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)

Im a documentary filmmaker and so hard drives are a part of my livelihood. Ive had this drive for a year now and have had no issues. Of course everything is backed up on another two drives so Im not stressed (and thats something I recommend everyone do), but it happens to be working fine. I also handle my hard drives extremely delicately. Dont move your drive while its plugged in. Dont plug your drive in upside down. Always eject your drive and gently feel the body of the drive for any movement before you unplug it. Do one action on the drive at a time as much as possible (write OR read). Of course dont jostle your drive when you transport it if you can help it. And most importantly: get a new drive every TWO years. If its been working for two years, great! It might fail soon though! Get another one theyre so damn cheap! If you follow this religiously I dont think youll have the issues other people have when they rate a drive one star. Im sure there are defects out there, but Ive almso never had one somehow and Ive been using hard drives from LaCie (1TB, 2TB and 4TB), Western Digital (4TB) and Seagate (1TB) for the past 14 years ;) My first two drives (which were from LaCie) failed after 2 and a half years each time. Since then, Ive followed my two year rule and I havent had a scare since. (I still use LaCie hard drives by the way. I think all drives are more or less the same with different levels of portability and ruggedness so just get the one you can afford and treat it like a new born).

Great hard drive to use for the Xbox One. I received this recently and once it arrived I split open the case carefully to remove the 2TB drive. Once the drive was removed from the case I inserted it into the Xbox One Collective Minds 2.5 Hard Drive Enclosure, formatted the drive to MS-DOS using my Macbook, attached the new enclosure to the side of my Xbox One and then formatted the drive via the Xbox One Console so I could store games and apps on this new drive. I titled the new hard drive the SideDrive because of how the Collective Minds Enclosure attaches to the Xbox one and I have gone from 500GB of storage to 2.5TB of storage on my Xbox One. This actually turns out to be around 2.15TB of usable space outside of the Xbox One OS and drive overhead. Regardless I now have a decent amount of room on my Xbox One so I dont have to keep uninstalling/reinstalling games, apps, etc. I would definitely recommend purchasing this drive if you are looking in the 2TB range of space to add to your Xbox One and would recommend getting the Backup Plus device as the drive itself costs $20 more than purchasing it with the Backup Plus enclosure as long as you dont mind spending 5 minutes removing it from the case provided with the Backup Plus. PS. The speed seems to be exactly the same as the internal drive itself. I have not noticed any difference in terms of game loading time, game saves, etc. Edited: I was incorrect on the amount of storage. The 2TB drive provides around 1.8TB of new storage which when combined with the 349GB of usable storage on the 500GB internal drive provides a total of 2.15TB of usable storage total.

UPDATE 2/26/2017: While the original review remains true for Windows XP 32-bit, shame on me for not researching the 2 TB limit with XP. I dont know what happened with OS X and GParted before, but today I tried again and I was able to delete that problem partition (on both drives) using GParted by: - booting from the GParted disc (which I had done previously) - selecting the (tiny) partition and going to Partition/Manage Flags - de-selecting LVM (if any other type was there, I would have deselected it too/instead) and selecting FAT 32 - I dont remember if I needed to Apply the changes or if it automatically did it but if it did require it, I did do it - then the partition became unlocked and I was able to delete it - at this point, there was one 3.64 TB of unallocated space (the ENTIRE usable space) I will be testing one drive in Linux and the other in the NAS, but I do not anticipate any problems. While it was my fault for not knowing that XP couldnt use them as one full-capacity drive, there was still the problem of running the Windows/OS X programs (from that tiny partition) requiring the internet to continue. I am NOT taking a star off, the reason being that I was finally able to remove the partition and use the entire drive. NOTE: As I am updating this review, I decided that before I test them as mentioned above, I will try to use GParted to create a 2 TB partition (actually 2 TB -1 MiB (2097151 MiB total) because of MBR limitations) to see if it then becomes usable in XP 32-bit. With a GPT partition table (for spits and grins)- as expected, nothing. With an MBR partition table, however it was NOT what I expected/hoped - nothing. Im probably doing something wrong so dont go blindly on my tests. I cant test every possibility because I am not going to use it in XP- I was only doing it to try and help others. The bottom line is that as long as you understand that Windows XP 32-bit (not sure about XP 64-bit) cannot use all 3.64 TB as one drive (i.e., one partition, if it can even be used at all), then this is a very well-priced and sturdy drive. Im sure that it will perform up to its specs and will be reliable. If not, I will update this review again. Original Review: I attached this drive to Windows XP. It was only recognized as a mass storage device. Disk Manager did not show anything. OK, plug it into OS X. I saw three files: an executable for Windows, an executable for OS X, and a pdf. I ran the OS X app and it wanted to connect to the internet but my firewall blocks it. It had a message box for Retry or OK (maybe it was Quit). It then proceeded to close. WHAT??? It wont run unless it can get to the internet? BS* OK, so Disk Utility showed two partitions- one very small and grayed out and the other was the space that I wanted but could not get to. Disk Utility said it was deleting that small partition (as per my actions) and it just tried and tried and tried. I then booted GParted and it, too, could not delete that partition thats holding my drive hostage. I bought two of them and all of them are going back tomorrow. I was considering this drive and the WD but for some unknown reason, I went for the Seagate. I am ordering four of the WDs. I have 12 WD drives in my NAS and the only corruption Ive experienced was due to a bug in the NAS. I guess all of the success stories are from people who dont care that one of the primary partitions is unusable to them. And Im assuming that newer versions of Windows can read the drives because OS X, GParted and Mint can all see it. *And because of the necessity of calling out on the internet I will never, ever, ever, and then some, buy ANY Seagate products from now on.

