Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – USB 3.0 for PC, Mac, PlayStation, & Xbox - 1-Year Rescue Service (STGX2000400)

Customer Reviews

• K. T.

  INITIAL review after setting up. Info on drive not showing up and reformatting for Time Machine...

  I'm writing this because of all the reviews I see complaining about the drive not showing up on their computer initially, saying "it doesn't work right out of the box!" I often wonder if some of these people never even read the documentation before giving up. The included documentation for the drives is horrible, with only a Quick Start page that shows how to plug it in, but there is great info on Seagate's site that helps if you go look at it. There's also something else I found out that might be helpful, and I'll address that here. Once I've had it in use for a while I'll update this review for a more in-depth account of how well it works. I'll list my comments by issue:1) Drive not getting recognized.After seeing so many "it doesn't show up" comments, I was concerned when mine didn't show up on my iMac either. I followed the instructions on plugging it in (in sequence, which may or may not make a difference, but you gotta do it correctly just in case), and the first thing you have to do is decide which US Standard plug to slide onto the universal plug adapter; there are two that are almost identical, two-prong plugs; one has holes in the prongs and the other doesn't. Docs say nothing about which to use, so I went with the one with holes.The unit powered up and sounded like it was initializing, but it wouldn't get recognized by my Late 2017 iMac. Unplugging and restarting did nothing. I went to the online documentation and did the recommended check to see if Show Hard Drives was checked in Finder/Preferences/Show-Hard Drives. It was (which I already knew because my others show there, but just in case I needed to recycle the command...). That did no good. After a bit of thought, I decided I'd try the other plug, and that did the trick. USE THE PLUG WITH NO HOLES IN IT if using in the US!Once that was solved, it showed up and all looked good.2) Using with Time Machine on Mac.The info in the product description says the drive is ready to use with Time Machine, preformatted. The problem is, if you have Catalina or later, there is a new formatting called APFS that replaces xFat, and you will have to reformat to use with Time Machine. This is a simple process using Disc Utility, and it reformats quickly.Once I had that issue solved, I got Carbon Copy Cloner (trial version) and set up the tasks of copying my main hard drive (348.3 GB) and my 8 TB external drive to the new Seagate drive and let it go. The main drive was backed up in just over 47 minutes. Yeah, it's a tad noisy, but nothing that can't go on while working on the computer by any means unless you're maybe recording a YouTube video at the computer or something.The external drive, which had 6.58 TB of stuff on it took a little longer... 12 1/2 hours to be exact. Slow? I don't know, it's the first time I've copied a hard drive with that much stuff on it, but I set the task and left it alone and it was done in the morning. The image included here shows Carbon Copy's review page for the performed tasks.CAVIAT: you may need to use a program that allows the computer to work without shutting down after a period of inactivity. I use an app called "Amphetemine", which forces the computer to stay on in various circumstances that you can set. I set mine to remain on "as long as specified app is working" and chose Carbon Copy Cloner. Not sure you have to do this, but Amphetamine is a great app and I didn't want to take the chance of having to start over, so I used it, and it worked great.The noise some complain about could be other drives (I have the 12 TB version for desktop) or it may be a personal preference, but a drive in a plastic case like this with lots of air holes in it will make some noise, however I didn't find this "noisy" at all IMHO.So far, I'm impressed with Carbon Copy as well, but like the drive, I'm in my infancy with using it, so time will tell. I also have a 1 TB external I use for Time Machine, so instead of using this one for that, I will most likely also set up the drive to copy that drive so I have a backup of my Time Machine just in case. You can set Carbon Copy to copy whenever it detects a change in a drive, so once the initial copying is done, the lengthy copies are done, and it's only copying when things change.If you have issues with one of these drives not being recognized by your computer straight out of the box, FIRST make sure you have the correct US plug installed. THEN, make sure to reformat to APFS if you're running Catalina or later if you plan to use it for your Time Machine backups. At that point, so far in my experience, it's a great drive. I'm giving four stars only because of having to hunt down good documentation for the actually necessity for reformatting for the OSs, and for having NO information about the right plug to use. NO idea why the one with holes won't work, but it would be nice if they gave a heads-up on that.Once it's been working a while, I'll readdress this review.

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• M.

  Better Than Expected!

