Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Light Blue USB 3.0 for PC Laptop and Mac, 1 Year Mylio Create, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography (STHN2000402)

I bought two of these to use in a Raspberry Pi backup project. Originally I was going to go for a 2TB set. But then I stumbled across these 4TB Seagates for about 77.99. Which worked out an extra tenner for an extra 2TB of space with a known hard drive manufacturer. I thought it was rather a steal.The drives as expected are supplied with everything they need to get them running, in this case, a drive and a USB 3 cable. There is pre-loaded backup software you can use on windows or mac. But these were to be used on Linux so copied the software off in case I feel like using it later, and wiped the drives.They are quite compact as to be expected with a 2.5 but the case does not add much additional size. One of my qualms was the minuscule activity light on these. Which seems to only be white other drives I have used differentiate USB 3 and 2 with different led colours. As per usual with most 2.5 drives there is no need for external power so long as your ports can maintain the 1.5 ampage need for USB 3, otherwise you will need to get a powered hub.The drive spins at 5400rpm which people would scoff at in the past but you have to remember with drives being larger now they store more data in a sector of a drive which means they need to spin less especially if you keep them defragged which Windows 10 pretty much does in the background now which means your drive should be reading sequentially anyway.Testing the drives on CrystalMark they seem to get around 150mb/s read and write sequentially. I compared my results to an internal drive which seemed to get similar results. As I am using mine for backups reading is more important than writing but both results were pleasing. Random read and writes dropped to between 5 and 7mb/s, again as mentioned in the last paragraph, that is the importance of keeping a drive defragged. Stops it needing to spin like a DJ.I formatted one with NTFS as I need it to be readable by Windows and the other using EXT4 as I do not want anything Windows to touch it well not easily anyway both formats went through with ease, I did not expect any problems but I have had a few drives despise certain formats before so I thought it was worth a mention.Overall, this is a very nice piece of hardware and I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs a large amount of storage at a reasonable cost from a reputable hard drive manufacturer.

I bought this as an alternative to the 4tb WD 2020 hdd with I bought before this an had 2 failures in rappid succession. So after being a loyal WD customer since 2007 I decided to finally switch over to Seagate, I'm really glad that I did :)The first thing I noticed about this Seagate drive is it's size and weight, it's bigger (although only a little) on both counts and the case is metal on top and plastic underneath and overall it just feels more solid than the WD passport, probably slightly less portable, however you really shouldn't be transporting hdd's around too much if you don't want the internal mechanics to fail.Also this Backup plus drive (for a 5400rpm HDD) is brilliantly fast and after I had formatted the drive from exFAT to NTFS (for better stabillity with Windows 10) and enabled high performance policy It scored over 140MB per second via USB 3.0 in both read and write, that's over 20MB per second faster than any WD passport I've ever used! and although 20MB per second may not sound that big of a deal, when copying hundreds of GB's of data that extra speed really helps shave time :) obviously this little hdd is WAY slower than an average SSD, but when you considder that a 4TB SSD cots hundreds of £'s as of 09/08/2020 I'm quite happy to wait a little longer for my files to copy over :)I use this drive mainly for MP4 video files which I rip from my personnal Blu-Ray/DVD collection and 1000's of Photos, also I rip my blu-ray's directly to this drive and it doesn't slow down my Ryzen 5 cpu compared to ripping straight to my PC's SSD (due to disc reading speed bottleneck)So In conclusion if your looking at buying a 4TB external Hard Drive and are unsure whether the 2020 WD passport or this 2020 Seagate backup plus, get this :) I learned the hard way after 2 WD's failed in around only 1 month

I recently purchased a laptop for gaming. I've needed an external drive for more space to store my pc games. I wasn't sure if this was going to run games well enough which it does and it really does a great job.The drive performs astonishingly well, used with GTA V and Fortnite they load just as quickly, but bare in mind that this drive only does around 100 or so mb per second which means your games download times could be a bit longer, it's a small sacrifice, but transferring huge files from your pc could take some time.It was easier for me to re-download my games as transferring the huge files would take allot longer. To note that when using Steam it takes longer to download because Steam likes to make sure there is enough space by creating it... Download from anywhere else and it performs.The cable provided in my opinion is needlessly short and could be longer so not to cram near my workspace. I have a longer cable I use and there are no problems with speeds when running games or programs stored on the drive using the longer cable.All in all its working better then expected. I should have gone for 2 terabytes based on the size of some games, but I'll make do with this one. It's a great little drive and good value.I didn't use the software provided, I'm just storing my content like any other drive.