Seagate Backup Plus 2TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STDT2000100)

My previous review was for an older model 2TB Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive I bought and returned in June, 2014. Don't know why Amazon is lumping this New 4TB Drive review in with the old.This review is for the Seagate 4TB USB 3.0 Backup Plus External HD for Mac I bought 12/30/2015 at Amazon and received 01/03/2016:I love it! Pure and simple.It works perfectly with my new iMac's Time Machine backup. Just plug it into a USB 3.0 port, there's a power transformer/plug as well, then click on the prompts to use Time Machine Backup, how often to backup and what to backup, and you are good to go. It works silently in the background as it goes about its business. Unlike earlier models from Seagate, this one comes on and shuts off when it's supposed to: for scheduled backups every hour, or when you tell it to backup now. Very unobtrusive. And, 4TB for less than I paid for 2TB two years ago! Outstanding!The USB 3.0 port, the HD's only connectorSeagate Backup Plus 4TB Desktop External Hard Drive for Mac with 200GB of Cloud Storage & Mobile Device Backup USB 3.0 (STDU4000100), is as fast or faster than the old Firewire 800 or Ethernet connections between my old iMac & Seagate backup HD. It's also comparable in speed to my Seagate 1TB portable Lightning External Backup HD I use with my MacBook Pro laptop.You can also drag or move files to the drive as well. They go onto the drive's desktop or into a folder you create and move them to.You can use it as an additional storage hard drive by clicking that prompt, but why? Just get an expansion hard drive with as much as 8TB instead. There ARE instructions on how to format and use this drive with a Windows PC, but again, why? Buy the Windows backup drive. It also has models with more memory.I've been using the HD for a week now as I load new software and update it all to work with El Capitan. (My old iMac is still running 10.7, so everything had to be updated. PITA!) It seamlessly backs everything up using Time Machine and I couldn't be more pleased with it.I am not going to use the 200GB of "free" OneDrive Cloud Storage for 2 years. So I can't review that. You have to pay for the space after the 2 years. Seagate says it's a $95 value. So I'm guessing $45 - $50 a year after that? I wonder how difficult it is to transfer what you have stored in the cloud with one vendor to cloud storage with a different vendor?I highly recommend this Hard Drive. It's much improved and a joy to use.-------------------------Old Review for Seagate 2TB External Backup Drive:This is a good Seagate drive, at least I think so. I have two older Macs, an iMac and a MacBook Pro. Neither has USB 3.0. I tried to back up my laptop from scratch. Using USB 2.0 Time Machine said it would take 4 days! So, I asked Seagate what I could use besides USB. I was told there was an adapter with which I could use either Thunderbolt or Firewire 800. Wrong!There are no Seagate adapters that fit this drive. The only port the drive has is a Micro B port. The cable is a Micro B to USB 3.0.There are no work-arounds. If you don't have a Mac with a USB 3.0 port, you are screwed.LIke my other Seagate external drive that I use on my iMac, it starts and stops at totally unpredictable moments. I have to unplug it so it doesn't run for hours. It will spool up and run continuously for hours even after it backs up the computer. It gets very hot that way. This drive seems to behave the same way.PS: the Mac Time Machine software was corrupted the second time I used it. First Aid wouldn't fix it, so I sent the hard drive back and bought a 1Tb portable Seagate drive with Thunderbolt adapter. Hopefully it will work.

Seagate 5 TB- it seems to be functioning fine so far on my old iMac 5 which always runs out of space.- I switched from an older 4 year old WD My Book which functioned perfectly but at 500 GB had simply become inadequate to store my stuff. I've never owned a Seagate product and I am keeping my fingers crossed. There is a $9.99 'recovery fee' option as you check out on Amazon which did not sit too well with me as it seems that the previous/current products have a 'problem' with numerous recovery requests, hence the need to charge the $10 for recovery. I could be wrong. Some reviewers have claimed that Seagate charges up to $500 as recovery fees. I pray that that shall not happen to me (or you) and I might get another storage device as a secondary backup if the machine starts acting up. Maybe I should have paid the $10.- the discounted price of the Seagate 5TB and the fact that I could get an extra 1TB by adding a bit of money on top of what I would have paid for a 4TB WD My Book swayed my decision.- I plugged it in and downloaded the Seagate 'dashboard'. I followed the instructions by other Mac owner reviewers to go to disk utility and partition the disk in order to format it for use by the iMac. Click on the Seagate 5TB drive and then at the top right hand side, click on 'partition and then choose 1 partition as your option.It seems that, for you to use the Seagate as the Time Machine, you have to choose the Mac OS journaled option while partitioning the drive.-The Seagate dashboard then gives you the option of using it with a Mac or PC or with a Mac alone. It 'warns' you that some capabilities shall be lost when you select the Mac only option. It also recommends one to download Seagate software if selecting the Mac and PC option.- I selected the Mac only option as I wanted the Seagate drive to function as my Time Machine. Setup was a breeze and I clicked on the Time Machine option after setup to initiate the initial backup. The initial backup took a while (the bar said 6 hours but it was more like 1 and a half) but all subsequent backups have been fast.- the data is easily recoverable from the time machine which easily scrolls to whatever date and time the data you want to access was saved and you may access it the same way it was saved then. I prefer to use Time Machine but other people have other preferences.- the Seagate icon is seen at the top right whenever the Seagate drive is on but it seems that, when you click on it, the 'Home' option does not allow you to recover data from there as I guess, once you select the Mac only option and the Time Machine as the default recovery app, then you have to recover and view your data from Time Machine and Time Machine only. I guess when you select the Mac and PC option, then the Seagate Icon, and later, app shall allow you access to the data. The Seagate app only allows you to get the latest update. (When Mac only/Time Machine mode is chosen at the beginning)- it seems quiet and doesn't get too hot. I unplug it sometimes as I heard that that stretches the life of the drive. Opinions differ sharply about this.- I don't know if you can change the setting from Mac only to Mac and PC once you make the selection and format the drive. You may need to research further.- a Seagate recovery app is downloadable but I am not sure if you need to pay a fee to use it or if it is free. Hopefully I (and you) never get to find out.

