Seagate Expansion 26TB External Hard Drive HDD - USB 3.0, with Rescue Data Recovery Services (STKP26000400)

Works great and is very easy to set up. Quite noisy and you can feel the ticks within my desk. You have to use the enclosed PSU (not a generic 12v HDD PSU) because it uses a lot more power than other HDD's, but of course, 26TB means you can give away all those old units! The PSU comes with a variety of pin adaptors for every plug on the planet, including EU, UK, Oz and US. I have purchased this purely to backup my main file server and store it off site. To initially copy 21TB took about 30 hours and once initially copied, the weekly update takes about 15 mins, so quite nifty and perfect for my application. I personally, would not use this as a permanently connected drive, its a bit too big, noisy and clunky (and of course 26TB is way beyond a USB connection!), a built in drive is better for speed, power, ventilation, vibration proofing etc. and this drive is probably the ultimate for being able to transport that data in a safe secure manner. You will need something with lots of memory to connect to it because chances are that 26TB of data will probably be over a million files! Make sure windows is set to 'Not indexed' and your anti virus scanner is configured to 'not check' when connected because something this large in capacity takes hours not minutes (and my PC is 5.6 Ghz, 32G RAM so no slouch!)

Firstly, the HDD cleared customs in approx. 8 hours, and arrived a day early, happily. It reads/writes at approx 40MB/s MAX, averaging around 35 to transfer a lengthy media file, in the 8TB Version, which has 7.27 TB of usable file space on it. Its not too big, the plastic case had a film on it, and the wires are adequate to sit at the PC or TV. It was plug and play with no need to format or worry about getting the HDD recognized by the system. It is easy to carry and move and would fit in most carry cases. Its jet black and moderately shiny and has an LED built in above the power port on top to show its active. I'm confident this drive should last me 10 years or more and will be a fantastic addition to my digital library. I played a UHD 4K video and it operated at a peak of 10%, mostly negligible usage. Although its not the fastest HDD you can get, I consider this very good value for money and a high quality product. You can plug this in your TV and play videos or music easily enough since its not USB powered which is a nice bonus.

A solid HDD drive with a massive storage space. I've been buying Seagate HDD's for a long time and they have never failed me. I trust the brand and this purchase was no different. Easy to use, just plug and play and the drive is pre-formatted in NTFS. The write speeds are solid at 100-150 MB / Second and the read speeds are quite good too. Have a number of 4K resolution videos and ton's of photos which I have stored on the drive and experienced no lag in reading them from the drive.

This hard drive bucks the trend of computer memory devices beconing cheaper per MB in recent times. It id an ezpensive option for most, and is not terrifically speedy transferring data to and fro. For those out there with sizeable video libraries, this device is nonetheless the best optoon for your storage needs. Seems to be robust enough to safely keep your data safe, and drlivers data at a decent rate. Knock some cash off and the 4 stara would become 5 easily.

Ordered late in the evening of Tuesday 6th Jan & delivered during the afternoon of Saturday 10th Jan. It seem physically robust as do its PSU, cables & connectors. Its LED read-write indicator works correctly. Nominally 28TB, it formats to 25TB in Windows [diagram enclosed]. It's on my desk and I can hear it ticking as it writes/reads. It took a day to write 12-13TB to it from my older, smaller external HDDs [which are now its backup drives, I use a RoboCopy batch script]. Its average write speed was about 100-150MB/sec. The included PSU output is 12V 1.5A - hence 18W [diagram enclosed]. I opted for the 4 year extended warranty for £10. Its terms include a pre-paid return should that prove necessary [which is better than Samsung-Seagate offer in their warranty]. - I have nine other Samsung-Seagate external HDDs, aged up to twenty years, and none of them have ever malfunctioned. Whilst writing this review, I've dug out & re-checked two twenty year old ones to make sure they still worked. - I started backing up my data as soon as I'd copied my files to it. Data recovery services may not succeed; they are not a substitute for backups.

Good capacity, easy plug&play. Good value for money when it's on sale or under discount. Use for backups and decent connection for read/write and file transfers. Good reliable brand.

I ordered this item (the 6GB version) on the 3rd of July 2025 in order to move a large number of files I did not have room for on my laptop, and which were causing it to slow down, but that I wanted to keep. Today is the 3rd of September, just two months later, and I have switched on my laptop to find it not only frozen, but when I did finally get into it, various changes I did not make myself to my laptop, and this hard drive beeping and disappeared from my laptop, along with all of the files stored on it. So this hard drive is about as much use as a chocolate donkey, as far as keeping your files safe, and storing them externally. It also apparently makes changes to your devices, without your consent, and without your knowledge. I had various items and files stored on my desktop, including a screensaver, which have also completely disappeared, which were in no way connected to this hard drive, and were stored on my laptop itself. There is zero reason for any of this to happen. The hard drive has just been sitting on my desk the entire time, and there were zero error messages and nothing has changed. It just suddenly started beeping today, and on switching on my laptop I found it frozen and the desktop altered and files missing. There are no help screens, error messages and no way to access it to actually find out what has occurred either, so super helpful. I have already got my money back, but that's not really the point is it, the point is that I have lost all of my files, as have others, and that this product cannot be trusted for its one job. Literally its one job, and not even over the ridiculously short period of two months, and it's not as though this product is cheap either. If you cannot trust it, then it defeats the object of having it. If you're looking for a completely useless piece of black plastic, that wastes your time, energy and money, loses your files, makes changes to your laptop/computer without your knowledge or permission and costs you more than it is worth, I highly recommend this piece of rubbish. Update: this hard drive was sent back to Seagate, as per their "Data Rescue Services" guarantee, and despite absolutely nothing happening to it, and it just completely failing from merely sitting on my desk for a few months, weeks later they wrote to me to say nothing could be done to save any of my data so they would be scrapping it. They then sent me a replacement hard drive, which then failed before I had even had time to move files onto it. Not that I either had any files left, or felt inclined to do so anyway. During the time the first hard drive failed, I also had an issue with my broadband and had no broadband for months, so this hard drive was meant to be a back up for the fact that I was unable to save documents to the cloud. With both failing simultaneously, I lost all of my files. I'm still infuriated daily by discovering files I've lost that were moved to this hard drive during this period, and today was yet another day I went to find some files and discovered they were a whole bunch and weeks of work that were lost to this hard drive. So I came to update this review to advise you, in case you were wondering, that not only is this hard drive utterly useless, the "Data Rescue Service" is completely worthless too.

Good product