Seagate Expansion Portable 2 TB External Hard Drive HDD – USB 3.0 for PC Laptop (STEA2000400)

I bought this drive to try and help salvage my ailing iMac (which in itself is a rare thing). The internal drive has started to fail, and I needed to get stuff off quickly.I used this drive to actually run the Mac OS on, based on a 1.1TB time machine imagine that I had taken a few days before. I have to say, I am pretty impressedThe drive itself comes well packaged in a neat box, with only the required amount of materials (no wastage here).Inside the packaging is the drive itself, which has a nice look and feel to it, and a proprietary USB cable that provides both power and data transfer in 1. Keep this safe, its an unusual cable so not sure how easy it would be to replace.I connected the drive, and set about formatting it to the right volume type to be a bootable MAC HD. Formatting was done quickly and I was away - able to install the OS onto the drive from a time machine backup, and have been running off it since.The drive itself is not silent, but neither is it noisy - you know its working by the blinking blue light on the top of the drive - but that's about it. I plan to velcro it to the back of my Mac so that its up and out of the waySize wise its about 25% bigger than a deck of cards, but also about 25% slimmer.The drive gets warm through use, but not hot and nothing to worry about.Read and Write speeds seem pretty good, and i am able to make use of nearly all of the 2TB of storage.I plan to use the drive for extra storage on my Xbox One once I have finished using it to run the Mac OS.Really pleased, and would recommend a good drive at a great price.

Update after several months use...I wondered why my backup software made my mouse so glitchy it made my PC unusable. I find it is, instead, this hard drive, which like many hard drives emits a frequency which can interfere with a wireless mouse (it's the USB adaptor which is vulnerable).With the hard drive within 50 cms of the wireless mouse USB adaptor it was dreadful. Moved to a USB socket on the front of the PC it works fine, nearer to 1 m distance.Original review....Works with Windows 10, but not the smoothest of operations. Comes with mains adaptor and USB lead (specific to this device).The following was written on first use of this Seagate hard drive...Aaaagh. Gets 22% of way into large backup and freezes. As a consumer I say there are hard drives which work, and those that don't, which are those that freeze, their manufacturers websites don't recognise the Serial Number or even the Model Number and when you try to download their software you click on the link on their website, at first nothing happens and then you find six copies of their software have arrived. My drive quickly passes a Seagate 'Short Test' but Seagate say freezing on doing backups can be down to many Windows problems. Thanks for that, as I'm not a geek and am not about to fiddle around with my perfectly happy computer for the sake of some external hardware.Would have got five stars, but currently down to three. The problem is, if I have a problem on first use, where is this going to go??Persisting with this Seagate drive, and a bunch of data 800gb copied and pasted in one go, leads to the following interim conclusion. Don't try to run too much else on your pc when copying over large amounts of data. It takes several hours, about 3 in this case for 800gb. Importantly, the progress window you get showing how much data there is yet to copy may or may not be accurate. My first go at 350 gb of other data showed up as recognised as just 3gb and an estimated time of a few minutes. The copying in fact took hours (of course) and copied over the full 350gb. As Seagate say, this is probably a Windows thing, which means if you want a truly what-you-see-is-what-you-get operation you might want to get a specialist to tweak your Windows system according to Seagate's advice page. But the news is, the drive does the basic job very well, and you get your files copied over OK. The truth is, copying such large amounts of data is outside of the daily routine and places stress on resources most users don't usually encounter.Originally, upon receipt and initial plugging in to my computer I wrote the following...Comes with: Mains adaptor, which involves a neat clip-in style 3 pin plug for UK power points, and there's a European 2 pin version, too. USB lead, which has a compact but unusual side-by-side double plug thing you plug into the Seagate (never seen one like it before), the other end is a normal USB plug to go into your computer.Easy plug and play for Windows 10. At first a window opens advising you to wait while the software automatically installs, then a page opens telling you how to set up automatic backups using the Windows facility if you wish to do this.I am just copying files across manually. Looks like it will take hours, days even to transfer. Even with USB 3 whole terabytes are a lot of data to transfer.The Seagate has no mains switch. It will therefore activate anytime you want to interact with it. Like other reviewers I don't like this, as one point of personal data (and other) backups is ensuring that you can keep them physically separate from your operating system in case of viruses etc.Also, and in addition to the problems I have subsequently noted with this drive, I have noticed with other large external drives from Samsung etc that if left running for hours, it is at that point that things can freeze, or cause other operations to hang. Large drives are best used with caution; do what you need to do, and then turn them off!I will get an extension lead with switches on each socket from Amazon to sort this.

Great quality drives. I've been using these and their previous model for running clients backup software to for the past 5 years or so.In all that time and probably over 100+ drives I've only seen one fail and that was down to it being dropped while still connected. Despite that the warranty replacement was fairly quick and painless compared to many I've had to deal with over the years despite it being user error for the fail.When first connected you can go into the root of the drive and there is a setup program to allow you to register the warranty (basically it links straight back to Seagate's main registration site) so you can do this quickly and easily - especially when registering a batch at once.Drive has a decent length power adapter cable (approx. 2 meters) and a 1 meter or so USB connector. LED light only comes on when both cables are connected and active so don't worry if it appears inactive at first with just power cable attached. Also has changeable plug for a European AC socket if you're so inclined.Transfer speeds are good and the drive doesn't weight a ton so are great for taking offsite at night for backup purposes.I also use these myself at home for storage and have one hooked up to an Xbox one for additional drive space. Ended up having to format it on a laptop first before the xbox would recognise and add it (after doing its own format) but I think that was more down to the xbox than the drive itself.Overall I couldn't recommend these drives higher for their mix of good pricing, reliability and ease of use. When buying backup drives for clients these are the fist stop we look at unless specialist (encrypted or rugged) drives are required.