Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive with Mobile Device Backup USB 3.0 (Red) STDR1000103..
GET Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive with Mobile Device Backup USB 3.0 (Red) STDR1000103 By Seagate
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170 of 199 people found the following review helpful.
By ƒůŽźŸ ωŬ≥ζŷ ♥☮♭♩♪♫♬♮☯☺♡✈
இ Fuzzy Wuzzy's Summary:
ѾѾѾѾѾ Highly recommended with warm fuzzies!
փ Positives:
փ This hard drive is indeed very slim, with its 9.5mm thickness being comparable to an internal laptop hard drive.
փ The read/write transfer speeds are pretty fast for a 5400-RPM hard drive (but performance will feel slower if you are accustomed to using 7200-RPM drives).
փ By installing a Windows or Mac driver, you can use either the Windows or Mac version of this drive on both Windows and Mac computers, which is great for transferring files in between both platforms.
փ This drive comes in 500-GB, 1-TB, and 2-TB capacities with five different color options for the top metal panel.
ჯ Negatives:
ჯ While the Seagate Dashboard software that is pre-loaded on the hard drive includes very useful and flexible backup software, the other two parts of the software to share files to social media sites and save files from social media sites are limited in their usefulness and flexibility.
With a thickness of 9.5mm for the 500-GB drive, this very portable little drive is only slightly thicker than an iPhone or pencil, and its thickness is comparable to many internal laptop/notebook drives. But while 9.5mm-thick internal laptop drives do not have an external case covering them, this drive is housed inside an attractive anodized aluminum metal case, with a plastic bottom base, that gives it a solidly rigid feel to the drive. The hard drive that is housed inside the case may even be thinner than a 7mm internal hard drive. So this external hard drive is actually thinner than most internal laptop/ultrabook hard drives. And the 500-GB drive weighs only 5 ounces, making this an extremely portable drive to carry around. With a thickness of 12.0mm, the 1-TB and 2-TB versions of this drive are 2.5mm thicker and slightly heavier than the 500-GB version. But a 12.0mm-thick drive casing is still tiny for a 2-TB external drive. There are some 15mm-thick 2-TB internal drives that are thicker than this, and they do not have an external case.
This hard drive comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable. While this cable length is adequate for plugging into a laptop, I wish that the supplied cable was just a little longer in length (24 inches would be ideal) to allow more flexibility when connecting the hard drive to a desktop computer. My desktop computers are connected to USB hubs located on my desk so the cable is not too short for me, but many people will plug this hard drive directly into their desktop computer's USB port.
This drive is whisper quiet and when it is plugged into the USB port, a thin sliver of light glows near one corner of the top of the case to show that it is operational. While this drive is either reading or writing data, the glowing light pulsates, slowly shifting between dim and bright, instead of just blinking like most hard drive status lights. The pulsating hard drive status light looks more unique than the usual blinking light used by other external hard drives, as if the hard drive is breathing in and out while it works. My one minor quibble is that I wish the light would pulsate at a quicker pace. With a blinking hard drive activity LED, I can quickly glance over at the light and see if it is blinking. With this slowly pulsating light, I have to stare at the sliver of light for several seconds to see if the drive is reading/writing. As with all non-SSD hard drives, when I hold this drive in my hand, I can feel its body vibrating due to the spinning platter that is inside, and if I press my ear right up to the case while the drive is reading or writing data, I can just barely hear the read/write head moving around inside. So this hard drive is as quiet as the quietest of internal drives designed for notebooks.
I have seen various reviews erroneously mention that this Seagate Slim drive is either a 7200-RPM drive or a SSD drive, but both of those descriptions are incorrect. While Seagate previously used 7200-RPM drives in their GoFlex Slim drives, this Slim drive uses a 5400-RPM drive. For a 5400-RPM hard drive though, its transfer speeds are pretty good. This hard drive connects through a USB 3.0 cable, and as with all USB 3.0 devices being backwardly compatible with USB 2.0, you will only get the faster USB 3.0 speeds if you connect this drive to a USB 3.0 port. Connecting this drive to a USB 2.0 port will result in slower transfer speeds. When tested using the "HD Tune" hard drive performance benchmarking tool on an older laptop with USB 2.0 ports, I get an average read speed of 28 MB/s and an average write speed of 21 MB/s. Connecting this drive to a newer laptop having USB 3.0 ports, I get an average read speed of 92 MB/s (with maximum peaks of around 112 MB/s) and an average write speed of 86 MB/s. Even though most 7200-RPM notebook-sized hard drives will be faster, these speeds are pretty fast for a 5400-RPM hard drive. If you want the fastest speeds using this Seagate Slim drive, you need to plug it into a USB 3.0 port. This rule applies to any external storage device that uses a USB 3.0 cable. Perhaps Seagate chose to not include a faster 7200-RPM hard drive inside this tiny thin enclosure because of potential heat and reliability issues?
