Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Black USB 3.0 for PC Laptop and Mac, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography (STDR2000100)

Still use it as a backup, works perfectly.

This is a brief review after having just received the Seagate Backup 4TB drive. Functionally the unit is excellent, and I was successful backing up both my resident hard drive and an external drive of thousands of photos. The initial backup took about 2-1/2 hours which I found fast enough for a full backup utilizing USB 2.0. The reason for 4 stars is the initial setup. Instructions are virtually non-existent; a tiny guide of several pages in multiple languages that are not instructions but rather an FCC Declaration of Conformance. The instructions consist of 2 pictorial steps; (1) plug the USB cable into the unit and (2) the PC. Then....Nothing. After finding an online site I realized there should be a Set-Up screen. The problem here is the Dashboard.exe file is not embedded in the drive. I finally went to the Support site and found the executable file and downloaded it. After that, setting up a backup schedule was intuitive, and the backup successful. Ill re-evaluate the performance when Ive got more history. One further comment..... I have been using PCs for decades, and although Im no Techie manage to survive quite well. Im not sure if the lack of the executable file is a defect but I guarantee many users would have become frustrated and returned the product. Communication is as important as the functionality of the equipment.

4TB good for 4 Mos. VERY disappointed. Registering 2% health on Hard Disk Sentinel. After 4 mos regular use I risk imminent Failure. I was going to use it as a recovery drive after an older (and Loaded) 3TB Seagate Desktop could no longer be read by my HP PC. So, I needed a recovery drive to potentially rescue the files and I transferred 3.5 TB to other sources (only to find out the 4TB is No Good). I spent $200 for the Data Recovery from the 3TB, the Seagate 3TB is toast ($150) and the 4TB (which was supposed to save me) has 614 Bad sectors and 2% health after four months of regular use. A professional advised me to switch brands and I spent $200 for a WD Black recovery Drive (My Data is now recovered and saved.) Wary, I then had ALL of my Seagate portable drives (most 2TB) checked and found two MORE out of Five are in critical condition. In case youre counting, thats 4 Seagate drives that have gone South on me. Ill let you know if that 2 Year Limited Warranty does me any good, but no more portables for me. UPDATE: Was on hold about 5 minutes but the recording directed me to the Seagate.com/warranty page. Nothing could be easier! With the Serial Number and Product number from the bottom of the unit, I was immediately given the option of returning it to them for a replacement, OR (for $12) they would send me a replacement first and I could send the bad one back to them pre-paid. I was also able to check the warranties on my other drives. The Data Rescue was worth the cost (the 3TB was bought in 2013) and I NOW monitor the health of all of my drives through HD Sentinel. Upgrading to 4 stars because they stand behind their product.

Ive had my 1TB Seagate Backup Plus for 1 month. I set it up with my PS4 Slim as soon as it arrived. Formatted the drive using the PS4 and downloaded multiple games onto it in one day, the games I had to delete or had been unable to download because I ran out of space on the 500GB drive that came in my PS4. The games I have on this drive load much faster than the games on the internal PS4 drive. Great speed. The games run very nicely, less loading time in game. No stutters or any other issues with those games. I did have an issue twice so far. I read somewhere that having an external drive plugged into the USB on the PS4 could cause problems with the DualShock 4 controller. I dont know why but its definitely something about having the drive plugged in that caused my controller to lag horribly making the games unplayable. However, it only happened when playing games NOT installed on the external drive and once I went to the quick menu on the PS4 and choose Sound/Devices then stop using extended storage then unplugged the drive from USB, which didnt affect my game since it wasnt installed on the drive, the controller worked fine. And Ive been using the drive for a month and only encountered this 2 or maybe 3 times. Just make sure you go to your settings or quick menu on the PS4 and choose stop using extended storage so you dont lose any data. I like this drive so much that I just bought another one, a larger silver 2TB drive to back up my laptop. Or maybe Ill use the silver 2TB for the PS4 and black 1TB for the laptop. Hmm decisions, decisions...

