This external drive any good?

ExoMale · 11 Mar 2018 at 18:08

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x Seagate Expansion 4TB Portable Hard Drive (STEA4000400)= £109.99

Total: £118.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)

It’s to replace my 1tb external for my Xbox one for a short time then eventually to be storage for all my spare desktop drives.

Basically I went to buy a 2tb from shop earlier for £65, but shop shut few minutes early, so now I’m rethinking things, I have seen this one for £10 less in local stores, but I’ve seen a private sale of a used one for £65, would it be a worthwhile purchase at either price or are there better for the money?

mrbazmondo · 11 Mar 2018 at 18:46

A lot of Seagate externals use SMR technology. I've got a few "Seagate 8TB Back Up Plus Desktop Hard Drive with USB Hub". They fast for reading, and fast for writing big files. What they're not good at is random writing. They're very bad at random writing. I'm not sure if your choice uses SMR. Do some googling for specs/reviews on the drive.

ExoMale · 12 Mar 2018 at 10:40

thanks for reply.

well first off i was thinking of connecting it to my xbox as i have an original 500gb, so figured all my games could go on that till i find a 1tb special edition cheap enough which is what i meant by short term, but i have over 2tb worth of data spread over several hard drives i keep protected in a large box and so rather than having to keep digging them out i have always wanted to get a pretty large drive to hold it all, but 3-4tb were always well over £100, so its a mere case of storage/backup rather that using it the way you use the drive for a console, it would get used a lot just not to run things from.

seagate_surfer · 12 Mar 2018 at 17:25

Hey, ExoMale, Seagate here. Just some general information when it comes to using an external drive with a gaming console such as the Xbox and in a PC from Seagate’s Knowledge Base.
Consoles like the Xbox have their own unique file formats. Even though you could use it in both PC and console, if you plug it into the Xbox, format it for that and then start putting all of your games and saves on it, then take the drive and plug it into a PC, the PC will want to reformat it to a particular format that it understands better, and this would erase all of the data on it. The same is true in reverse if you first plug it into a PC, get it formatted and put your PC-oriented media on it, then try and plug it into the Xbox, it will want to reformat it for the Xbox. Hope this paints a clear picture for you in what you are trying to do.

ExoMale · 12 Mar 2018 at 21:15

hello, thanks for the reply. yeah im aware of that prior research to my current hard drive and i notice now its also a seagate expansion model, just 1tb, but either way it wouldnt have bean a problem, the games wouldve gone to the new xbox plus my existing 1tb again by the time id have formatted for pc use, but ive changed my plans now, so that storage for my pc stuff will wait a little longer, i used part of the money to order a new pc case, so now im going to be rocking a Maxtor M3 1tb with my xbox as well for the time being.