I got this drive for backups of my QNAP NAS, which is USB3 capable. I had no issues filling it full of data in NTFS format, then connecting it to my regular PC to do some final verification and add some more files before putting it in a box at the bank. Write speed was a solid 81.2 MB/Sec average according to the RSYNC log for pushing 7.2 TB of data to the drive. There were 3 GB of files which were between 200MB and 1 GB each, while the balance were mostly small files of 1 to 10MB. Basically, a normal file sever makeup I suppose.The drive inside is just a 8TB SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drive from Seagate, though at right this moment, the bare drive is actually more expensive than this one in an enclosure. The enclose though is great so far; even though I was originally planning on shucking the drive. Note that the enclose doesn't appear easy to shuck, I couldn't find screws, so it needs to be pried apart.Unlike some other reviewers, I had no issues with the drive getting hot. It certainly got warm, but my infrared thermometer showed it at only 41c (About 105 F). The only difference I can think of is that I loaded it pretty much sequentially, meaning there wasn't a lot of rewriting data. It was just pushing data to the drive. I will update this on the next rewrite in case the read-write process is markedly different. So far, it is an awesome backup drive for the price.The drive also comes with a free 200GB of space on OneDrive. To get it, you go to Seagate and register your drive, and walk though some steps. It took me about 5 minutes, then my MS OneDrive account showed an increase of 200GB in space. Meaning I got to stick some important files up in the cloud too.

Ich habe für diese Festplatte knapp 65€ bezahlt. Für 3 TB unschlagbar. Die Platte rennt pro Tag fast 14 h und hat noch nie einen Ausfall gehabt. Ich musste allerdings noch einen Adapter für die Steckdose kaufen, da ein englischer mitgeliefert wurde. Das stand leider nirgends. Sonst alles Top.

El diseño es en negro brillante, los bordes vienen algo filosos, el disco es silencioso y los cables de corriente y USB, algo cortos. El aparato no ocupa mucho espacio, aunque es un poco pesado. Fue una muy buena compra por menos de 2000 pesos. Puedo guardar toda mi colección de multimedia y documentos, y me sobra espacio. Lamentablemente no trae software para sincronizar. La uso en una Mac, por lo que está formateado para este sistema. Muy recomendable.

I chew through huge amounts of external storage backing up my personal and work systems. While I use two different cloud backup providers, there's still nothing quite like having local backups, ready at hand for when problems hit. And, since I generate a lot of content (I have written over 50 books), I need to keep backups for a while (I still have backups from the 1990s!). Fortunately, external backup devices are not hideously expensive, although some are more reliable or easier to work with than others. This is far from my first Seagate external device, as I have quite a stack of them in a cupboard, ranging in size from a few hundred megabytes to 8TB. This unit was on sale, and since my current storage is almost full, it was time to add a new external to my backup cycle.The unit looks like a typical Seagate external drive: a boxy enclosure with USB and power supply on the back; a wall-wart plug provided. As an external drive the unit worked fine, backing up my primary system easily and quickly. As part of the package you get some online Seagate cloud storage, but I tend to not use these bundled services as much as a commercial online cloud storage. As with all such Seagate's the unit is a little on the heavy side, as well as bulky, but they do stack quite easily. For me, the best thing I can say about an external drive is that it works flawlessly and doesn't cause any issues, and this is just like all the other Seagate drives I've used: it works, and works without issue.

He comprado varios discos portátiles de Seagate, en ésta capacidad (8 tb) y en otras capacidades. En general funcionan muy bien. Llevan años funcionando con cargas de trabajo bastante pesadas. Si sirve de algo, funcionan bien en sistemas Linux sin necesidad de instalar o configurar nada. A veces son un poco lentos cuando se respaldan muchos archivos pequeños (incluso en Windows) pero definitivamente son confiables. Solo un consejo, existen unos discos que traen un patrón piramidal en la parte superior. Estos suelen ser un poco mas baratos pero definitivamente no son recomendables. Desde el principio uno de estos modelos baratos me dio problemas con perdida de datos y en una falla eléctrica se le quemó la placa controladora mientras que otros 4, incluido el modelo de la publicación, no sufrieron daño alguno. Una busqueda en Internet para sustituir ésta placa controladora arrojó que este es un problema común para esos modelos baratos.

Not much to say about this since these types of devices are very "what you see is what you get" - I am extremely pleased with mine. It arrived well-packaged and in great condition. I own about 10 other Seagate external hard drives and I've never had a problem with any of them...to the point where I now exclusively only buy Seagate drives. I have tried others over the years, such as Western Digital, Samsung and Iomega, but have run into some problems with each. I trust Seagate drives completely. This drive in particular works great as a storage device for my Xbox One! With 5TB of space I can install all my games with a ton of room left to spare, and the USB3.0 means the data reads and writes quickly. I was able to get this drive at an amazingly low price, so keep your eyes out for sales on external hard drives! I would definitely recommend this drive to anyone looking for a large-capacity external hard drive, especially if it's for backups or for console (Xbox One/PS4) or data storage!