Seagate Exp USB 3.0 5TB Desktop Ext Hard Drive US $179 + Shipping (~ $217 AU Del) @ Amazon

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Roary on 17/07/2014 - 01:25 amazon.com (240 clicks)
Last edited 17/07/2014 - 02:56 by 1 other user

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Back to a low price again in case you missed out before. It was this price a couple of weeks ago.

This is a huge 5TB. Big enough to hold the collection of the most enthusiastic porn collector.

The quoted $217 is the amazon conversion so using a 28 degree card should be cheaper.

This is not a portable drive. Need to use power supply.

Power supply and USB 3.0 cable included

Officeworks - $299

Price History at CamelCamelCamel.

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• 

  hamwhisperer on 17/07/2014 - 01:32

  +1

  I believe this is an identical price to the 5TB Toshiba which is posted here.
  https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/148387#comment-2046257
  http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio-Desktop-External-HDWC25… ($179 US also)

  The problem is, does either of these guys honour the warranty if you pull the disk from the caddy? Many years ago you could get away with this and IIRC WDC used to replace disks for me, pulled from USB caddies.

  Anyone know if either of these 2 drives are:
  a> caddy removable
  b> if seagate would honour disk only warranty
  c> quiet / cool, and or offer an option to enable acoustically quiet mode
  and finally
  d> would work in some kind of a RAID config / synology setup?

  Thanks for the OP

  EDIT:
  Anyone notice if you go over $1000 AUD / USD Amazon /themselves/ are now adding some rubbish "import fees deposit" figure? rather than letting us actually risk customs not catching a $1000+ order?
  It's saying that on the checkout page for either disk if it's over that amount, ultra, ultra lame.

  • 

    hamwhisperer on 17/07/2014 - 08:57

    No seriously, anyone? Comments? :(

    • 

      senorclean on 17/07/2014 - 09:04

      +2

      I did this with 3TB Seagates in 2011 when the Thai flooding happened. The Seagate warranty checker rejects the serial numbers on the bare drives. I imagine this means no warranty bare, maybe if you put it back together you might be lucky.

      Here is the 'warranty checker' result: http://imgur.com/SnBGLaW

      Full disclosure - I bought 4, and 3 have failed, at about 13, 18, 26 months. The 3TB model seems to be a particularly bad drive for failures though, with its crazy head parking behavior.

      I assumed no warranty when I bought them - but the cost made it worthwhile regardless, being less than half the local cost at the time!

      • 

        llama on 17/07/2014 - 10:35

        +1

        The Seagate warranty checker rejects the serial numbers on the bare driv

        Not always. I have had many where the cheker returns some message like "OEM Drive" and thus no warranty.

        The 3TB model seems to be a particularly bad drive for failures though, with its crazy head parking behavior.

        I think that applied to all Seagate drives now days. I have completely given up on Seagate consumer-grade stuff, and won't buy them again. Selling off the few remaining drives that still function without SMART errors.

        The local Seagate warranty on bare retail drives is good and easy for me in Sydney (local parcel to Mascot or Rosebery) but the continual loss of data makes these drives a massive liability and pain in the butt.

      • 

        PainToad on 17/07/2014 - 10:40

        @llama:
        "I have completely given up on Seagate consumer-grade stuff, and won't buy them again."
        You're not alone. I'm guessing this is why Seagates are continually on special. I won't touch them.

      • 

        hamwhisperer on 17/07/2014 - 11:07

        Dude thanks heaps on that - thinking on it, DEFINITELY was Seagate like 4 to 6 years back which I'd managed to get a return on after being pulled from an external.

        So the question is, should I buy the 5TB Toshiba which I linked instead (apparently HTGST? or whatever? re-badged?) - anyone know if they are the same or what?

  • 

    [Deactivated] on 17/07/2014 - 09:00

    Just a side note - The Toshiba drive has a 3 year warranty vs a 1 year warranty on the Seagate. Kinda makes it better value :-)

    • 

      hamwhisperer on 17/07/2014 - 11:09

      Yeah but the Toshiba drive I'd be pulling out of a drive caddy too and apparently it's a 1 way removal (plastic clips and stuff) - so the question is, will Toshiba honor a warranty on a dead disk from a USB enclosure

      Also can I just say @#$@% all these manufacturers for having better / cheaper deals regularly nowadays on USB enclosed disks than the standalone drives.

