Seagate STHP5000400 Backup Plus 5TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD - Black USB 3.0 for PC Laptop and Mac, 1 Year MylioCreate, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography, 2-Year Rescue Service

A whopping 130 MBs top speed... Nice storage capicity for the price tho!

I bought the external HDD last black Friday, great deal 89.99. But...... At first, it seemed to work fine, it came with one exFAT partition, macOS recognized the partition, but I could not eject the disk, so I reformatted, then the problems started. I made 3 partitions, one exFAT, one ext4 and one for Mac. Nowadays just one of the 3 partitions is recognizable OSX, one in windows. My fix: Low-level format again and 4 TB of data transfer. Not recommended.

Let me preface with, I have a 2-year old windows 10 machine with 32GB RAM. The machine is configured for graphics and photos, so there is a hefty display card. When I first unpacked this drive, I plugged it into one of my USB 3.0 ports and installed the software. Right after that, I was getting mouse and keyboard lags some short and some for 10 seconds or more. Unplugged the drive, shut down the software, lags disappear. So I uninstalled the software and decided to use Windows backup. But, when I plugged the drive in again, same thing - keyboard and mouse lag (freezing up as if there was an extreme performance hit) I unplugged it from the USB 3.0 port (5 Gbps)and plugged it into the USB 3.1 port with 10 Gbps transfer speed and problem solved. Now, I have to buy a USB extension, because the one that they sent was obviously meant for a laptop and not my console machine. It is a small drive for its storage capacity - so thats good.

I am a bit dissapointed with this 5TB hard drive. While the price is attractive, the technology they use is the SMR technology that is very slow compare to traditional CMR technology. If you only write small amounts of data at one time, you will probably not notice it too much, but who buys a 5TB drive to only write small amounts of data? When copying large amounts of data, you will only be able to see write speeds of around 60MBps which is half of what older CMR technology drives do. Together with the thicker 15mm size, making it comparably less portable than 9.5mm drives, I am not sure this is such a good deal anymore.

You ever wonder what you could do with 5 terabytes of your own cloud, just skip the cloud get an external hard drive well Ill tell you you can copy the cover art and 4000 Blu-rays and DVD movies. You could also used it to backup your computer so you never ever have to worry about ransomware. All this at a reasonable price.

Got this as an external hard drive to replace my 4TB hard drive. Does its job well and I cannot complain. Worth every dollar and will continue to buy from this brand.

I use this external hard drive daily for work. Our server at work is typically not accessible when I work from home, so saving files on the server is not worth the headache of repairing that ongoing issue. Thus, I use this hard drive every day. Its small and easy to take back & forth from work & home. Its fast, has more storage than I could ever use, and its a quality product that has continued to work as intended for over 3 years. And you cant beat the price for that. (Especially since Im hard on things; its been dropped a bunch and thrown in my briefcase daily).

Simply plug in and play. 3 years and counting this device still working. Planning to buy it again.

I have an old Seagate external drive that still works well but has limited storage capacity for my current needs. Out of the box I liked the size of the new portable 5TB drive. It was very cost effective. Unfortunately the Toolkit software they include did not work correctly with my new Dell XPS laptop running Win10. I followed the prompts exactly to get started but the backup hung with 2 min remaining and never finished. After several attempts I uninstalled the software from my laptop and reinstalled a fresh download from Seagate with the hope some bug had been fixed to no avail. After several attempts to backup it finally gave a backup complete message but the backup had skipped my most important folders containing my photos and Lightroom catalogue. I am impressed that the customer service answered my inquiry within 24 hours but the advice was to use the Windows backup software instead of their own Toolkit. No suggestion was made to trouble shoot their Toolkit software. So far an OK external drive but forget about their preloaded backup software.

So Ive been using this device for about a year. Then I noticed that intermittently it would not appear in Explorer. Its plugged in, why isnt it working. Well, after literally months of this, Im just now figuring out that its the cord that goes from the unit to the USP port thats causing an issue. Its not secure, kind of wiggles. I dont want to get another unit because the stupid connection doesnt work but what use is the drive if it wont boot up. Unfortunately, my availability to have tech support ended just a mere 10 days ago. Not sure what to do at this point. So, just check that your cord is really tight and secure if you buy this device. If not, return it and look for another brand.