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)

I usually buy WD Element drives for backups, but they are just too expensive at the moment. I wanted to expand my backup storage, and this time I wanted to get USB3 external drives and these seem to fit the bill. With that being said, heres my initial impressions: Pros: 1. Small Form Factor. 2. Nice Finish 3. Very good performance over USB3 copying files. 4. Bus powered, no need for an additional power supply, although some USB2 ports may not offer enough power so it wont work with those. Cons: 1. Short USB 3 Cable. Wow, could they have made the USB cable any shorter? I can barely plug this into my desktop back USB port without it hanging because of the very short cable length. Amazon has the basics USB 3 cable for this currently $5.49 for 3 feet, so figure the cost of that into this unit if you need something longer. 2. Vibration: I bought two of these drives to act as a dual back up for each other, and one is barely noticeable with vibration and the other is vibrating like a vibrator. I think I may return that one because I dont trust the longevity/reliability of it with the way its vibrating. Other: For the price of this unit, they really should have thrown in a protective sleeve (and a longer USB 3 cable.) But, great work on the form factor and capacity/price point...I just hope these prove reliable beyond the 2 year warranty -- I hope to get at least 6-8 years of service life out of them. Update 12/16/2015 -- Since I bought the original drives over a year ago, they are still working very well. I bought some more of them during Black Friday 2015 and very happy with their performance -- but the USB3 cable is still short on the new drives I bought this year, they havent increased the length since last year.

I am buying the Backup Plus 4TB. The Plus is one Seagate/Samsung ST4000LM016 4TB SMR drive. The Plus FAST is 2 Seagate/Samsung 2TB SpinPoint M9T ST2000LM003 . The Plus 4TB drive is 15mms so it wont fit in most laptops or 2.5 containers. I am pulling them out of the container and using them in a RaidZ for files that I rarely if ever will access again, but need to keep. Low Power, Low Heat, Small size make them ideal for what I need. You can put 12 of these in 3x5.25 bays, which in a RaidZ2 gives you 36.4TB usable space. I attached 2 pictures of the speeds hooked up to USB 3.0 port. The pictures are with the drive empty. My experience with the drives so far is, as they fill up, they slow. One screen shot is stressing it with 1GB files the other is with 5GB files. Generally they seem to be faster with Larger files. Update Dec 31st 2016 My motherboard started kicking out all kinds of ACHI errors on some of the ports so Ive decided to replace the motherboard and to be safe replace the drives with 6TB 3.5 drives. The 2.5 drives worked good for the most part. I did have a 50% failure rate on the drives. Though all of the drives that failed, failed within the first 3 weeks. I had bought some of the drives from Best Buy, they had a sale on them and they were cheaper than Amazon, Best Buy was cool exchanging the bad drives without question, which surprised the hell out of me since I had pulled them out of the case, damaging the cases in the process. Ive gifted the surviving drives to friends and family, they work great and are reliable, with 2 minor exceptions. 1 has a constant temp reading of 89c (192F) so the sensor is bad and a second one, a couple months ago, had a lot of sectors go bad over the course of a few days. The drive was still useable, and if I wasnt in a RaidZ2 config I would of replaced it immediately. Over all they worked and did the job once the problem drives were weeded out. ASRock C2550D4I Mini ITX Server Motherboard 2x Kingston KVR16E11/8 HighPoint Rocket 620 Dual Port SATA 6Gb/s Controller 10x Seagate STDR4000100

Still use it as a backup, works perfectly.

A+++

I needed to back up files on my desktop (windows 7) and other external HDD and found this HDD to be pretty good at the job. Installation was easy and the backup app was simple and intuitive. Like the WD My Passport Ultra the app gives you two options: guided or all file back up. The guided back up will find files that fit certain categories (like music, photos, etc) as well as any non system folder and back them up. The all file back up will copy all folders that you select. I had issues with the all file back up as it refused to copy certain folders (like program files). In the end I had to manually copy a couple folders over to the hard drive that were not copied by the software. This wasnt much of an issue with my desktop but it would have been with my older laptop which had more data stored under folders like program files. I imagine this issue has been resolved but I didnt take the time to look into it. The back up files were easy to locate on the hard drive. I found the social media backup app to be a really useful and easy piece of software. I only used it for facebook but all you have to do is sign in and the software will automatically download all videos and pictures from you profile, including ones you were tagged in. This was something I had always wanted to do but never took the time to find a program to do it. It was definitely a nice addition. With USB 3.0 it took about 3-4 hours to backup 300 GB of data. Of course once you get the first backup completed it wont take as only with the updates.

