SeagateBackup 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)

We purchased a few of these 2.5” drives to use for storage in a home retro arcade unit we built and these drives are truly exceptional for this purpose!The drives are fast, small, light weight, extremely well built and wake from sleep almost instantly.The drives hold their transfer speeds for extremely long periods of time, stay cool and have huge capacity’s for such small form factors.Building a home arcade machine requires a drive that is fast and reliable with a lot of storage in a small form factor and these drives suit that particular use-case perfectly and are highly recommended for this purpose.As long term storage you also could not ask for more, as the drives boot up and wake from sleep extremely quickly and have a very high reliability factor. The drives operate almost silently and most importantly load games faster than you might except from a conventional HDD.They require no drivers, are solidly “plug and play” don’t have aggressive sleep functions built in, wake instantly and look great.With their high speed USB 3 capabilities they are perfect for gamers looking to build home arcades or even those looking to extend the storage of an XBOX/PS/PC or gaming laptop etc.A silent, reliable, drive built to last!Exceptional quality, reliability and speed!A solid 5* recommendation!

I bought two 5TB units to use to rotate offsite backups for my new Synology NAS.I chose these units for the balance between capacity and size:* 5TB seems to be the current maximum capacity of 2.5" disks;* Although ideally I wanted 8TB to match my NAS, I decided (a) portability and (b) power over USB were more important to me.My new NAS is a Synology RS819, and my backup regime is nightly to a USB disk which Irotate off-site weekly. I used large 1T Seagate desktop USB drives with my previous NAS for nearly 10 years without a problem, but found that their size and separate power supplies caused me to delay swapping them off site, so I wanted to make it easier this time.Early experience with these new portable Seagates is great. They run fine powered from the USB 3.0 port on the Synology. I'm not yet convinced that they dismount properly as they seem to keep spinning after the Synology says they've dismounted, but that may be me. They come pre-formatted with an ex-FAT partition which requires an additional $5 licence from Synology, but this seems a better choice than reformatting as EXT4 because it means they also work when plugged directly into a PC or Mac.I've not done much disk speed testing with other drives, but these seem slow compared to the 10 year old desktop drives I used before. My first backup of 537 GB took just under 15 hours, which I make just under 10 MB/s. It's possible that the speed was limited by the Synology, but I suspect it's the drive. This isn't a problem for me because my application is relatively low-volume incremental daily backups, but anyone who wants to copy large volumes on a frequent basis may want to dig a bit deeper before committing: a desktop drive may work better for you.It's too early for me to comment on reliability, but the build quality seems good including the USB connectors (which I'll be disconnecting and reconnecting weekly). I know that some people wouldn't trust a 2.5" portable drive for their backups (I have a contingency deep back up as well). The drives in my Synology are datacentre spec, so it may seem a little lax to use these guys as my last line of defence, but I'll see how it goes.I definitely love the portability, the small size and weight, and that they're powered over the USB. It's a lot of storage in a very small footprint. I hope this is helpful.

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.