    • 

      Trishool on 17/07/2014 - 11:35

      Are you sure? I recently bought a 4TB Seagate external HDD from DSE and that has a 3 year warranty on it. Not sure about these ones from Amazon though, which may be the case for US products.

  • 

    rekabkram on 17/07/2014 - 09:33

    I've broke open a 3TB and 4TB of this design as well as 2x 2TB of the old design. I've even had to RMA a 2TB and didn't have any issues.

    A - yes, and re-usable if your careful. Place an old gift card or credit card on the bottom of the caddy (the caddy being placed top down on the bench) use a thin (but not crazy thin) flathead screwdriver to pry the casing at whatever end you choose to start on in the middle. Once you've pry'd it open place the gift card in the opening to keep it open, then ease the flathead screwdriver inward to pop the casing out of the tabs keeping it locked together. Once it's been popped to the same for the other side of the end your working on, once you've done both leave the gift card in and use another for the other side. Once you've done both ends you can easily pop it out with your hands.
    Then you simply lift the HDD with adapter out, remove the rubber tabs keeping it in place and unscrew the HDD with a PH2 Phillips screwdriver. Then a gentle yank out of the sata power adapter and it's just like an OEM HDD you'd get from your local computer shop.

    B - I have been successful doing an RMA before but haven't done it in a while or with the current model of expansion drives.

    C/D might be suited to someone that knows a bit more about computers, mine seem quiet to me but they are in a HTPC across the room next to a speaker so I'm not going to hear shit from it. Can't see any reason why they wouldn't work in a RAID setup though as they are the same HDD's you can buy from the shop, just for some reason adding extra components makes them cheaper?!?

    I threw an old 150GB HDD in the caddy and it's used to quickly transport data from one place to another works a treat.

  • 

    Miami Mall Alien on 17/07/2014 - 10:55

    -3

    b> if seagate would honour disk only warranty

    You must be kidding.

    Any warranty sheet for any external HDD you buy will clearly state that once you open the enclosure itself, All. Bets. Are. Off.

    From Seagate's Warranty FAQ page:

    Opening an external or network drive's external enclosure and/or removing the drive inside will void the warranty. Simply return the entire unit.

    As senorclean mentioned, the S/Ns on external drives are different from internal ones, so the moment an external S/N pops up on Seagate's radar and has obviously been removed from it's enclosure, they reject your warranty claim.

    Many years ago you could get away with this and IIRC WDC used to replace disks for me, pulled from USB caddies.

    Key words underlined.

  • 

    ironpaw on 17/07/2014 - 11:16

    I've shucked 6 Seagate 4TB externals. When I check the internal drive's SN via Seagate's warranty checker, 4 of the drives have valid 1 year warranty. The other 2 gives me a "return to place of purchase" message.

    In the case of drive failure, I'd stick the drive back in the enclosure and return it to OW or DSE for warranty…it's not like they can tell that the enclosures were opened if you did a decent job shucking them…not to mention the external drives comes with a 3 yr warranty where as the internal drive only gives you 1 year…

    • 

      hamwhisperer on 17/07/2014 - 13:09

      Hey that's a great response, thanks man - very interesting that the S/N's are not consistent - sounds like they just pull them from the big "bin of finished HDDs" at the end of the assembly line, sometimes checking into the warranty system, sometimes not.

      Putting back into the enclosure can be a bastard, depending on the enclosure - example the Toshibas I linked in my original post, someone claims it's a one way street opening those.

      • 

        ironpaw on 17/07/2014 - 15:57

        The Seagate Expansion drives are pretty easy to open and reassemble. Haven't tried the Toshi ones yet…

• 

  send2riven on 17/07/2014 - 02:41

  4TB version of external desktop drive usually goes on sale for $130 from Amazon, which i think is better value if you can wait.

