Seagate Expansion 8TB external hard drive review: No-frills storage that needs USB-C

Known for the storage space, Seagate not only builds the internal drives, but also the enclosures. Most drives in the Seagate lineup are mass-market consumer devices, while LaCie represents Seagate’s professional line.

While not necessarily as flashy as LaCie, Seagate devices are reliable and more widely available.

The Seagate Expansion is your typical desktop storage solution. It has a well-ventilated plastic case, just a hair bigger than the 3.5-inch hard drive it hides.

Rear ports on the Seagate Expansion

It connects to your Mac or PC via USB 3.1. On the back of the drive is a regular barrel connector used for the included power supply and USB Micro-B port.

We’re not big fans of the slim Micro-B connector, but they’re commonly used with external hard drives. Since the cable is a USB-A cable, you may need to use a hub or adapter with your Mac if you only have one USB-C gates.

The included USB-A cable and our replacement USB-C

In our case, we just picked up one of the widely available USB-C to Micro-B cables found on Amazon. We’d prefer a USB-C cable in the box, but many people still rely on USB-A, and replacement cables are readily available in a pinch.

Using the Seagate Expansion with our MacBook Air

The housing has a striped appearance with oblique lines running along the plastic housing. The top, back and bottom have hidden vents that allow airflow to the hard drive. They sit between the lines, making them almost invisible at a glance.

The passive cooling makes the drive feel a little hollow when we pick it up, but that’s better than a fan spinning loudly.

Finally, there are silicone feet on the underside of the drive that keep it just off the surface of your desk and prevent it from sliding.

Speed ​​won’t impress anyone on the Seagate Expansion drive. Not because it’s bad, but because it wants to be affordable.

Spinning hard drive platters will be cheaper than solid-state media, especially if you’re looking for something as large as 8TB.

If you need a backup system or a place to store a wealth of files, this is what you need.

We connected the drive to our Mac and the drive is formatted in ExFat by default. As an ExFat, it can work with both Mac and Windows PCs out of the box, but you can simply reformat it in the more Apple-specific APFS or leave it in ExFat for universal access.

Blackmagic Disk Speed ​​Test Results

Using the Blackmagic Disk Speed ​​test, we got 177 MB/s for our write speed and 178 MB/s for our read speed. It’s not fast, but it’s not very slow either.

In practice, we transferred a 1 GB file to the Seagate Expansion in less than 10 seconds. Again, for a backup disk, file repository, and everyday tasks, this is fine.

Using the Seagate Expansion with our MacBook Air

This isn’t ideal for a video editing scratch drive, but it’s great in 95 percent of the other cases. Not everyone moves 124 GB of Final Cut libraries with any regularity.

There is not always a need for the flashiest hardware. Seagate has a solid drive with an attractive appearance that gives you 8 TB of reliable storage at an affordable price.

Seagate Expansion in its box

You can get faster drives with hard drives in a raid formation or using that SSD, but they will cost you significantly more. If you don’t need the extra speed, the Seagate Expansion will get the job done without breaking the bank.

• Solid, reliable drive
• Spacious 8TB capacity
• Sleek, modern exterior
• Affordable
• Pre-formatted in the universal ExFat file system

• No USB-C cable included
• Uses full size desktop disk that takes up more space
• HDD Speeds