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)

Ordered this years ago and still works decent. Starting to show signs of wear and tear now so time to order a new one!

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.

My Seagate 2TB Slim Red, as I renamed it, came a day early well packaged & pretty in red. Its 18 USB 3.0 cable fits tightly on both ends. This Dell Inspiron i5 3542, Win 8.1, immediately put a Safely Remove... icon on the Taskbar & chirped. I DO use that icon when I want to disconnect it, although I see, in Device Manager, Windows set it for quick removal. And I leave it set that way. (Aready Ive rebooted & let the laptop sleep forgetting to use that icon with no detectable ill effects - but no writing was going on that I know of.) Quick Removal: Disables write caching, but supposedly no need to use icon. Better Performance: Enables write caching, but must use the icon. (Dell Diagnostics says... Cache Size: >= 32.0 MB.) I ran Dells performance tests: smart status, 2 smart thresholds tests, targeted read, random seek, funnel seek, 2 linear read tests - & it passed each. The optional SMART Extended Self Test ran for 6+ hours, & it passed. Im extremely pleased the drive got only midling warm (it has no vent holes) & never clinked or clanked the whole time. I could only hear it spinning by getting close. And I lifted & tilted & held it an hour+ during the tests, but never turned it upside down. (Now/then I felt a tiny kick in there; hence, the cesarians some here have performed on theirs. But Ill let mine come to term on its own!) Left plugged in for 10+ hours today - but little/no activity - it isnt even midling warm, though the 2.5 disk is spinning. Pursuant to my main reason for getting the drive, I did a MS System Image Backup. It offered to backup the EFI System partition, C:, & WINRETOOLS to Seagate 2TB Slim Red & took just a tad over 7 minutes to do it. I see the WindowsImageBackup folder that was created is 28.5 GB huge & the drives used space increased accordingly. I did reboot to System Image Recovery & was pleased to see the 2TB Slim listed as a recovery drive with the image shown by date for selection. So, I must say Im very pleased through four days of ownership. Definitely, I will update this review should anything go wrong. But I fully expect Im invincible now... (1) Dell recovery image partition (to factory install) (2) MS Recovery USB Flash drive (Control PanelAll Control Panel ItemsRecovery - Create a recovery drive) This is necessary to boot without engaging partitions you intend to overwrite with the Current System Image during a restore. This also has a copy of my Dell factory image for refresh/reset purposes. (3) Current System Image on my Seagate 2TB Slim Red (Control PanelSystem and SecurityFile History - System Image Backup) So, Im all signed up to get the Win 10 upgrade! - UPDATE 8/8/15: All continues to work well with my Seagate 2TB Slim RED. In addition to two for Win 8.1, it now holds two full system backups for Win 10. Back in July, I gave it a brother: Seagate 2TB Slim Blue. It too worked well out of the box, w/o installing the Seagate software. I put a clone of Win 8.1 onto it, before taking the upgrade to Win 10. Before that, I did run... PS C:Windowssystem32> chkdsk E: /R The type of the file system is NTFS. Volume label is Seagate 2TB Slim Blue. Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ... 256 file records processed. File verification completed. 0 large file records processed. 0 bad file records processed. Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ... 282 index entries processed. Index verification completed. 0 unindexed files scanned. 0 unindexed files recovered. Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ... Security descriptor verification completed. 13 data files processed. Stage 4: Looking for bad clusters in user file data ... 240 files processed. File data verification completed. Stage 5: Looking for bad, free clusters ... 488318496 free clusters processed. Free space verification is complete. Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems. No further action is required. 1953513559 KB total disk space. 113728 KB in 7 files. 20 KB in 15 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 125823 KB in use by the system. 65536 KB occupied by the log file. 1953273988 KB available on disk. 4096 bytes in each allocation unit. 488378389 total allocation units on disk. 488318497 allocation units available on disk. PS C:Windowssystem32> exit So, I remain overjoyed with Seagate.

Great external hard drive. Funny story keep losing it and will find it eventually. Bought another one when I thought it was totally lost.

