Question about Seagate Expansion Portable

Hi Conexa
The question of whether a hard disk is suitable for continuous operation is quite complex. On the one hand, various manufacturers offer special disks that are designed for continuous operation (enterprise disks, NAS disks, e.g. Seagate Ironwolf / Skyhawk or WD Red). These have a different firmware that has special features for heat monitoring and vibration control, the disks tolerate more vibrations (e.g. when several disks are installed next to each other, e.g. in raids or NAS/SAN etc.) and more heat.
However, if a normal "cheap" hard disk is well cooled, i.e. not stacked closely together and "freely" exposed to the air (i.e. good heat dissipation), in our experience it can also withstand continuous operation. The question is also what happens if the drive (like any other drive, no matter how expensive or "enterprise" it may be) fails at some point and suddenly stops. So think about backup, ideally set up two backup media or backup to Amazon S3 or similar in addition (e.g. periodically 1x per week or similar) - my experience with hundreds of disks in our data centre of onlineumfragen.com is that no matter which disk (cheapest disks, most expensive disks, enterprise SSD, etc.) - you ultimately never know when a disk will fail. So the question of whether a drive is good for continuous use is really a purely statistical one - i.e. if you have 100 drives, how many die when on average. This is relevant if you have a data centre. If you want to use the disk privately or as a single disk, the question is not whether the disk will run but how long and what you will do when the disk is dead. As a backup, I would connect a cheap external HD, and occasionally put the backup in a cloud for security (e.g. Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier). Or for a much more reliable backup solution, simply use a cheap NAS (e.g. Synology) with two internal SATA hard drives, e.g.

I can't say whether it is specifically suitable for continuous operation, but I have been using the hard drive for three months in continuous operation without any problems.