If I read or write hundreds of megabytes of data, the exterior of the drive does get warm over time since there is no internal cooling fan or ventilation holes in this drive's casing, but it usually does not get too hot. On one occasion, however, I was copying many very large HD video files onto this drive, and after twenty minutes of transferring HD videos back and forth where this hard drive was reading and writing non-stop, the drive's enclosure felt very hot when I touched it, so I undocked and unplugged the drive to let it cool down because I was worried about adversely affecting the drive's long-term reliability by continuing to operate it with the temperature inside its enclosure being so hot. The drive enclosure's metal top surface cooled down after about fifteen minutes, and I then plugged the drive back into my laptop and proceeded to edit the HD videos that were now loaded onto the drive. Because this tiny hard drive is housed in such a small totally-sealed enclosure, you should let it cool down sometimes if feels too hot after extended periods of reading/writing data. Avoiding repetitive overheating is a good idea for any external hard drive that lacks a cooling fan or ventilation holes in the hard drive's enclosure since heat can degrade a hard drive's performance and reliability over time. With most electronic components, repeatedly overheating the electronics can cause hardware failures and overheating is the primary cause of hard drive failure. Also avoid bumping, jarring, or dropping this hard drive, especially when it is plugged in.
About 800 MB of this drive's space is used up by the pre-loaded Seagate Dashboard software and brief tutorial videos on using the Seagate Dashboard software to protect and back up your files, save social media files, and conveniently share image and video files that are stored on this drive to Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. If you are certain that you do not ever want to use this Dashboard software, you can delete the 'Seagate Dashboard Installer.dmg' Mac software file, the 'Seagate Dashboard Installer.exe' Windows software file, and the 'Video' folder to free up hundreds of megabytes of disk space. A 'Seagate' folder that is in the root directory contains a 'SerialNumber.xml' file that has the model number and serial number of the drive. The model number and serial number are also printed on the bottom panel of the drive however. In the Windows version of this drive, the 'Seagate' folder has a 'Seagate-Release.exe' program that you can run to register the drive with Seagate. After you finish registering the drive, you can delete the 'Seagate' folder.
If you want to leave the software and tutorial videos on the drive, you can still delete either the 135-MB 'Seagate Dashboard Installer.dmg' Mac software file or the 156-MB 'Seagate Dashboard Installer.exe' Windows software file if you only exclusively use Mac or Windows computers. In the 'Video' folder, there are eight folders - 'en-US', 'fr-FR', 'it-IT', 'ko-KR', 'ru-RU', 'sv-SE', 'zh-CN', and 'zh-TW' - that each contain the same set of four tutorial videos: 'Introducing Seagate Backup Plus', 'Protecting Your Files With Seagate Dashboard Tutorial', 'Saving Social Media Files With Seagate Dashboard Tutorial', and 'Sharing To Social Media Sites With Seagate Dashboard Tutorial'. These eight sets of videos are identical in the video and audio, and only differ in the subtitle language used: English (no subtitles), French, Italian, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Chinese, and Taiwanese. If you keep the 'en-US' English video that has no subtitles and delete the other seven folders, you free up almost 350 MB of space.
Of the three components in the Seagate Dashboard software, the "Protect" function offers the most usefulness and flexibility, while the "Share" and "Save" functions for sharing/uploading to and saving from social media sites are limited in their capabilities. With the Dashboard's "Protect" function, you can schedule backups of your files based on a regular hourly/daily/weekly/monthly schedule, or have your files backed up whenever they are added or modified, or make backups on an as-needed basis by manually initiating a "snapshot" backup of your files. I am always surprised by how many people never back up the files on their computers, either their work-related files or their personal files, including documents, email and Microsoft Outlook files, photo/music/media files, or other files that are often irreplaceable if their computer's hard drive suddenly fails. If your computer has years of files accumulated on it that you have never backed up to another disk, to a CD/DVD, or to an online cloud-based backup service, this Seagate Slim hard drive can be used as your backup device where you can store a duplicate copy of all your important files. If you have already been using a backup process, as mentioned, you do not have to install the Dashboard software and you can just completely delete all the pre-loaded software from this hard drive if you want.
