Seagate Expansion 18TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive (Review) | Poc Network // Tech

We have been testing out a number of 18TB Seagate Expansion External HDDs from Seagate (Model STKP18000402) for some time now and have had some great success to talk about. A drive that is no shy stranger when it comes to big data backup solutions for home or office, while also acting as a great solution for home media servers.

The Expansions series features a small footprint approach for external drives (just 7.04″x4.92″, and 1.65″ wide), making it not much larger than the 3.5″ HDD inside of it. Allowing you to slide it into convenient places and stack multiple side-by-side while still minimizing the amount of desk or shelf space taken up.

Of course, this doesn’t come at much of a surprise since all there is inside is a normal 3.5″ internal HDD, a small adapter board to convert it to USB and wall power, and a little plastic element to bring the static light source to the front of the enclosure. It’s the same with almost every external model out there. Only this one doesn’t play any games with wasted space inside.

Also like just about every external model out there, it comes with its USB 3.0 cable and power supply. Although this one also includes multiple adapters for the power supply so that you are covered no matter where you are in the world. This is likely so that they can sell the same model in just about any country without having to distribute multiple versions, each with a different power cable.

Of course, most people will just pick the adapter that fits their locality and toss the rest into a drawer (or even the trash). Which is unfortunate. as this could add to the continuous waste our world is so well-known for.

The drive doesn’t contain any active cooling options (no fans), but this is normal and it does have plenty of ventilation. For the average user, this works out to be just fine. However, for the power user, it can sometimes benefit you to have a fan hitting from one vented side so air can pass through the other. There are plenty of external fans powered by USB out there that can be used for this. But this mostly depends on where you store it and how active you keep it. At the end of the day, this is just to help extend the life of your external drive, so it doesn’t hurt. We do this all of the time, hitting 2-3 drives at a time with a single fan.

The design of the case is pretty simple and hasn’t changed much over the years, outside of the general texture of the plastic (lines, instead of a smooth or diamond-patterned surface, etc).

There is nothing outside of the USB port and the power connection that is needed (as usual) and it has rubber feet on the bottom to help with vibration or any chance of sliding around if you shake your desk.

It offers a modern speed for a USB 3.0 HDD, averaging around 160-205 MB/s during file transfers. Slower if you have it connected to an older port, of course. We didn’t find it to be exceedingly fast when compared to options like WD_Black, but the difference come sometimes be pretty minimal. So this drives falls into “average” modern HDD speeds. Although since these are HDDs, with normal HDD speeds, it’s always important to remember that large capacity drives are going to take many many hours to copy data to if you are planning to fill them up all at once. For example, one of the scenarios started with an estimated finish time of about 23 hours for about 16TB worth of data copying to one of these. It dropped a little, but it did end up taking a long time.

We also found it runs a little hotter than some of the other drives we have about. But the difference is minimal at around 2-3 degrees (farenheit) when compared to similar capacity drives, and almost 8-10 degrees hotter than smaller capacity drives like 3TB-8TB.

So far, we have hit these drives with close to 80TB’s read/written on average between them all and they have been holding out just fine. Showing no errors or any other concerns within anything we monitor S.M.A.R.T. information from. Mostly transfering content between two different sites and traveling in between.

The only issue we could really point a finger at with this model is noise. All of these drives are decently loud, making them similar to some models like some of the WD_Black drives that are meant for speed over comfort. But in this case, you don’t get the speed of those WD_Black drives (although the price on these are better). You can get a feel for what they sound like when they are at their busiest, writing large amounts of data all at once to them, in the following clip:

Keeping in mind, that you aren’t going to always be writing large amounts of data to them. So the only time you here just a little of this noise, is when you first plug them in for a few seconds, and once in a while while reading or writing to them. So they don’t always sound continous like the above clip. At the time, it was receiving around 10TBs worth of data during a long backup job.

This is a question that comes up a lot. Especially, for those looking to shuck one of these into a NAS unit or something. So many want to know what model of HDD is actually inside, so we decided to sacrifice one of ours to provide that answer this round due to the size of this model and the fact that it will likely be a very popular option for such projects.

Inside, we found a Seagate EXOS X18 internal HDD. A model that, in a rare turn of events, is actually cheaper to buy in its internal format than it is the external (from most retail locations). It is normally the other way around, which is why shucking external drives is such a popular thing. So this is something to keep in mind during Black Friday. If the external model goes on a decent sale that runs it below the cost of the internal, than you know that there is a chance that this is the drive you’ll find inside.

We should also point out that it held onto the data on it when we did this and inserted it into a DAS (desktop attached storage) unit right after. It is always enjoyable to see this, especially when we weren’t really planning to add a new drive into any of the DAS units. It’s just that this model is a little hard to shuck without damaging the plastic casing and the DAS has fans, so that will help keep it cool.

Just keep in mind that you completely destroy any warranty you may have on it if you do this. These companies do not like it when you shuck for internal parts.

In the end, we felt that these are well-balanced drives for the most part. When it comes to average transfer speeds, these aren’t the best. But they, at least, fall into modern averages. So it isn’t like they fall into any slow categories. This also means that WD still takes the prize when it comes to speed in our opinion (Seagate is more than welcome to prove us wrong on this if it would like). The WD_Black series is just hard to touch, although it is a bit more expensive and this can sometimes offset the benefits if you don’t find a good sale.

When it comes to reliability, we couldn’t find any faults to point out. These drives seem perfectly reliable so far. Of course, we will update if our opinions change during continued use. But so far, we do not see any signs that these will under perform any average lifespans.

The price is a little high right now, but they do go on some decent sales from time to time. We picked one of these up for $299 and another for $279 during two different sales, for example. So there are some pretty good opportunities out there. They could likely also fall in price once those 30TB+ models start to enter the market, although they may have to be out for 6 months or more before that happens. It just feels HDDs don’t experience the normal price drops they used to anymore. So hopefully, one of these companies will shake up the competition and force some price wars back into the mix again.

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

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