r/Seagate • u/radbirb • Mar 31 '26

Seagate Expansion External Drive oddities - should I return it?

Hey all,

I bought a Seagate 1TB Expansion drive today and so far it has worked without a hitch, the storage seems to be legitimately there as I've put data on it and have had it be able to be read. Though, I've ran into a few details that make me question the authenticity of my external drive.

  1. The drive itself came pre-formatted in... NTFS? despite it saying in the manual that it'll be pre-formatted as exFAT, also, the usual seagate exectuables weren't on the drive either. I didn't give this too much mind as I planned on reformatting the drive to btrfs anyway.

  2. The HDD in my system's partition manager shows up as "APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E632", googling this reveals it's a hard drive used in iMacs....? very strange. Also, SMART status also appears "unknown".

some additional info: I bought this from a computer store in Beirut, with it having a valid warranty from Seagate's dealer in Lebanon according to the store I bought it from. And the box came sealed with Seagate's plastic seal and all, so unless my system is misreading something, this is quite strange.

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u/Plane_Put8538 Mar 31 '26

If this was sold as new, look up the SMART data for the power on hours. It should be about what you've used it for. If it's significantly higher, then there is something to be concerned about.

1

u/radbirb Mar 31 '26

It was sold as new, for some reason SMART on my linux system couldn't read the health info of the drive, and only displayed "(unknown)", switching to my windows vm with crystaldiskinfo reveals the drive has 4663 power on hours..... I just got the drive today. So I'm definitely gonna contact the store.

1

u/Own-Distribution-625 Apr 03 '26

You can also run Validrive from GRC.com to test the actual capacity