Seagate GoFlex 3TB External USB 3.0 / 2.0 Drive Now $119.99 at Costco

There's a $20 instant rebate (no coupon) to get to the $119 price. I already had one of these drives, and I just bought two more. The one I've had is blazing fast, and has worked great. Amazon's price is $139.

My Costco just created a MASSIVE display of these things in the middle of electronics, so I think they expect to sell a bunch.

In case you're interested in cracking this open and using the drive inside: There's a Costco label over the actual product label, but when you peel it off you can see that the model # on the box is STAC3000102. After firing it up, the Seagate software believes the model # is STAC3000602. So make of that what you will.

D'oh. Sorry for the upside down sign. But now I kind of like it...

You get a 2-year warranty from Seagate. You can return it to Costco anytime during your lifetime for a full refund.

But, I will say what I always say when hard drive warranty debates come up: We're talking about $119. No one is going to give you the warranty that matters most, which is that your data stays protected. Having a hard drive crash and losing a couple years worth of photos is not going to feel any better just because somebody replaces the hard drive for free.

I'm a big fan of Crashplan for continuous off-site backups. I have over 1 TB backed up with them. Works great, and the restores are blazing fast. All for about $50/year.

"We guarantee your satisfaction on every product we sell with a full refund. The following must be returned within 90 days of purchase for a refund: televisions, projectors, computers, cameras, camcorders, touch screen tablets, MP3 players and cellular phones."

Hard drives are not in the 90-day list.

sulu1953 said:   I looked but did not find this info online - but is this a 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM drive?

TIA.

MontyBurnsFW said:   There's a $20 instant rebate (no coupon) to get to the $119 price. I already had one of these drives, and I just bought two more. The one I've had is blazing fast, and has worked great. Amazon's price is $139.

My Costco just created a MASSIVE display of these things in the middle of electronics, so I think they expect to sell a bunch.

In case you're interested in cracking this open and using the drive inside: There's a Costco label over the actual product label, but when you peel it off you can see that the model # on the box is STAC3000102. After firing it up, the Seagate software believes the model # is STAC3000602. So make of that what you will.

According to random geeks on the Internet I can't vouch for but seem to know what they're talking about, it contains a 7200rpm drive with 5 platters of 800GB each.

Rocks,

I'm sure you already tried this, but the drive does come with some sort of Windows 7 backup software from Seagate. (Maybe the incompatibility with Win7's auto-backup features is why.) It also comes with a package of Mac tools. If you've already deleted them because you reformatted and want me to send them to you, send me a PM with your contact details.

Also, here's a link on Seagate's forums where some people discuss workarounds. It does sound like this is a common issue with Windows 7 and drives this size.

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Other-External-products/Seagate-Exp...

Good luck.

Is there any reason why external hard drives are cheaper than internal hard drives these days? Don't think you can pick up an internal 3TB drive at such prices.

rocks said:   WARNING to people with WIN 7 thinking of getting any drives over 2TB:

I got one of these at costco yesterday, it is very fast on my 3.0 usb port. But, trying to back up on it, I then spent several hours discovering that you will not be able to use Win 7's back up function with any of these external HD over 2TB, off the shelf. Win 7 doesn't write to these 4k sized sectors on the 2tb and up drives, thanks MS.

Just do a search on Windows Backup Error: 0x8078002A on 2.5TB and 3TB.
Might get fixed on Win 8, don't hold your breath.

You can use other backup programs possibly, but why bother? Or reformat sector size, but why bother?

So I temporarily back up an image to a partition, then copy to the seagate. Silly.

I use crashplan, too; its great.

Very few people use the windows image backup. Probably just you and Steve Balmer. The win image tool is so infleible that burning an image and moving it it not a big hassle considering you cannot even update incrementally that image. So you burn a new image every time which makes no sense when drive image and shadow protect will give incrementals and most likely have no issues with the drive. Same for Driveimage XML a free tool.

Sure.....I back up both my computers to an external drive....gotta do it......but once a month, I burn the whole mess to a DVD....takes 15 minutes.....I will never lose my data again.

I found these in west palm beach costco under the laptop island. The 1TB were on the main isle and walk around to the 2TB and the 3TB were on the inside.

If you have a AMEX card, they double the warranty up to a year, so you'll get 3 year warranty. Since AMEX is tied in with Costco, it's a no brainer.

This is a great price, but makes me think that much cheaper prices are just ahead. Every time I jump on a great deal, it gets even better a few weeks later. I'll buy at least one to migrate off my DROBO. Anybody want to buy a bare DROBO?

Expires Aug 5.

So would this work on a 32-bit computer with 32-bit Windows XP as a secondary storage drive? Sounds like a very good deal!

Just bought two of these to use as internals in my PC. I'm running Windows 7 64 bit. Will I need to do anything special or will Windows see them as normal drives?

@ the folks using crashplan. It sounds great. On the Family plan, where it says up to 10 computers can be backed up, can the computers be on different IPs? I have a PC at my home office on its own DSL connection, and I have the rest of my computers on a separate DSL connection which is for the family to use.

Probably Costco US.

=aw

In for 2, thanks op!

I needed some storage and wanted to get them at Costco since they do their lifetime return policy on external hard drives. But I needed direct SATA connects and didn't want the heat issues that sometimes come with externals so I used this video to show me how to remove the drive from the case. Note, the other 3TB vids on YouTube are for the older case style, the 4TB and the newer 3TB at Costco are the same case.
How to remove the drive from a Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB enclosure

The internals are ST3000DM001 3TB 7200RPM 64MB ca.che (FW - pls stop auto-urling the word Cache) drives; there was no Costco sticker, just the Seagate label. They used to sell a 3TB 5400RPM GoFlex but it seems they've gone 7200RPM which is what I wanted. If you pull the drive from the case, be sure to keep track of the external/internal serial numbers since they're different.

I got one out perfect and the 2nd case had 2 small clips damaged but once it's back together you'd never see it so I'm sure it'd return to Costco no prob. I had to do "Covert to GPT" in Win7 Disk Management and then I formatted with Minitool Partition Manager since it doesn't create 128MB partitions at the start of the drive like Windows and it puts all the system meta data right at the start of the drive (Win7 puts it out a bit from the start). Both drives are still in their inner metal cages and happily going through chkdsk /r.

Also, the USB3 adapters I have left over now that I removed the drives work great; CrystalMark gave 1.7x-2.4x more throughput vs a Usb2 Opti adapter with sequential and random 512K read/write tests using the same drive (2.5" 320GB 7200rpm) on the same Usb3 port. The 4k results were +6%/-3% vs the Usb2 adapter.

All in all a great deal: $119.99 x 2, lifetime return policy, USB3 hard drive adapters and power blocks x 2, and 5589GB usable! Woot!

PS - bonus, I just found out these are Seagate's new 1TB platter drives, only 3 platters for 3TB. Also, I got 51c under load with the metal cages on and with them off just 45c so definitely remove the metal cages if you remove them from the plastic case for direct SATA connection.

see above:

Note, the other 3TB vids on YouTube are for the older case style, the 4TB and the newer 3TB at Costco are the same case.How to remove the drive from a Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB enclosureThe internals are ST3000DM001 3TB 7200RPM 64MB ca.che; there was no Costco sticker, just the Seagate label.I got one out perfect and the 2nd case had 2 small clips damaged but once it's back together you'd never see it so I'm sure it'd return to Costco no prob

This is very tempting!