Important: If you do use the pre-loaded Seagate "Protect" software to back up your files, or if you use other kinds of automated backup software, you should randomly spot-check some of the duplicated backup files and folders every one or two months to verify that the files are correctly being copied and that they can be read correctly. Spot-check the backup files more frequently if they are important and you really value their integrity. Backup software is still a software application and, just like firmware and other software, and also taking into account that a hard drive may start to slowly fail with read/write errors after years of usage, there may be a software or hardware glitch that causes a file to either not be backed up by the backup software, or to be backed up but unreadable. By occasionally spot-checking the integrity of your backup files, you reduce the possibility of having an unpleasant surprise if you really need to recover the files from the backup copy. A data error can happen with any electronic storage media. For example, if you back up files by burning data to a CD/DVD/Blu-ray disc, you should spot-check their integrity by accessing some of their files at least once a year. The same rule applies if your backup files are stored by a cloud-based backup/storage service. There are also integrity-checking software that will automatically verify the integrity of hard disks or optical media. I am an avid photographer, and with terabytes of hard disk space becoming more inexpensive each year, my favorite way to back up files is by manually copying files and folders to two separate hard drives in a "manual RAID 1" setup where I manually back up and mirror the photo and HD-video files between both drives, instead of relying on backup software to perform the function. I previously used a dual-hard-drive RAID 1 storage unit, but I like being able to directly access either drive and I also do not like how RAID 1 simultaneously deletes files from both drives if I ever type or click too fast and have an "oops" accidental file deletion.
The Dashboard software's "Share" function lets you share files that are stored on the hard drive by uploading to either Facebook, Flickr, or YouTube. And the "Save" function lets you save photos from Facebook or Flickr. Unlike the "Share" function, "Save" does not let you save videos from YouTube. But there are many freeware software and online sites that can convert and save YouTube videos already. I really did not care for how either these "Share" or "Save" functions worked because they are quite limited in their flexibility, and it is very easy to perform the same functions directly using the Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube sites without having to go through an intermediate step of using the Dashboard software to upload files. Perhaps Seagate added the "Share" and "Save" options for computer newbies or social media newcomers. But the irony is that even though this Dashboard software "dumbs down" the uploading of files to Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, the computer newbies who would most benefit from using the "Share" and "Save" options may not even have an account on Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube.
This pocket-sized drive is quite small and light: 4.5"x3.0"x0.4" and 5.3 ounces (including the USB cable) for the 500-GB version, with the 1-TB and 2-TB versions being slightly thicker and heavier. You can use this portable drive to shuttle files back and forth between Windows and Mac computers, dragging and dropping folders and files to transfer them between the computer and this external hard drive. Note that there are two versions of this Seagate Slim external hard drive: a Windows version formatted for NTFS and a Mac version formatted for HFS+. You should get the version for the platform that you work on the most. If you mainly use a Mac and you use Time Machine for your backups, you should definitely get the Mac version of this drive. If you mainly work on Windows and Mac is more of a secondary computer, you should get the Windows version of this drive.
Since Windows NTFS and Mac HFS+ file systems do not automatically play well together, use of this hard drive on both Windows and Mac computers does require the download and installation of a driver. If you get the Windows version of this drive, when you plug the drive into a Mac, it will download from the Internet a necessary Mac driver (NTFS_for_Mac_with_restart.dmg) that lets the Windows-NTFS-formatted drive work with Macs. NTFS drives are normally read-only on Mac OS, and this driver lets Macs both read and write on the NTFS-formatted version of this hard drive. Note that because Mac's Time Machine requires a Mac-HFS-formatted drive, when you use the Windows version of this drive with the Mac driver, this setup cannot work with Time Machine unless you reformat the drive to be a HFS+journaled file system... in which case you might as well just get the Mac version of this drive if you intend to also use it with Time Machine. If you get the Mac version of this drive, when you plug the drive into a Windows PC, it will download a necessary Windows driver (HFS4Win.exe) that lets the Mac-HFS+formatted drive work with Windows. You can also download both the Mac-driver-for-Windows-NTFS and Windows-driver-for-Mac-HFS+ drivers directly from Seagate's Web site. See the 'Comments' section of my review for the URL locations. Seagate should have pre-loaded both of these Windows/Mac drivers on the hard drive just like how they pre-loaded both the Windows and Mac versions of their Dashboard software.
Overall, this is a great little drive that is sized for maximum portability. It includes a 2-year limited warranty. And at the time of this review's writing, Amazon is offering this hard drive at a great price of less than $70 for the 500-GB size. It was not that long ago when a 500-GB portable hard drive costed hundreds of dollars and was at least three times larger in size. I rely both on my own research and the opinions of others to help me make informed buying decisions. I hope that this review helped you to be a wise shopper! :)
107 of 127 people found the following review helpful.
By Roberta V. Russo
Here are the impressions of a non-techy about the Seagate Slim 500 gig external hard drive. This drive is amazingly small - about 3 by 4 inches and 1/4 inch thick. Nice - because it doesn't take up much shelf or desk space and is easy to carry around. I like to take a backup drive with me whenever I travel with my computer and this drive is the perfect size for that. The USB cord that it comes with is approximately 18 inches long (give or take). It also comes packed with a small instruction pamphlet describing how install the backup software called the Seagate Dashboard that comes pre-loaded on the drive. Its a pretty simple and straightforward process so there is not a lot to the instructions. There are also 4 short instruction videos pre-loaded on the drive: "Introducing Seagate Backup Plus Video"; "Protecting Your Files With Seagate Dashboard Tutorial"; "Saving Social Media Files With Seagate Dashboard Tutorial"; and "Sharing To Social Media Sites With Seagate Dashboard Tutorial". If you watch them they give a pretty good overview of the features available with the Dashboard software.