This portable drive is a good replacement for my older 2TB external Toshiba drive that required being plugged into the wall. This one is far more convenient because its smaller and runs off the USB power. The cable it comes with is fairly short, but I like it because it doesnt take up as much space when I pack things into a bag. If you lose the cable you can still use a regular micro-USB cable (presumably at the cost of using USB 2.0 speeds). Some of the reviews here claim that the drive died soon after purchase, or never worked at all, but fortunately mine has not had any issues at all. Ill be sure to reflect any changes in this review. Im not planning in using the internal HDD for a PS4 or any other device, I will use it to make backups of my Dropbox files and storing videos and whatnot. AESTHETICS: I chose the red 2 TB model and I love how it looks and feels. It feels like an Apple product somehow. The Seagate symbol is slightly raised and groove textured. The bottom of the drive is black plastic with grooves cut into it (see pictures) The red aluminum feels strong, light and smooth like it should. SPEED: The speed of the drive is nothing short of impressive for me. Copy speeds reach about 130 Mbps for large contiguous files like videos, and about 60 - 80 Mbps for thousands of small files. SIZE: The drive shows up in windows as 1.86 usable. On my Mac it shows 2TB (Mac uses the other sizing system) I wrapped kept my drive in the plastic bag it came in so I wouldnt scratch the pretty metal. Ive included pictures that show the physical scale and look of the drive. CONTENTS: The box came with the drive enclosed in a plastic clam shell that is easy to open. The drive is also within a plastic bag-type covering (the one in the pictures) Inside the box was the short USB 3.0 cable, about one foot long, maybe a bit less. There was a small instruction booklet in various languages. In the drive itself were files to register the drive with seagate (for Mac and windows)

This is a fantastic lightweight and portable external hard drive. I use it for archiving my media that I want quick access to. I cannot personally speak for longevity of the 2TB model (as I have only had it for a couple weeks), but my friend had the 1TB version of this model and it died after only a month of use. I believe it had something to do with a faulty SATA controller and not the hard drive itself, but he has yet to put it in a new enclosure. That being said, I have faith in the Seagate brand and I have mainly used their hard drives in my gaming computer and for my external storage for the past 12 years or so and I have never had a single issue. I even am using a 1.5 TB desktop drive from them for the past 7 years and it still runs well and has never pulled up an error with regular checks. The highlights here are that this drive is fast (about 50-60mb per sec on average transfer on USB 3.0 for me, this will vary from computer to computer. The hard drive is extremely portable and the case feels durable. The Seagate brand is reliable in terms of the hard drive, but if the drive stops reading it is almost assuredly the SATA card at which point you should just buy an enclosure off of Amazon for a few bucks and then do a quick swap. There are many tutorials online how to do this and it is far cheaper than paying someone for data recovery.

I received this drive 8 months ago and it is still working in an acceptable manner by my standards. For more details, please continue reading. Having recently re-browsed the Amazon reviews for this product, I saw some people complaining that their drive had failed after x months having ordered it around the same time as me. This prompted me to fully check my drives health so that I could at least be reassured that it is in full working order for the time being. I ran a read test on Windows using HD Tune Pro since thats where my drive was plugged in at the time, and the results (shown in as screenshots attached to this review) show the drive did in fact contain some bad sectors. I ran a non-destructive write test using badblocks on Linux which, for each sector, will first read the sector and store it in memory, then write a random pattern, then read this pattern back and make sure it matches the pattern that was written, and finally restore the original contents of the sector. I had backups just in case, so I wasnt worried and was mainly doing this for science. At the end, SMART output showed 2310 bad sectors existed on the drive. Since I waited 8 months to run this test and used the drive sparingly, its unclear whether the sectors were always bad or if they developed over time. It also just so happens that none of the data I had stored on the drive were on these bad sectors. Despite the clear indication of potential failure, all sectors were restored to full working order after being written over. This means the sectors were really just held a weak magnetic charge, and were not permanently bad from e.g. physical damage to the platter. As a result, the pending/offline uncorrectable sector counts were dropped to 0 and the reallocated sector count did not increase at all. If interested, Ive included the entire SMART output below. MART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 117 100 006 Pre-fail Always - 154970934 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 097 096 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 568 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 070 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 11738583 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2497 (146 170 0) 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 52 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 587 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 099 000 Old_age Always - 4295032834 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 054 041 045 Old_age Always - 46 (Min/Max 32/49 #8) 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 9 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 8819 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 046 059 000 Old_age Always - 46 (0 18 0 0 0) 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 062 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 062 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 147 (146 13 0) 241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 9955309601 242 Total_LBAs_Read 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 15389131969 You can see there is an error count, but no pending/uncorrectable or reallocated sectors. Although its clear that the drive is currently working, the history of weak sectors means I will keep a close eye on it in case data ends up being written to the sectors that used to be weak, since if they become weak again, the drive will have trouble reading from them and I could start to lose data as a result. Remember: all drives fail, no matter what make or model you buy, so always keep backups and be prepared for the inevitable.

