Seagate Expansion 18TB External Hard Drive HDD - USB 3.0, with Rescue Data Recovery Services (STKP18000402)

I like Seagate as far as external drives go they’re pretty good but this particular drive crashed within three weeks and was on accessible. The reason I gave it a five star rating was because it was immediately replaced the next day by Amazon. All I had to do is return the defective one I did within three days. They wrote me back telling me that they received the effective one now that’s customer service.

I bought this drive (10TB version) to use as a media storage device for my Plex server. I run my Plex server on an older (2013) apple iMac that is running MacOS Catalina. When I first unboxed the drive, it looked nice, but when I plugged it into the power and then the USB on the back of my computer, it wouldn't show up. I couldn't get it to show up in my Finder window, on my desktop, or even in Disk Utility. I did all the tricks to show all drives and all volumes, but it just didn't even recognize that it was plugged in at all. I read some of the other reviews, lots of people complaining about how it wouldn't work on their mac etc..., I thought that maybe I was going to have to return the drive and figure out something else (it comes preformatted in exFAT, but as I said, MacOS Catalina wouldn't even acknowledge it was plugged in at all, so there was no way for me to reformat into the the system I wanted). Luckily I had a Mac Laptop with BigSur installed. On my laptop, it didn't show up in Finder or the desktop at first, but it did recognize it in Disk Utility (again, you have to set it to show all drives and volumes in the view). There I was able to select it, then reformat it as MacOS Journaled (or whatever file system you wanted, but that is what I use on my older Mac). Once I did that, I was able to plug it into my older Mac, and it showed up in Finder, Desktop, and Disk Utility. I actually reformatted again on the old mac (just to be safe, but probably not really needed as it was reading, I just wanted to make sure it would work on the old mac the way I wanted it to). As I'm typing this, it's just finishing backing up the 4TB of media from my old drive, it's been whirring away for about 24 hours now, no problems so far. So as long as you are willing (and have the newer macOS available), then this is a great external hard drive for Macs, just don't expect it to work natively right out of the box (but external hard drives rarely do). That being said, I am happy with the price and performance so far, hoping 10TB will last me quite a while (my old drive was 6TB and I thought I would never even come close to filling that up, but I don't like to run my drives too full, so using 4TB out of 6TB was more than I liked, so this 10TB should fit the bill nicely for a while anyway).

I am reviewing the 8000 GB (8 TB) Desktop.Okay, I knew going in that this was a "shingled" drive. But, I needed it for archival storage, so I figured it would work and I was right. I have a home network and a home server. I nedded to expand the capacity of that server. This is my experience.The drive arrived on schedule. It was easy to unbox and I liked the look, feel and solid weight of it. 30 minutes after unboxing it was connected to my server.It took only few minutes to reformat it for linux. (Who would want to run a server on anything else?) After formatting I got down to work.Let me say here that it runs only slightly warm, never hot. It does make a sound, but is quiet and doesn't bother me at all. It comes with it's own power so my computer doesn't have to supply it.Anyway, the first thing that had to happen was moving about 4 TB of files onto it. I started the copy and went away. It's a shingled drive so I knew it would take a while. And it did :)The next day I set up the Samba share, let Jellyfin scan it, and I was in business.It has now been running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for tw-months. It performs beautifully. No problems and no issues. It is a perfect archival drive. It's performance is way better than needed for it's purpose. I really like this drive and it is approaching 6.5 TB, so I will need to get another one soon. Can't think of any reason not to get another one of these. So far I am VERY satisfied with this purchase.One thing I wanted to know going it was how long it might last running 24/7. Never could get an answer. But, so far, better than good!