I have 5 hard drives connected to my network. One attached to the WFI router, one to the WD My Book and two to my streaming device. I also have Samsung T3 External SSD that I carried when away from home. I normally have duplicate backups for important data. One of my hard drive died, it was in fact a Seagate one. I lost data but since I have backups, I was not too upset. To be fair to Seagate, the failed hard drive could have been dropped before. Unless I am connected the hard drives directly to my Computers, the speed is depended more on my WIFI network speed. The fastest file transfer is between my Samsung External SSD and my Apple MBP when connected directly. My Time Machine Back UP is via the WD My Book which is done automatically in the back ground. The spindle speed of the hard disk is not too much an issue for me. Either 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM would do. Yes, I would prefer SSD drives but that would be too cost prohibited for the time being. When the failed hard drive was making clicking sounds, I started looking for a replacement. My selection is rather simple. I looked for the Bang for The Buck hard drive among the well-known brands. I picked this 5TB as it was not much more than the cost of the 4TB. I picked the Red color one as it costed $10.00 less than a black one or blue one. The silver one was almost $40.00 more. This is a no brainer, I picked this red 5TB for $119.99. While this Seagate advertise for able to be use on Mac, it does not come with a cable that could be use with the newer Apple MBP. But then, a pair of USB 3.0 Type-C to Micro-B Data Cables could be picked up at Amazon for about $9.00. I have Windows PC on my network and this hard drive works fine. I install Paragon on my MBP and I can read and write on this hard drive. My recommendation for picking up a hard drive is look for a known brand and get the bigger capacity as it would normally cost less per TB. It there is a price difference between the colors, get the one that cost less, since the difference is only the color. Personally, I do not recommend taking hard drive on the road as mechanical hard drive are more prone to damage if pumped or dropped. Pick up a Samsung SSD if you want to take it with you. I pick these ‘portable’ hard drives for home use because these do not require separate power supply. I do not want more wall warts. Personally, I do not see that much difference in speeds of different brands of hard drives. Since I am not hard wired to my hard drives, I am fine with the speeds. If I need to transfer large files between the hard drives, it would take some time. I just use one of the PC that is on my network to perform this task and I work on my MPB. If the files are not that much, I can just multitask and let the files transfer in the back ground.

For the most part, theres really not a lot to say about this drive in comparison to others. Everything one would expect is here: solid transfer speeds, quality build, svelte looks, and reliability (some will disagree with this last but, in my experience, Seagate is just as good as the rest). What makes this drive a go to drive is the size. If you own Seagates 500Gb Slim, you know what Im talking about (this 1Tb version is a bit thicker). if you dont, dig around for whatever 1Tb portable drive you have handy. Now, cut the thickness of that drive into almost half and youve got this drive (the actual dimensions are listed below). What makes this drive worth the price (if you can get it on sale) is that you get the same storage as other 1Tb drives, but at half the thickness. For many, this wont matter, and I can certainly understand that. For those who are packing things tight, though, saving 1/4 on the thickness of a portable drive can be a big difference. I can now easily carry this portable drive in its own pocket my messenger bag, rather than having it rattle around in the larger pocket with all the other doodads that dont have a good spot. Combined with the fact that this drive will run off a standard Micro USB cable (albeit at USB 2.0 speeds), this winds up being a big advantage for road warriors and geeks. Is the drive worth the cost? Thats hard to say. If you can get this on a decent sale, I would say yes. I have all sorts of portable drives, but since getting this one I find many of them are gathering dust. Its just hard to pass over the tinned form factor for this drive. I will, however, point out that the Toshiba Canvio Slim is more or less the same price, but manages to shave 1/2 off the length. Personally, I trust Seagate a bit more, but thats personal preference (I also like the look of this drive more).