The drive works ok: - partitioned the drive with disk utility on mac, formatted journaled OS volume, no problem - did a full Timemachine (TM) backup and encrypted, worked fine, took a whole day - made two other partions, one for data, one for another TM backup of another device - works ok when directly connected to the mac, does not work when used on the network Problems: -could be the disk, el capitan, or netgear router readyshare but when I connect the seagate drive to the router, my computers can not see the drive nor can TM. - got no help from apple, netgear, searched all over the web, evidently theres some missing driver to bridge the mac and the drive via netgear R2600 thats probably not the drives problem. Worst thing about all this, the so-called free 200 gb cloud storage that comes when you register the drive is OneDrive by that s***ty company known as Microsoft. What a hassle, still does not work. DO NOT GIVE THEM YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION! MAKE A SEPARATE EMAIL, PHONY NAME AND NO PHONE NUMBER. Oh and MS as soon as you visit their site they record your browser fingerprint. Heres the info ms wants: OneDrive Preview needs your permission to: Sign in automatically Signing in with your Microsoft account will automatically sign you in to this app. View your profile info and contact list OneDrive Preview will be able to see your profile info, including your name, gender, display picture, contacts, and friends. Access your email addresses OneDrive Preview will be able to see the email addresses in your profile. View your OneDrive photos and documents OneDrive Preview will be able to see your photos and documents on OneDrive, but cant make changes to them. Add or remove bonus storage OneDrive Preview will be able to add bonus storage to your account. It will also be able to remove this storage (but no other storage), at any point in time. You can change these application permissions at any time in your account settings. Sorry, no can do. Going to just go get Veracrypt and encrypt my data onto the seagate and be done with it.

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 drive. Ive had two of these for a year now. Each one used to extend the storage of Xbox One consoles. They work really well as extra Xbox One space, the console recognized it right away and started using it. Since then, theyve endured hundreds of hours of Xbox One gameplay. I noticed today after playing Fallout 4 from it for several hours it was slightly warm but still chugging along no problem. Its sitting behind the console in our entertainment stand, it doesnt have the best ventilation but even with the console blowing heat in there it still runs great. A glitchy game like Fallout 4 has never froze, or crashed while running from the drives. I liked them so much I just ordered another one for more storage on our server. It will replace an old 320gb Seagate external drive that has been running for the last 7 years with no issues. I used to prefer Western Digital, but Seagate has really proven to make some durable hard drives. With so many positive reviews on here its safe to say youre likely to have a good experience. All hard drives are prone to failure, moving parts, heat and many other factors will contribute to their death. Its easy to hate a company immediately once you lose your data, its not the drive manufacturers fault you lost your data. They may have made a faulty drive, but you didnt protect your data with redundancies. If your files are truly important youll buy two of these drives to double up on your back ups, or maybe even better, put them in the cloud to protect against fire loss. Ive learned the hard way and lost memories I cant get back now. Thats why our master closest is literally 1/3 server cluster with hard drives..and drives backing them up.