I bought this drive and started using it just last week, but my initial impressions are that this is a great portable drive. This 4TB drive is SMALLER than all my older drives, all of which are LOWER in capacity than this drive! In the included photos, you can see this drive (in red) next my much larger 3TB older drive. Data transfer speeds seem really good with the USB 3.0 and I didnt notice the drive getting too warm at all, even after using it for hours and backing up a TB of data. As is common with any product, some failure is unavoidable and some reviews have mentioned this drive either DOA or dying/unreliable after not much use. After reading those negative reviews, I was hesitant at first but then I purchased it based on the fact that I have been using Seagate backup drives since 2010 without any problems. So if this drive is like the other Seagates Ive been using and gives me many years of reliable service, then it deserves nothing less than 5 stars. The drive is very compact, only needs USB to power it, and is affordable and fast. However, if I was forced at this moment to state something negative, itd just be that there are no AF (advanced format) labels on the drive even though with all the research I have done so far, it looks like this IS one of the newer drives with 4K sector formatting (which would make it better and more reliable). I hope I never have to update this review with something negative and that this drive proves reliable for many, many years. Initial impressions: 5 stars out of 5!

On the hardware side, I have no complains. Is very small (a little bigger than a Blackberry 9320), its really fast (even on USB 2.0), and gets the job done (100GB took like 2 and a half hours to copy on the 1TB version). Its awesome. However, in the software side, it really needs some tweaks. First, the automatic backups are somewhat messy. Each time the software finds a new file, it will back it up, but it creates a new folder with the date to do it. I would like if it could back up to the same folder each time, so I dont have files scattered all over the drive. Second, Ive tried to use the mobile backup app, but didnt work (Ive tried it on a Samsung S4 mini). The software on the phone recognizes the drive, the software on the laptop recognizes the phone, but I always get an error. I reinstalled the software on the phone and on the laptop, and still doesnt work. Its a little dissapointing. I havent tried the social media backup, or the Mac driver, so I cant tell at the moment if they work or not. So, as an external hard drive, I would definitely recommend it. As a backup utility, it really needs to improve the features, especially with the phone. EDIT: After reviewing the firewall rules, I noticed that only the main program (Dashboard.exe) had rules applied. I created a new rule for MobileService.exe, and now the mobile backup works as expected. So I now give the Backup Plus 5 stars for the hardware and 4 for the software (I gave it 2.5 for the software at the beginning). After two and a half months, it stills works perfectly. I partitioned the drive (one as FAT32, the other remained as NTFS) and its working pretty well. Im very pleased with my purchase.