  Got this for my son to use with his Xbox because anytime he'd want to play any of his favorite games it would take him forever to get started. Found out it was because he was deleting Fortnite to play Apex, and deleting that to play Rainbow 6, and that for GTA5 to COD and back around again. Oh hell no if he wanted to play Lego Batman (smh). So I figured this would do the trick. His father was skeptical because he'd had the 2GB and at least it happened before the warranty expired, but it crashed and had to be replaced which the warranty DOES NOT COVER! It covers trying to rescue your data on the device. Which like never happens, and why bother? My data is all backed up in an XBox cloud somewhere. It is secure, what is not secure is you device and sneaky way of making the consumer think you got them covered. Sorry, "Oops your data could not be recovered)fake apology just doesn't cut it. But there aren't a whole lot of choices and Bolo has a good deal on this 5GB so figured we could give it a try. That was Birthday in July of 2022 and so far so good. Writes and reads fast as hell and hopefully he won't run out of space anytime soon. Definitely worth the money, I will update this if it changes.

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• x.

  Seagate for the win as a Time Machine backup!

  I was a little hesitant to order due to mixed reviews concerning Time Machine backup. I ordered this as a same day delivery as I needed it quickly and it arrived promptly. It works with a Mac computer for backups, but it does requires very little reformatting. I got it to work with no issues at all. I’ll try to explain below in hopes to make it easier for anyone else having this issue.When I first connected this hard drive, my MacBook recognized it, but once it tried selecting it as my Time Machine drive, it didn’t work right out the box, and it ended up not showing up anymore. So I’ll try to explain how I remedied this.First you will want to open up ‘Disc Utility’ from the ‘Applications’ folder. From there, you will want to select ‘View > Show all devices’ from the top bar so that you see all the drives. Select your Seagate drive and hit ‘Erase’ (if you are setting this up from a new drive this shouldn’t be an issue since you won’t have any files on it anyway and this is the only way to format it). When filling out the info (this is very important) you will want to name your drive correctly with the following information:Name:ExternalHHD (or whatever you choose)Format:MacOS Extended Journaled (USE THIS IF YOU PLAN TO USE THIS ONLY BETWEEN MAC COMPUTERS).*OR*ExFAT (USE THIS IF YOU PLAN TO USE THIS BETWEEN BOTH MAC AND PC COMPUTERS)Scheme: GUID Partition MapHit erase and you should be good to go! If you have any issues after formatting it as ExFAT, follow the same steps by formatting it as a MacOS Extended journal, then go back and reformat again as ExFAT afterwards. No idea why this even works but it does (as it happened to me).Now if you want to use this drive as 2 drives you can. I set up my 5TB and split it so that 2TB is dedicated to Time Machine Backups, and the other 3TB is dedicated to my normal documents and files. You would need to partition this using disc utility as well but I recommend a quick YouTube search to better explain that part.

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• C.

  Brutal.

  These perform ok, until they are about half full, then they start shingling the information (SMR), and performance just goes through the floor. This is due to it reading data, so that it can write the new data, with the existing data.Basically in laymens terms, these seem great for ~3tb, once you fill it past there, write speeds go from 100+mb/s to <1-2mb/s after the buffer fills up.I copied 60gb of home videos to it once it reached 50% filled, and its now at 6 hours of copying. Worse still it causes the entire computer to hang, as it has no idea why the drive just stops responding.Avoid these smr drives, they're junk.

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• B. L.

  Many negative reviews - surely not that bad?

  There does seem to be quite a few negative reviews for Segate drives in general here.I have no connection with Segate nor any other vested interest, but I would say I've had literally dozens of their drives over the years and only ever had one failure.Also worth pointing out that almost every other make and model have similar comments, if not quite as many. I guess people are more likely to post negative comments when they have suffered a failure of some kind?More recently, I've been using these 2.5" USB 5TB drives for video library use. They don't get hammered, but do cope perfectly well for this fairly demanding use.No storage device is ever 100% reliable nor lasts forever. So, whilst I do sympathise with those folk who have lost valuable data, I would always advocate BACKUP, BACKUP and BACKUP!Generally, have AT LEAST one copy of everything, preferably kept in another physical location. That way, when the inevitable eventually happens, you won't get that deep sick feeling that all your important data is lost forever.I will keep buying these 2.5" USB3 drives as they are compact, fast (for my use) and cheap enough to have another one elsewhere as backup.

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