SeagateBackup Plus Portable, 4 TB, External Hard Drive HDD, Black, USB 3.0 for PC Laptop and Mac, 1 yr MylioCreate, 4 mo Adobe Creative Cloud Photography, 2 yr Rescue Services (STHP4000400)

Just doing some copying but it was extremely slow. This is not a review per se but there is an easy fix to speed up writes. Go into Device Manage, double click the drive and select the Policies tab. Tick 'Better Performance' and tick 'Enable Write Cacheing'. OK it and write speeds will be much improved. Like anything though keep a backup if the data is important to you.You're welcome.EDIT: This drive started giving errors and Seagate Tools reported the drive as defective. I had to buy another drive from Western Digital to backup my data to. I then did a complete format of the drive and it reported as fine in Seagate Tools. However since then it gave another error that disk repair fixed. I no longer trust this drive anymore so use it as a backup drive/scratch disk.

I am now retired, but when I worked as an IT professional I was used to SAN, NAS and mirrored server backup solutions. At home I used an external drive for my main backups plus a small NAS for longer term backups. I had used a variety of software solutions, but invariably went back to Windows 7 backup. It was painfully slow and prevented useful use of my PC until it had finished.I was running short on backup space and decided to go for another external drive. The Seagate looked like very good value. It came with it's own software, but I was just after the drive, or so I thought.I installed the drive and software. Initially the software did not install properly, but I was successful second time. I'm glad I persisted. The whole package is brilliant. I have set the backup for continuous backup. It just potters in the background backing up everything I want. Very fast and completely unobtrusive.Highly recommended.An update from September 2020. The software had now been updated several times and has seriously lost its appeal for me. I found my CPU regularly hitting 70 degrees with nothing obvious happening. I tracked the culprit to Seagate Tools. I turned it off and the temperature plummeted to mid 20s. I moved from continuous backup to daily. The daily backup did not happen. I tried to force a manual backup , but the programme just hung. Scratching my head a bit now. Why can't they leave well alone.?

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.

After spending two day adding data whilst attached directly to PC I then attached to a powered Amazon hub - it would not work, not recognised and started to click. After some help from Amazon they put me in touch with Seagate customer support - They were very helpful they even told me that the 5TB would not work with a hub!!! They also recommend that no USB powered portable drive should be attached to a hub not enough power. Some lower TB drives might work but it is still not recommended. I returned the product for a refund as I have no spare ports on PC.

What can I say about this drive? the Drives are well put together, good quality and the hard drives are well protected upon opening up the caddie so well worth the £100 for 5Tb.. however.. this was the 2nd (and last) Seagate 5Tb external drive of mine since October 2018.....the first caddie (not the drive itself) went in November 2019 after falling 3 inches onto a soft carpet which damaged the USB connector.. completely dead.. the PC wouldn't pick up the drive at all.. so took it out of the caddie, connected it internally and Hard Disk Sentinel (still) reports the HD as 100%, so that has become internal storage for digital conversions of LP's..The second drive hasn't lasted 2 months.. once again it's the USB connection not the actual hard drive.. obviously after the "soft drop" that damaged the 1st drive's USB connection this one was treated with kid gloves.. this time all it took was unplugging from 1 pc and connecting to another.. once again the actual Hard drive has been checked with HD Sentinel and is in perfect condition.. rather than replace and spend another £100 (already have a 12Tb pc, thanks to the previous failure) gonna look for a replacement USB connector or a better quality USB connector