Seagate Expansion Desktop HDD review: Vast and fast
At a glance
Expert's Rating
Pros
Super-low price per terabyte
Up to 24TB total capacity
Good looking
Twice as fast as 2.5-inch external HDDs
Cons
Slow compared to SSDs
Requires AC adapter
Our Verdict
When you need more room for your digital stuff than an SSD can provide, the Seagate Expansion Desktop delivers up to 24TB of capacity at an affordable price point. It also delivers twice the sustained transfer rate of 2.5-inch external hard drives.
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Hard drives may not be sexy anymore (they actually were once!), but an external HDD like the Seagate Expansion Desktop reviewed here is the only way to get up to 24TB in a single unit, and for far less per terabyte than any SSD.
The kicker? Performance isn’t nearly as slow as you might think — our 16TB test unit read and wrote at close to 280MBps.
Further reading: See our roundup of the best external drives to learn about competing products.
What are the Seagate Expansion Desktop’s features?
The Seagate Expansion Desktop is an external, 3.5-inch USB 3.0 hard drive available with up to 24TB of space — three times the largest single SSD currently available.
The rather handsome enclosure measures approximately 7-inches long, by 4.9-inches wide, by 1.65-inches thick and weighs around 2.5-pounds. It’s black with plenty of ventilation grating, and diagonal grooves spicing up significantly what would otherwise be a bland countenance.
On the rear of the Expansion Desktop are the SuperSpeed Micro-B USB port and a power jack. The drive requires an AC adapter — 3.5-inch HDDs use a fair amount of juice.