You gotta love the ever increasing capacity of portable external hard drives! My last 2 were 2TB each and I nearly filled one up already and the other is well past half way now. When it comes to storage you can NEVER have enough! I owned 2 of the WD My Passport Ultras and love them. I love the fact that they dont need an external power supply and that theyre just so damn portable yet holds a lot for something so small. I recently go this in the mail and it is a little thicker as is described than the WDs but not by a whole bunch. Its still considerably less thick than stacking 2 of the WD drives on top of each other. While I do love the storage capacity on this device for not much more thickness than the WD drives, I do have one big gripe about it. Now this might be something on my end, or even the limits of my TV but I have one 2TB WD HDD pretty much committed for only movies. That HDD stays hooked up to my Samsung TV about 95% of the time so we can watch my gigantic collection of movies anytime without having to hook up a laptop or computer to it. So assuming that since that worked perfectly fine, I expected the Seagate 4TB HDD to work the same once I copied all my movies over. Sadly that was not the case at all. The TV wont even recognize the device. So Im now stuck with the dilemma of what to do. I can hook up my laptop to my TV via HDMI and play movies that way, which is a pain and reason why I loved my WD 2TB HDDs so much, or get one of those mini HTPC for about $100 and hookup this to that, or even maybe Chromecast. Either way its sadly no plug and play anymore for me. Like I said, maybe theres something that I need to do in order to get it to work but I havent had time to research it or figure out how to make it work. Because of the above reason, I dropped it 1 star otherwise I wouldve given this a 5 without any problems. If there are any updates or changes, Ill be back to add to my review.

I bought a 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive (Model STDR2000100 2TB) from Amazon last Friday. It arrived with Monday’s mail to my SW Ohio home. It’s about the size of a pack of cigarettes (volume-wise) and very nicely finished. I plugged it into my new iMac, booted it up, and the drive icon immediately appeared on screen. When I opened it, I found three files visible: Warranty.pdf Seagate Dashboard for Windows.exe Seagate Dashboard for Mac.dmg Since I have no PCs and since I hope to add a boot system to the drive, I chose to reformat the drive with a GUID partition table with the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. The formatting took less than a minute using Apples “Disk Utility” application. [See Seagate article 207851 here: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207851en?NewLang=es&language=en_US . See also Apple Support article HT202380 here: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202380 .] However, before I did that, I called Seagate Support: I asked, “If, at some later date, I want to format my drive back to NTFS, could I do that, and would the software that was on the disk when I bought it be available to me online?” I was assured that I could, though I would need to do it from a PC, and the software is available online free. [For the software downloads, go here: http://www.seagate.com/search/?keyword=dashboard%20download .] I also took the precaution of copying “Warranty.pdf” to my main drive before reformatting, and copying it back to the Seagate after reformatting. I then asked what the difference was between the drive I bought and the more expensive Seagate Model STDS 2000100. Well! The hardware is identical. The only difference is software, and that software is available online free. Wow! Wish I’d started asking that that question ten drives ago! [See, Seagate Dashboard 3.0 How to Setup Mobile Backup Using the Backup Plus as the Destination Drive, and the other Seagate Dashboard videos on YouTube.] Some have asked how hot this drive gets. Mine just now finished copying a 250 GB Time Machine backup file from a Firewire drive (plugged into the iMac’s Thunderbolt port via Apple’s Firewire-to-Thunderbolt converter cable) to my new Seagate drive. The transfer took about 20 hours. My fingertips can barely perceive that the drive is warmer than the room. I’m impressed! Several have reported reliability nightmares with this drive. It’s far too soon for me to have any experience on that, but it does concern me. To protect myself for the next two years, I purchased the, Seagate Rescue - 2 Year Data Recovery Plan for External Hard Drives, for another $10. So far, I love this drive!