So, it was great while it lasted. Very fast usb-3 R/W speeds (comparatively) on my older Lenovo x220. This was to be the main backup/overflow drive for my Lenovo x220 development box (Manjaro, 4.10 kernel), but unfortunately it died about a month after delivery, exactly THREE DAYS(!) after my return window expired. April 4th was right around the time the drive actually failed, but I made the mistake of working on it for a few days to no avail, trying to recover files. Arrrgggh! And yes, it is the drive; the ports fine. Other drives function as expected, but this one refuses to mount, wont accept known-good superblocks, cant reformat, repeated i/o errors, etc. Everything points to drive failure. While perhaps unrelated to quality, I notice the price continues to decline. Hopefully thats a false correlative. I wasnt expecting this from Seagate. Frustrating that it failed and that I likely could have returned/exchanged in time had I started the process immediately instead of mucking about. *** Updating my 1-star review based purely on my support experience with Daryl. There are quite a few negative reports of Seagate Customer Service reps here, but Daryl was incredibly helpful, knowledgable, and resolved my issue quickly: In my case that was a return ticket which he processed promptly without issue. Plus were both veterans... ** Return shipping was modest, but I bought on sale, so that wasnt as issue for me. I get that it stinks for someone whos just dumped their entiere life on a backup drive that dies. That stinks. (And is why multiple backup vectors are encouraged.) Anything produced in quantity and discounted for the market will have modest failure rates. Seagate seems prety solid overall. Of course, i could be cursing Daryl if my replacement arrives DOA. But get this, he went out--during the call--to make sure that I received the same color (because I use RED for DEAD drives, etc). Great support! Great service.

This is my 3rd External Seagate Slim 2TB hard drive that I have gotten, however I do not use them for the original purpose it was designed for but instead use the actual sata based hard drive that is in the External Closure for Internal Hard Drive upgrades, The reason why is it is actually about $5 to $10 dollars cheaper than buying a bare bones 2.5 inch notebook sized hard drive. Since the actual hard drive is a small 9.5mm thickness it is perfect for both PlayStation 3 or 4 internal hard drive upgrades from the standard 250/320gb drive on the PlayStation 3 or the 500GB drive on the PlayStation 4. Until recently this was the only way to upgrade the storage on your PS4 until Sony released System update 4.50 last month which now allows External Drives through their USB ports up to 8TB. However if you still want to upgrade the internal drive of your PlayStation 4 your stuck with using this 2TB drive for now since the higher capacity ones are to thick to fit into your PlayStation 4 enclosure, for now (At least if you want to keep your PlayStation 4 portable). Anyways I originally brought 2 of these for upgrading both my sons and my PlayStation 4 and both have been working great for over 2 years now. This one and another one I am planning on buying are to upgrade the 2nd Internal Drives on mine and my wifes laptops which currently house a 1TB and 750GB internal drives respectably. Again due to their 9.5 mm thickness they go in perfectly into the hard drive laptop enclosures for a perfect fit. Also if done correctly you can re-use the External enclosures that these 2TB hard drives came in for other internal notebook drives you may want to re-purpose as an external drive. So while I did not use them for their original designed purpose I would highly recommend this Seagate External Hard Drive for either their original purpose or as internal hard drive upgrades for your PlayStation (3 or 4) or Laptop. Specs: HP Pavilion dv8t-1200 Entertainment Laptop (June 2010) OS: Windows 8.1 Enterprise Processor: Intel I7 Core @ 1.60 GHz (1st Generation) RAM: 8 GB (Max Capacity) Hard Drive: 500GB WD-Blue SSD2TB Seagate traditional Sata Drv (Storage) Video: Nvidia GeForce GT 230M (HDMI & VGA) Display: 1920 X 1080p 18.4 inch Screen Internal NIC: 1GB WiFi NIC: Internal Intel Centrino Dual Band/USB LB1 AC600 Dual Band USB Dongle (5 ghz) USB Ports: 3 X USB 2.0 Ports ROM: Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Burner

I have 16 of these. I use them to backup my NAS. Used for years with no issues. A USB cable provided for each. Powered by the USB cable. Compact, easy to store in a safe for backups.

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.

Had this drive for over three years. I removed the drive from the casing/shell and installed it in my laptop and worked perfectly in that time. I never did use the shell or the cord. I put that back in the box and stored the box. So three years later I decided to replace the drive before this one would fail so I put it back in the casing and started using it as a back up while my new drive is in the laptop. Within a couple of weeks I discovered that the cord was bad. I could wiggle it just slightly at the neck/cord region of the USB connector side. And then the next time I plug it in, the drive wasnt recognized and said I had to format the drive. So I see why people are having problems. When I plugged it back in windows explorer would freeze for minutes and I had to unplug and plug in a few times to get it be recognized by Disk Management (Vista) and then did a dick check on the partitions on the drive and now its OK again. A bad cord can seriously screw up a drives file system. Drive is A-OK, but the cord is crap. So Im disappointed in the cheap cord, even though its a thick, stiff monstrosity. Seems like it would be sturdy but its definitely not. So if you buy this drive, get another cord for it. Like this one ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L963STD/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?smid=A20J3ITGSOMSJG&psc=1 ). And people who think they can throw their drives around like a plastic toy, expect your drive to not work. Treat it like an expensive and super fragile thingamajig.