gbps and 5200RPM) and just average when it comes to performance. The main reason to get this is for backup use. It tends to spin up and down a lot, and it makes a lot of noise doing this. Thankfully, it just keeps going and going. So it's good to have for anything that doesn't require speed. Read more

Have 5 of these drives now, 4 I bought early last year, and 2 I just bought to add to my server. In early 2020, if you added the X16's serial number into Seagate's online warranty checker (or add to your account), the warranty would come up as ~2-2.5 years; odd it wasn't the full 3 for the X16, but it was more than the 1 year that the Seagate Expansion drive's S/N comes up with. I chalked that up to manufacturing time between the drive being made and it going in to the Expansion. That isn't the case anymore. When I went back into my Seagate account to add the two I just bought, I noticed that the other 3 now showed warranties had ended in 4/2020. Same happened when I tried to add the new ones. Other I drives I had were now accurate. I removed all the drives, and re-added them with the Expansion S/N's, and all obviously still come up with their respective 1 year warranty expiration dates. Moral of the story? Still a great drive at better price than can be had otherwise. The shorter warranty is what it is; it sucks, but doesn't really surprise me. Just want others to be aware of it :-). However, if you intend to use the X16 without the included Expansion case, you had better hang on to that case for a year (or at least the bottom half if you have more than 1). Read more

As always Seagate drives are, in my opinion, the best on the market. I have tried multiple brand name external drives and the Seagates always outperforms all the other brands. This is the only brand I will biy. Read more

Picked this up in February of 2020. Drive mostly worked without issues for twelve months then began to slow down as I approached capacity. After several weeks of intermittent slow downs I got errors while copying files. I quickly ordered a larger drive as a replacement to back up my files to. Today I checked to see what my options are with a potentially failing drive only to discover that the warranty has expired two months ago. Ask yourself if you think one year is a fair price for what you're paying. Then consider another product. Very disappointed. Read more