I purchased two drives, a 2TB in Black and a 2TB in Red. They will each take the place of two desktop bound external 2TB drives that have been dutifully serving as my Media and Time Machine drives that, until bad sector errors have reached critical mass, have performed quite well for a few years. Its fortunate that they should choose to die now, as Im also moving overseas and would have hated for them to go a month or two from now while Im over there. Portable was definitely the way to go for me. I dont need 7200 or 10800rpm drives and I dont want to be adapting bulky wall warts overseas, either. Now, theres a bunch of options out there from Toshiba, Western Digital, Seagate and many other lesser-known brands for external, portable drives in the 2TB range. Ive been mainly a Seagate customer for the past 5 years or so because theyve proven to me that their products have a long life and perform well. This was for desktop models only, however, and design never played a part because they are all, pretty much, big and clunky boxes that sit and do nothing. A portable drive is a different story, and I think Seagate has outdone itself with this drive. Design. Before I bought the two Seagate models, I had bought a WD My Passport 2TB drive at Staples. It was alright, but it was very thick. Nearly twice the thickness of my MacBook Air at the hinge end. The chassis was metal surrounded in plastic and it looked alright. It certainly wasnt going to vie with the MacBook Air for looks and I think it suffered because it tries. The performance was fine, just what Id expect from a portable USB 3.0 drive. The real problem with the design, though, was not the thickness but the shape. There was virtually no flat surface on the drive at all. Every edge was tapered and the flat surfaces had some convexing going on. Mine would rock side to side on a desk and wouldnt stay in position in my lap. I looked on Amazon for alternatives and found this. Im happy to report that, with the sides leading to the bottom are tapered, the bottom of these drives are flat and are made of a nicely textured plastic that feels good and grips well on a desk or a leg. The top is even better, being a piece of aluminium that is completely flat and very good looking. Despite the colour scheme not being derived from Apple, the slimness and choice of materials certainly make this feel as though it belongs in a bag with my MacBook or on my desk next to my Magic Trackpad. Its the best looking external drive Ive seen. The light on it, however, feels distinctly Apple. Overall, the design is excellent and, without going to the lengths of moulding a piece of metal over a bare drive (see the Seagate Seven), this is probably as slim as you can expect these drives to get. Its nice to see products that design around the user and still manage to keep it looking good rather than just make it pretty. Performance and Heat. As said, these replace my other drives that serve other purposes and that are just about full. So, first order of business was to copy over the old Media and backups to the new drives. First, I formatted them for Mac. For those who dont know, you can buy just about any drive and use it for Mac, even if it says Windows or PC. This can save you a lot of money. Just open Disk Utility, click the drive, select Format and click Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or whatever filesystem youd like to use. After that, I just dragged and dropped. From a USB 3.0 drive to another USB 3.0 drive with my Retina MBP, two terabytes copied in a little over five hours. This puts the total transfer speed around 100MB/s. Pretty damn fast. While the files were transferring, I made sure to keep an eye on the heat coming from the Seagate Slims (well, I kept the back of my hand on it) and was pleased to report that neither the metal top nor the plastic bottom got any hotter than my MacBook Air runs on my lap. That is to say, they didnt get hot at all, merely warm, and I dont think theres a hazard here. Packaging. Who cares? Its a cardboard box around a plastic shell. The tape holding the box shut was annoying like the tape on new DVDs and Blurays that never comes off in one pull, no matter how much you use your nail to free it. Included is the drive, a fact sheet and a USB cable. Who needs more? This is a great buy. At (if I remember what should be the numerator and what the denominator) $0.05/GB this isnt the best you can do for 2TB, but its really close. Im happy with the performance, the design is stellar and user-centric and I suspect the lifetime of this product will be far longer than the time it will take me to fill these drives and need bigger ones.

I rate the Seagate Backup Plus Drive 4/5, but am writing a 1/5 review due to the condition of the specific item that I received from Amazon: I received this Seagate Backup Plus drive -- which I intended to use to back up files on my personal laptop -- on time. It was delivered in a plain mailing envelope, however, loosely packaged with a loose (untied) cable and no paperwork, which I found to be suspicious. (I would have expected the drive to be packaged in a Seagate box with at least the standard warranty card). Looked like a used drive, not a new item. Anyway, I attached Backup Plus drive to my laptop, expecting the installation software to start up. NOTHING happened. I checked out the drive, and it was EMPTY -- zero files. No installation software. Fortunately, I was able to find and download the Seagate Backup Plus Toolkit software from Seagates website, and after installation, got the drive to work. Good experience with this drive on my first try. My previous Seagate drive would take over 24 hrs to download my files and had a funky/difficult to use file management menu. This new drive accomplished about the same backup file load in about 3 hours and has a better menu and features for managing files. Also, Seagate has a downloadable .pdf users manual for this drive. I was tempted to return the drive to Amazon, but now that it works and has accomplished what I wanted/needed, I guess that Ill (reluctantly) keep it. So, 4/5 for Seagate Backup Plus, 1/5 for Amazon experience.