Ive owned this product since January, 2017. I have intentionally not written a review until now so I could have adequate time to use the product and make a fair assessment. To date the Seagate Backup Plus has performed admirably. It is an excellent product and performs exactly as advertised. I have not used it to back up any mobile devices. Ive owned a Lenovo T410 laptop since 2011 and have been running Windows 10 for a little over a year. Ive used this external hard drive many times to do backups. The process is scary easy. In general I backup File History which is really loaded up since my laptop is so old. In addition, the backups include my 10K song iTunes library, numerous movies, and many videos. I have done a couple of System Images as well. At present I have more than 900 GB (of the 1 TB) of unused space remaining. Im hardly an expert on external hard drives but that seems pretty awesome, particularly for such a reasonably priced unit that also happens to be light as a feather. One of the things I noticed in reading external hard drive reviews prior to my purchase is the large number of reviewers who complain about their drives breaking down. So I guess the final quality assessment may not be possible until Ive owned the drive longer. Hope this helps someone with their decision making process. This was an authentic purchase and I was not part of any promotional program.

i experienced some weird issues with this drive and i still cant tell what went wrong and whether its the drives fault or mine. although considering this is not my only external drive and the rest work fine it seems to me like something is off with this drive. so heres what has happen: i received the drive and went straight on to backup my other 4tb drive with the new one. at first the drive seemed fine, no issues. it took 13 hours for the copy to finish. but then once i tried to access the files issues started. at first it worked really slow and had a hard time to read the files, then i couldnt read the files anymore and tried to reformat the drive, thought maybe something went wrong in the copying process, but no, windows couldnt format the drive and returned an error. i tried a disk check, but it behaved weird, i checked SMART data and it showed already over 380 bad sectors. and it kept going downhill, eventually i couldnt read any smart data anymore and every time i connected the drive to any computer the computer would freeze completly until i disconnected the drive. ok, i though i had a bad drive, that happens, i would just return it to amazon and get a new one. thanks to amazon and their great service i received and new drive very quickly. so i went to once again backup my other 4tb drive. and basically the same story with the 2nd drive. now all i did was to copy files, nothing that i would think would cause a drive to fail unless it is already faulty. so at that point i thought about sending it back for a refund thinking this model is just bad. but sending it back is time and money, and since i do need a drive i decided to try some advanced methods to revive it. the issue was that every time i connected it to a computer the computer would freeze, so it wasnt easy to work with. it would also make a sound like its trying to read over and over. so what i wanted to do 1st is to wipe (0 fill) the drive, for that i had to be very quick since there were only about 3 seconds until the computer would freeze. i used dd command under linux. it took 38 hours but in the end i could reinitialize the drive and reformat it. and so after all this the drive seems to work fine now. the only problem is that it has 8 reallocated sectors already. which shouldnt happen on a brand new drive but ill suck it up cause im tired of messing with it. what the issue was, i dont know, seagate should figure it out. maybe with the bad drive i sent back. oh and also, the 2nd drive i got has two bumps and the casing. its just cosmetics but still... now i can just hope that the drive will work fine for the next years to come. other then that, an actual review of the operation: i like it, its very small for a 4tb, the case is nice. it runes very cool and quite but it requires more power then my usual external hdd, not much more but enough to not work with my unpowered hub where my other drives work. my copy of mostly big files (so mostly sequential write here) showed a 60mb/s, which is fine by me. so to sum up, i dont think i can recommend this drive 100%. it seems like there are a few more reviewers with quite similar issues (also on other sites, new egg i think.) when this drive works its very nice, but theres seems to be an issue that i cannot put my finger on. also, dont take this review as a statement that you shouldnt buy seagate, i delt with many many hdds and the failure rate for me over the years has been similar. this product has a good price and overall is a great offering and that is what you should think about when you shop for hdd. as long as you have at least 1 mirror copy it doesnt matter much which hdd you have.

