@M@GOID: I think this is my third external drive that I got in the last decade. I gave one away, I still have two around. I think that best solution would be to get an empty rack, a decent HDD, and you get an external drive that has nothing to do with luck. I also have a 1.5 TB WD Green inside an USB 3.0 external rack and the old 320 GB Barracuda from my dead K70AB laptop inside a 2.5-inch external HDD enclosure. I consider these to be the most reliable solutions of the lot. :)

@davidm: It's great when it doesn't fail all of a sudden and recovery is impossible or requires a professional to do it and you cannot afford it. ;)

@Yuuki: I mentioned that the drive inside is a 5400 RPM Barracuda. That spells "slow" for most people. If you know the difference between CMR and SMR, I guess that researching the model of the drive would give you that detail (I added the screenshots with the details especially for those people). P.S. Do you have any comparison/benchmarks involving CMR drives to back your claims? 1 MB/s seems awful...

@Ale: Just get a good internal drive and an external rack to put it in next time. For temporary storage of not-so-vital data, I suggest Dubox - 1 TB for free, I think they're the only ones offering this right now.

Agreed withe last comments .got 3 tb external drive. And now lots of regrets just lost buch of old pictures and videos. Trying to save the last of them took me like a week to copy.
Never again I will buy any of these products.

Why would you not disclose that the drive inside is a SMR drive that runs significantly slower (up to 99% slower in certain writing workload) than a CMR drive? People buying this would be fooled when seeing your benchmark but when they ever fill the drive the rewriting speed would drop down to 30MB/s or below. And if they torrent on this drive they may see the speed dropping to 1MB/s.

I used a Seagate Expansion 5tb as a primary, 24/7, constantly accessed storage drive from 2015 until it finally started failing last month. The heat is probably similar. It has a small fan, that makes most of the constant noise.

The USB hub feature on the Plus model seems a bit odd, I guess it keeps working even when the drive has been powered down but given the drive is portable it's not the most logical combination, unless it's mainly to restore use of the port.

I have a older Samsung 3TB external drive, one that I shockingly discovered was made by Seagate. Those things really get hot. In my neck of the woods 30°c is the norm most of the year. The drive generally sits around 50°c. SMART shows it had a failure, but it still holding it, despite its 5+ years of daily use.

I had actually cut bigger holes in its plastic case. Together with taller feet, they did little to bring down the temps. Nothing short of a active fan could do it.

The manufacturers don't really care about longevity. Their warranties already say they aren't responsible for your data anyways. There are few suppliers, all in cahoots to keep the money flowing, not a single one with intention to sell a unit that operates cool.