  • 

    Roary on 17/07/2014 - 02:51

    Its $140 US
    http://camelcamelcamel.com/Seagate-Desktop-3-5-Inch-Internal…

    So the base price per TB is slightly cheaper to buy ($35 vs $36) when you add in the same shipping cost the 5TB will work out cheaper per TB.

    Plus you have the convenience of a bigger drive rather than more smaller drives.

    • 

      ironpaw on 17/07/2014 - 11:18

      I'd wait till DSE or OW does a special on them again…I paid between $120-$160 each for the ones I've bought in the past two years locally.

      • 

        Roary on 17/07/2014 - 12:23

        Really? These haven't been out for 2 years yet.. Also they are never never that cheap. You must be thinking of a 3TB drive..

      • 

        ironpaw on 17/07/2014 - 15:59

        @Cardz:

        Err, no.

        I bought 4 x Seagate 4TB expansions for $127 each last month when ebay did their 15% off and DSE had the 20% off offer on the weekend.

        The following week Ebay had the 20% off sale and the 4TB seagates were going for $150ish

        I bought 2 more last year from Officeworks (so maybe within the last ONE year, not two years, my bad) for $160 by pricematching some DSE sale…

      • 

        Roary on 17/07/2014 - 17:18

        @ironpaw:

        This is a 5 TB drive.. Not 4..

      • 

        ironpaw on 17/07/2014 - 22:38

        @Cardz:

        And you were assuming that I was talking about 3tb drives when send2driven was clearly talking about 4tb drives…get your facts right….even you referred to the 4tb drives being $140 USD on amazon…

  • 

    hamwhisperer on 17/07/2014 - 08:57

    It's smaller, so you need more of them, using more power and more likely to have disk failure (since you have more disks) - you have more heat, more noise etc.

• 

  PainToad on 17/07/2014 - 06:21

  Seagate has long been the homebrand of hard drives, glad they are finally pricing as such.

• 

  rekabkram on 17/07/2014 - 08:04

  +3

  'Big enough to hold the collection of the most enthusiastic porn collector.'

  Challenge accepted!

• 

  Davros on 17/07/2014 - 08:08

  Whoops - deleted

• 

  Mister Plod on 17/07/2014 - 11:09

  +3

  I still don't get why external drives are always cheaper than the bare ones nowadays, as it used to be the other way round!
  Surely it costs them more to put each drive in an enclosure and bundle the power and usb cables?

  Even if the drives are the same speed/quality, the bare ones should still cost less. Silly companies…

  • 

    Miami Mall Alien on 17/07/2014 - 12:12

    +1

    I'm just speculating, but it wouldn't surprise me if HDD manufacturers used a binning process similiar to what CPU/GPU manufacturers use, whereby the good chips become the higher-priced, higher-clocked models and the bottom feeders of the binning process become the gimped versions (i.e. NVidia's "SE" models or Intel's non-K models).

    I know for a fact that manufacturers like Western Digital, dump End-of-Life HDDs by selling them within external enclosures because they don't bother changing the entire model number when they move to higher density/platter successors for a particular model.

    Maybe the drives that don't pass all of the factory tests with flying colours become externals, because the assumption is that externals are plugged in and plugged out, and sit in storage for longer periods of time, thus seeing lower power on hour counts than internals, which are expected to be used far more intensively.

    Undoubtedly though, the shorter to non-existent warranty periods for external drives help keep their costs down.

• 

  ironpaw on 17/07/2014 - 11:13

  "Big enough to hold the collection of the most enthusiastic porn collector."

  Not sure if srs

• 

  aussieaubs on 17/07/2014 - 12:09

  5TB about time…. anything under $50 per TB is great value - better value if you can pick it up locally…

• 

  gadgetguy on 17/07/2014 - 14:29

  Wasn't there a reference in the previous thread to these not working well or at all as internal drives?

  • 

    Miami Mall Alien on 17/07/2014 - 15:29

    -1

    See this comment.

    You need to install a device driver from Seagate if you want a use a +2TB drive internally on a PC without a UEFI and a non-GPT formatted disk.