So far so good, I have been using mine as a primary game drive for my new Xbox One X and has been performing great for the past couple of months. The drive enclosure is well made and comes in a variety of colors, the colored part is anodized aluminum with the rest being black plastic. One of the good features is that the drive does not need an external power supply so if you plan on using it with a laptop make sure that the port you plug it into has power supplied to it, some laptops do not provide power to all of the USB ports. Mechanical hard drives marketed to consumers and enthusiast PC builders today are not as reliable as hard drives of several years ago and all of them are priced as every other disposable consumer electronic devices, you may get one that will last for years while another one will fail far sooner than you would like. With this knowledge the question of drive failure is not if it will fail but is one of when this will happen. If you like the vast majority are using mechanical drives for primary storage due to their affordable cost to their large capacity and you consider the data you have placed on the drive to be valuable to you and something that you cannot afford to loose like important business or school files or perhaps you have lots of personal photos etc stored on them then you really need to be doing backups of your data on a regular schedule. Drives are so inexpensive today I generally buy two, one for daily use and the second one to mirror the first one. There are several really good free and open source tools that are available but the one I like and use is called Synchronicity and can be found here (just change the dot to a . and remove the spaces) synchronicity dot sourceforge dot net Synchronicity is very powerful as well as easy to set up and use and did I mention that it is FREE as in free beer as well as being open source? Open source software is great even if you are not a software developer, open source means that the source code is freely available and if you obtain the software from an official download source you will have a very high confidence that it will not contain any viruses or any other forms of malware, the reason? Other open source software developers have taken a look at the source code and have not seen any malware in the program this is why I personally choose to use Linux as my main operating system, no big brother data mining my personal information from my OS. I would recommend these drives and I plan on purchasing a few more for myself.

I purchased this drive for backup purposes. It was not my first choice, because a Seagate 1TB internal 3.5 hard drive recently failed on me. Both Western Digital and Seagate internal hard drives have failed in my system recently, so I was hesitant to purchase either brand. However, my first choice drive, the 1TB Toshiba Canvio which I purchased in August 2015, failed within a month. The replacement Toshiba Canvio 1TB also failed within two weeks. I will update this review if this drive fails inside the warranty period. Background information for anyone interested. I have been building and upgrading personal computers for 20 years. I have used many hard drives, from 5MB to recent 5TB models from a dozen manufacturers. Over the years, several of these drives have failed. My usual procedure is to destroy the drive or just store it until the information is no longer relevant. Recently, I retired 5 drives which were 5 to 8 years old, but still working. I purchased mostly 1TB replacement drives to increase my storage capacity. However, the newer drives have failed at an alarming rate. I copied my laptop backup files from an older 500GB Toshiba Canvio to a new 1TB Canvio. This drive failed under light use in less than a month. When I attempted to zero the data on the drive to return it for replacement, all attempts with multiple programs failed due to drive errors. I was forced to return the drive with the data intact for replacement. The replacement drive failed within 2 weeks and I returned it also. Now, to keep my data from being compromised if the drive should fail, I use whole drive encryption. While a little inconvenient, it gives me peace of mind to know that my data cannot be retrieved should I have to return the drive under warranty. I also am using a dual backup system for my laptop, with two USB 3.0 1TB hard drives in rotation. These two drives are from different manufacturers, to spread the risk of single drive failures. Periodically, I copy the contents of these portable drives to my main 5TB backup and various other drives, including a NAS server. I have no desire to put all of my data in the cloud, because of security concerns. I insist on keeping physical control of my data, which is why I have adopted these practices. With the cost per terabyte of storage in the $50 range, this system is not expensive for my needs.

Seagate is the brand for me. Its simply reliable. I owned several other brands in the past: Toshiba, western digital, hitachi but Seagate by far is the best of all. The worse thing it can happened to you is having one drive failing on you, and that happened to me with toshiba, wd and hitachi. I lost music, movies and the most valuable of all the data...pictures. I bought this exact model 1 year ago...and its working as the first day. Also in the worse case scenarie the HDD comes with 2 year of warranty (which is 1 year more than most of the other brands) This drive is insanely small and thin, I can put it on my shirt pocket without adding any bulk to it. USB 3.0 offers you lightning speed to transfer anything, so if youre making a backup and the ETA is displayed in hours, forget about that, it wont be happening again with this baby. The design is awesome, it has an aluminum body thats gives you that sense of good quality/build. This drive includes an special offer that provide you with 200Gb of storage in OneDrive, which is nice mainly because these days you may find running out of space on your smartphone. Just keep in mind that there is a limit to redeem the offer (mid 2017) The only thing I personally would like to have...is a carrying bag. Unfortunately this HDD does not come with anything to travel, unlike other brands. So if youre looking for a reliable HDD, give this drive a shot...Im pretty sure you wont regret.