I usually don't load the software that comes with hard drives, but I decided to give the Seagate Dashboard a try. I am using a laptop with Windows 8 operating system. Basically you just plug in the drive, navigate to the installation file and double click it. That brings up the registration screen, the software loads, and then you must re-start the computer to finish the install. It took maybe 5 minutes and installed with no problems.
Once the software is installed you open it by double clicking its desktop icon. From the home screen you get 3 choices: Protect (backup and restore your data); Share (upload your pictures and videos to your Facebook, Flickr and YouTube accounts); and Save (Download pictures and videos from your Facebook and Flickr accounts).
Protect:
You can schedule backups at specific intervals like hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Or you can select continuous backup which basically creates backups in real time as you add or change files. If you don't want to set a regular schedule you can instead click the "snapshot" button to start a backup whenever you want. By default the backup includes anything that is not a system or program file but you get the option to pick the files you want to include. The first time you run backup takes a little longer because it is backing up all the files, after the first time its faster because its only backing up new or changed files. I have the drive connected to a USB 3 port and the first time I ran backup it took about 20 - 30 minutes to backup roughly 100 gig of data files. I selected "continuous" and keep the drive connected all the time. I haven't really noticed any lag time or slow down using the continuous backup feature.
The drive comes with a free one-year subscription to the Nero "cloud" drive which you can also select as a backup location. You get 4 gig free for 12 months - after that you have to pay for the subscription. You can also buy extra space. You have to create an account and set a password. I did set up the account, but haven't used this feature and don't really plan to in the future.
Share:
You can use the Dashboard to upload pictures and video to social media sites: Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. I don't use Facebook or Flickr (hard to believe in this day and age, I know) but I do use YouTube, so I gave it a try. From Dashboard click the Facebook, Flick, or YouTube icon. The first time you access one of these sites you have to enter your account log-in information and give the software permission to access your account. Here is how it worked for YouTube. Once logged in it brought up a file manager screen where I could browse to and select a video on either my Seagate external hard drive or my computer hard drive. Once the file is selected you choose one of the standard YouTube categories for it. Then the file uploads. After uploading the video using the Seagate Dashboard, I deleted it from YouTube and uploaded it again using the standard upload directly from the YouTube site - just to see the difference.
First of all the video took longer to upload using the Seagate Dashboard than it did directly from the YouTube website. I suppose that might not be the fault of the software - maybe the internet was just running slower when I used the Dashboard, but I did upload them within 1/2 hour of each other. The biggest fault I found using the Seagate Dashboard to upload videos is that you don't get any of the options that you do when you upload directly from the YouTube site. When you upload a video directly from the YouTube site you get a lot of options. You can enter a Title for the video, you can enter a description, and enter tags (e.g. Chicago, dogs) so that the video comes up in searches, you can pick a thumbnail to use for the video, select a privacy setting (public or private) and select a category for the video. When you use the Dashboard, it automatically uses the name of the file as the title of the video (you don't get to choose). The only choice the Seagate Dashboard gives you is to select a category for the video - that's it. It also automatically posts it as a public video. You don't get any other choices or options. Once you have uploaded a video using the Dashboard you can always log on to your YouTube account directly from the YouTube website and edit these choices, but why bother with 2 steps if you can just do all this directly on YouTube in the first place? Given the results of this test, I would not use the Seagate Dashboard to upload videos to YouTube. I can't speak for how Facebook or Flickr uploads work because I don't use Facebook or Flick.
Save:
You can use this to save files from your social media sites (for example, save the pictures you posted on Facebook). The only 2 social media sites you can do this for with the Seagate Dashboard are Facebook and Flickr. YouTube is not an option. I don't use Facebook or Flickr, so I couldn't test this. I am disappointed that saving files posted to my YouTube account was not an option.
Overall I would give the drive 3 stars. What I liked most was the size and speed - its small and very fast. I give the Dashboard software mixed reviews. The backup function seems to work great but the Share and Save options left something to be desired. I would have rated the drive higher if it hadn't been for the software. I just got the drive, so I can't speak for durability, but it seems like well built little drive.
36 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
By Chris Burston
I ordered one of these in the hope that it would contain the long anticipated 2TB 2.5" 9.5mm Samsung M9T hard disk. I'm happy to report that it does and that said drive has a standard SATA interface.
My MacBook Pro is now sitting pretty with 2TB of internal storage. Happy Days!
More than you expect for $50, but not perfect
