Seagate 8TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive

Seagate has really degraded the build quality of their hard drives during the past 10+ years, perhaps so they can price their drives cheaper than the competition. But unlike buying inexpensive clothing or cheaply-built furniture, this is terabytes of your valuable data that you potentially risk losing when you try to save some money by purchasing Seagate's cheaper hard drives. I was previously a huge fan of Seagate during the 1980s and 1990s. During the early 1990s, I purchased more than 80 Seagate Elite 9 Fast Wide SCSI 5.25" hard drives for a computational compute cluster that ran non-stop every day of the year (10-GB hard drives were very spacious in 1994 :-) The compute cluster was used for numerically-intensive computing purposes along with two Cray Y-MP supercomputers (bonus points if you know what that is :-) Seagate's Elite 9 drives weighed as heavy as a brick, and their build quality and durability were as solid as a brick. I also mainly used Seagate internal drives in my desktop computers during the 1980s and never had a single hard drive failure. But since the start of the new millennium, it seems that Seagate now tries to trim as much manufacturing quality off of their hard drives as they can, perhaps to price their internal and external hard drives cheaper than the competition. I purchased two of these Seagate Expansion drives. Their speeds are slower than Western Digital My Book drives, and they sometimes make a small rumbling noise that I do not mind. But the USB and power connections on these Expansion drives are very loose. Both the USB port and power connector on the drive seem to be made of softer metal. The AC adapters are also temperamental, and if I sometimes plug them into the surge protector power strip at a slight angle, or if I slightly bump their AC adapter while I insert another plug into the power strip, the hard drive can lose power and disconnect, and I have to reseat the AC adapter in order to restore power to the drive. I have never had other AC adapters be so temperamental. Sometimes when I plug the supplied USB cable into the Expansion drive's USB port, it slightly pops back out again and I have to push it back in. Just the weight of the USB cord is enough to slightly pull the cord out of the USB port. If I am able to get both the power cable and USB cable firmly plugged into the drive and the AC adapter firmly plugged into the power outlet, the drive works okay, albeit not that fast. But if I happen to slightly bump the USB cable, it sometimes randomly disconnects the drive because the USB cable has such a loose physical connection to the USB port that the USB cable easily loses contact with the port. Both on Amazon's own reviews for this hard drive and on other Web sites, do a search on keywords such as "loose", "USB port", "power", "disconnect", and "connection", and you will find many complaints about these manufacturing defects. These customer complaints have been going on for more than one and a half years now. Seagate should be aware of this because I see Seagate Support replying to some customer reviews. But Seagate's replies with repetitive parrot comments such as "it is not typical or expected for the cable to behave this way" and "We apologize for the cabling problem with your 5TB Expansion Desktop drive, as this is not typical or expected", and this is just blind denial that their manufacturing quality stinks!!!! I have several cheap $20 made-in-China Bluetooth speakers that have better USB and power cables and ports than these poorly made interfaces. If Seagate scrimps so much on the build quality of their USB and power ports and cables, then how much are they cutting the quality of the internal hard drive components that cost more money to manufacture?!? The two 4-TB Seagate Expansion hard drives that I bought are the first Seagate products that I purchased since the late-1990s, when their product quality started to degrade. I have purchased more than 26 Western Digital My Book external hard drives during the past three years, without a single failure so far. Three of those My Book hard drives have fallen off of desks onto a rug on the floor while they were turned on and spinning, and they continue to perform without issues; one drop was due to me accidentally knocking a drive off the desk, one drop was due to my cat bumping the drive off the desk, and one drive was pulled off of the desk when the cat jumped off the desk and her foot caught and pulled the My Book's power cable downward. Some of my My Book drives have had their USB and power cables detached and reattached hundreds of times, and those cables still firmly plug into the USB and power ports without issues. But my two Seagate Expansion drives have had loose USB and power connections from the day that I unpacked them. If a cheap $20 Bluetooth speaker can use solidly-built USB and power cables and ports, there is no excuse for a hard drive to have such terrible quality on these crucial components! It does not cost that much to manufacture a decent-quality USB port and power connector. After almost 20 years of not buying Seagate products, I tried two of these Expansion drives because they were aggressively discounted at a price of $26/GB. But no more Seagate for me... it is worth it to me to spend an extra $20 or $25 more for peace of mind by buying Western Digital or HGST hard drives. Maybe in another 5 or 10 years, I will check back to see if Seagate finally decides that quality, not price, should be Priority #1 when it comes to hard drives. After Western Digital acquired Hitachi's hard drive business in 2012, Hitachi's hard drive factories were sold to Toshiba. I purchased 8 Toshiba 5-GB X300 7200-RPM drives last year on sale for $125 each, and I have been very impressed with their speed and reliability so far. Unlike the SSD market that currently has huge amounts of competition, the hard drive market needs more competition to keep Seagate honest. To Seagate Support: if you read my review, you do not need to reply to my review with a pre-recorded comment of "please contact us as your problems are not typical or expected" because I do not believe you! These quality issues have been around ever since these Expansion drives were released, and Seagate Support continues to be in denial of everything and parrot the same replies of their hard drive problems being "not typical or expected".