I had purchased a 5 TB Seagate Backup portable plus external hard drive around a year back, being a SMR drive it starts getting slower as it fills up. With around 6+ terabytes of video data to backup, I needed an external backup solution which doesn’t take years to copy to.
While searching through amazon the Seagate Expansion 16TB Desktop External HDD popped up by chance. A little more research into the drive and I found a Secret so surprising, I’ll tell you about it in this video.
This is the Seagate Expansion 16TB Desktop External HDD, yes 16 Terabytes. That’s going to be enough storage for me for some time at least. Let’s get it open and see what we get in the box. This is the largest consumer grade external hard drive available in the market.
This is the main drive, which we’ll get to in a bit, and this box here are the accessories.
Usb-A to USB Micro-B cable, which allows getting USB 3.0 speeds.
Power adapter, and you can see there’s no actual plug on it.
Slide off the protective cover and we have a choice of adapters, which we can slide in as required. I’m using this 3-prong plug as it will keep the adapter in place. That’s how you attach the adapter.
Now for the main drive, it looks just like a standard external drive. A bit heavy, but simple design. We have the Seagate logo on top, with this angled line design. It’s not a portable drive and needs external power to run.
Dimensions are 5 inches wide and 7 inches long, so this drive is a bit big.
The sides and back have vents, you can catch a glimpse of the drive within.
On the back we have the micro-b connector and a barrel power port.
The bottom has the drive information, and also rubber feet to keep the drive from slipping around.
Yeah, so as I said, it looks like any other external drive.
Let’s power up the drive and connect it to a USB port on my desktop. It does need external power, and it cannot run without it.
Plug in the drive and it’s detected by windows, and here we go. A new drive pop’s up with the name Expansion and we see the Expansion Drive Icon. We can see the space available is around 14.9 TB, which is normal, for manufacturers one kb is 1000 bytes but windows takes it as 1024 which is the right number, so we lose that much space because of this.
Opening it up, we have the warranty document and start here win which is for windows, if you have a mac run the start here mac app.
It just opens up a drive registration page, no other software is provided, we need to use windows backup to schedule any backups. We also get a creative cloud photography account for only a month.
Now for the secret, I was looking for an internal drive, 10tb at max as they were in the range of 25-27,000 Rs. Suddenly I noticed a 16 TB drive at 28K. I expected the drive to be a SMR drive similar to what was provided in the backup plus. Also, I expected maybe two 8 tb drives would be sandwiched together for the 16tb capacity. But it’s noticeable that there’s only one drive within.
Seagate has 16 Tb drives, but only in their Ironwolf or EXOS enterprise drives. The barracuda drives top out at 5tb, Ironwolf, Ironwolf Pro and Skyhawk models have drives upto 18-20 TB.
And Exos, Seagate’s enterprise drives are available upto 20 TB. Seagate being a drive manufacturer could make a model specific for these external drives, but that would cost money to design, and they would like to be able to ship these drives out using their existing sku’s.
Using Crystal diskinfo, I could get the serial number of the drive within. Of course I don’t want to open it as I want the warranty.
This is the model number ST16000NM001G, and search on google, Seagate’s own website lists it here as an EXOS drive.
Wow
Looking for the same drive on amazon and we find it at around 38k. What?
So here we have a drive which is 38k, which is installed into an external drive enclosure and sold for 10K less? Not sure if these drives had any problems during manufacturing to be sold this way. I have seen other youtubers shuck the drive’s out and use it in their NAS and being installed in a NAS it provides much better data throughput.
Copying files hovered around 120-130 MBps which is not bad at all considering it’s over USB. Copying multiple files, it split the bandwidth between the various copying tasks.
Read and write speeds are around 250 MBps max as per Crystal disk mark, I got around 120-130 MBps when copying files.
I’m so glad it’s fast enough and not painful like the backup plus. It is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 but to get the best performance a USB 3.0 port is necessary.
The build is good, we have this small white led here, which blinks when there’s drive activity. The drive stays relatively cool when used for a long time. I’ve been copying my files off the desktop for a couple of hours now and it’s slightly warm but not that hot.
One thing that might irritate some is that the drive does make a bit of sound. It’s not that bad, but this is how it sounds when active.
We can feel the vibration on the table when accessed. But it’s not that much of a problem.
If you need something portable or pocketable this drive is not for you. This is a great choice if you need a reliable drive with lots of storage space, which you would not be moving around much.
The EXOS drive within would last long and Seagate does have a data recovery service if anything should go wrong. Exos drives generally get 5 years warranty, but the desktop expansion drive gets 3 years limited warranty. And I have free data recovery services for three years too. Hope I never need it.
It’s a great drive, I have managed to copy around 4 Terabytes of data to it which would never happen on my older external drives.
