Seagate Expansion Desktop HDD review: Vast and fast

Jon L. Jacobi

Jon L. Jacobi

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    </div></figure><p class="imageCredit">Jon L. Jacobi</p></div>

One of the edges of the unit sports two anti-skid feet, so the drive can be stood up lengthwise. However, there’s no way I’m sitting a hard drive up in this orientation unless it’s sandwiched between two items that will prevent it from being knocked over.

While not as sexy, it might have been better to put the feet on one of the broader “sides” to encourage users to lay the unit flat. I highly recommend you do this — hard drives do not like sudden g-forces and Murphy says it will eventually get knocked over if not otherwise fixed in place.

How much does the Seagate Expansion Desktop cost?

The Seagate Expansion Desktop is available in a variety of capacities, but pricing on both Seagate’s website and its Amazon store were rather inconsistent. Many capacities were seemingly unavailable with some very heavily discounted.

The retail pricing is:

• 4TB for $120 ($30 per TB)
• 6TB for $160 ($26.67 per TB)
• 8TB for $160 (yes, the same as the 6TB, $20 per TB)
• 10TB for $270 ($27 per TB)12TB for $300 ($25 per TB)
• 16TB for $330 ($20.63 per TB)
• 18TB for $350 ($19.44 per TB)
• 20TB for $450 ($22.50 per TB)
• 24TB for $540 ($22.50 per TB)

As to those heavy discounts on Seagate’s own site, they are:

• 6TB/$110 ($18.33 per TB)
• 8TB/$150 ($18.75 per TB)
• 12TB/$170 ($14.17 per TB)
• 16TB/$230 ($14.38 per TB)
• 20TB/$350 ($17.50 per TB)

The 12TB and 16TB are currently the sweet spot in terms of price per terabyte, and overall, we’re talking one-third to one-quarter the price of an external SSD. Those currently cost around $70 per TB, with a maximum single-unit capacity of 8TB.

SSDs are, of course, a lot faster, though some of the cheaper ones can drop to HDD-like speeds during super-long writes. For more on that, check out the 450GB write results below.

How fast is the Seagate Expansion Desktop?

The short answer to this question is, way faster than you might think. Instead of the rather slothful 120- to 140MBps its smaller 2.5-inch cousins read and write at, the Expansion Desktop manages almost 280MBps. Some external SSDs using QLC will slow to that pace and even slower during long writes.

Compared to a 2.5 inch external hard drive, the Expansion Desktop’s CrystalDiskMark 8 numbers look pretty darn good.

            <div class="lightbox-image-container foundry-lightbox"><div class="extendedBlock-wrapper block-coreImage undefined"><figure class="wp-block-image size-large enlarged-image"><img decoding="async" data-wp-bind--src="selectors.core.image.enlargedImgSrc" data-wp-style--object-fit="selectors.core.image.lightboxObjectFit" src="" alt="" class="wp-image-2360454" width="1200" height="606" loading="lazy" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Yowser! The Expansion Desktop was more than twice as fast as the 2.5-inch hard drives in sequential transfers. Note also the consistency between reads and writes. Longer bars are better.</figcaption></figure></div>

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It’s almost not worth posting hard drive random write numbers as they are pathetically slow compared to SSDs. This is one test where you’ll get slightly better results from 2.5-inch hard drives. However, it’s not nearly enough to to offset their far weaker sequential transfer performance.