Seagate Backup Plus 4 TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive STCA4000100

• Keep copies of your precious digital files, in case disaster strikes
• Impressive 4 TB storage capacity
• Save feature enables user-generated content to be backed up from your favorite social network
• Share feature allows multiple files to be uploaded to social networks at once from your computer
• Install the pre-loaded NTFS driver for Mac and use the drive interchangeably between PC and Mac computers without reformatting
• Features USB 3.0 for quick data transfer rates; upgrade to Thunderbolt technology or FireWire 800 with the available additional adapter

I have been happy with my 3TB GoFlex drive for keeping my active iTunes Library and other multimedia files. I was backing it up onto a 2TB GoFlex to store off-site where it would be safe, until 2TB was too small to hold everything. For a while I split the backup across a pair of 2TB drives, but wanted to give one of the 2TB to my daughter for college. I have a multitude of portable Seagate GoFlex drives as well, and none have failed me yet. So I bought the new 3TB Backup Plus so I could simply clone the 3TB iTunes drive in one step.

I used the Mac OSX Lion Disk Utility to re-partition the Drive as "HFS+ Journaled", instead of the NTFS that it came formatted with. Then I did a test and copied a 16GB folder to it and it was pretty speedy (under 10 minutes on an old iMac). But this time I installed the Seagate software for the extra features, which I never did before with my other Seagate drives. BAD IDEA. I couldn't clone my first drive without the receiving drive switching to READ ONLY after between 2-16 GB transferred. Sometimes the drive would just stop responding.

I did a search and found that this is a universal problem with people all over the drives work great on Mac unless you install the Seagate Dashboard software. I found instructions to manually remove the software, and every thing is fine now. On a faster Macbook Pro with Caldigit USB 3.0 Express Card from Amazon (1/3 1/2 the speed of Native USB 3.0) I was able to see speeds over 180 GB/hour copying files from another Seagate drive on the FW800 port, and approximately 270 GB/Hr from the internal drive.

In Summary This is a great drive but I MUST WARN MAC USERS TO AVOID THE SEAGATE SOFTWARE FOR NOW, unless you think you are experienced enough to trouble shoot issues afterwards. If the Software hadn't bungled things up this would be rated a 5. If I hadn't figured out the software issue it would have been a 1.

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I understand that there's some back and forth over whether or not this unit is compatible with Windows Backup (due to sector sizes and blah, blah, blah). I don't use Windows Backup and have no intention to do so (I like to keep track of my files myself), therefore, I can't comment on the compatibility issue one way or the other. Other reviewers have also commented on the the Seagate Dashboard...I haven't used it either. So, you might be wondering why I'm bothering with this review.

I'm writing this for one reason...all I wanted was oodles of storage space, and this External HDD delivers in spades.

Seagate has been the only brand of External HDD I've ever used, and every drive I've purchased has functioned as intended (even my first Seagate External HDD, a 120gb model that's nearly 10 years old now, still works to this day). I don't mean to sound like a brainwashed fanboy, but I've never been disappointed with a Seagate drive.

I've seen some people mention their HDD not showing up as a single drive (enough so that I was worried mine would do the same)...but I'm running Vista 64 Home Premium and my PC reads the entire disk as one 2.7tb drive.

So far, I haven't been able to test the USB 3.0 capabilities as my PC only has 2.0 ports. This drive was my first step toward upgrading my rig...I figured having all the files I wanted to keep on a 3.0 compatible drive would make swapping over faster when I make the step up to a 3.0 capable machine. I guess we'll see, but my expectations are high. By the way, used solely as a 2.0 drive, it works just fine.

Aesthetically, it looks nice. I could have done without the 4 bar "fill" meter on the front (and the math needed to determine how 3tb [or rather, 2.7tb] is divided equally between the 4 bars...*joking*), but I'm not complaining about it either. The base of the unit (the obvious "this end down" part) was a tiny bit loose right out of the box (and I DO mean only a TINY bit loose). It didn't hurt performance at all, but I was hoping that it would feel more solid like other Seagate models I've purchased.

My particular unit has been in service since the very beginning of August. I've used it every day moving all sorts of files (videos, music, games), and I've never had even the slightest hiccup.

Final Thoughts:

I don't know about all of the extra (and, in my opinion, useless) bells and whistles, but, used purely as storage, this thing has tons of room, and I've been very happy with it.

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I bought the 3 TB drive to back up my Dell XPS 15 750MB hard drive as well as to store my ever increasing inventory of video files. It seamed like a great price for $149

The hard drive came with Seagate software called Dashboard for backing up user document files. It was easy and worked well. It created a backup of my document directory and gave me the option for having both added or changed files updated at a time of my choosing.

What happened next was more of a Microsoft issue than Seagate. When trying to use Windows 7 backup to create a disc image on the Seagate, it kept failing halfway through giving me error messages. This happened to me before on other large external hard drives over 2TB, so I thought I would fix it by partitioning the drive into a 750GB and 2.25TB drives. I then tried to back it up on the 750GB partition but had the same problem. It took me 2 hours to figure out Windows 7 backup will not work with these hard drive because of the way the sectors are sized. I did however find a free Seagate program called Seagate Disc Wizard that you can download for free at Seagate's website that will create a disc image backup without this issue.

Pros

Seagate Dashboard is great for backing up and recovering individual user files and Disc Wizard for creating disc images in case of system failure

Its quiet

Its fast. Created a 320GB disc image in about 45 min.

Runs cool after 1 hour of continuous backup

Great pricing

There are 5 lights on the front that illuminate sequentially as the hard drive fills up

Cons

No stand so if you stand it upright it can easily tip over

There is an activity light on the front that is supposed to tell you when the unit is in use, but it only flashes from full brightness to 75% brightness (instead of going fully out) so its hard to tell when the hard drive is in use when viewed from over 2 feet away.

Happy and would buy again

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Simply stated, do not purchase this if you would like to backup with Windows Backup & Restore. Why? (Warning: Nerd speak ahead, skip the following paragraph to proceed to rant)

The drive is formatted in a way that causes the windows backup and restore to fail when creating a system image because it uses a native 4k sector size. Native 4k drives are not supported by Windows 7 (). Although, it seems as though windows is beginning to support 4k sector drives(). The hot fix previously referenced does not seem to fix the known compatibility issue referenced in the first URL resulting in Error code: 0x8078002A. I tried everything from reformatting to sharing the drive on another computer and attempting to save the back up through the networked drive. The result of 9 hours of troubleshooting == null.

Now some may blame Microsoft for "Error code: 0x8078002A". However, Seagate is truly to blame. Why? Well, first off if you take a look at one of their Tech "Insights" articles, which in my opinion should be changed to Tech Hindsight, titled Transition to Advanced Format 4K Sector Hard Drives (). The writer actually goes through and describes in detail the compatibility issues that exist with the native format of this drive. However, mentioning the problem once was not sufficient because they proceeded by describing the "obstacles" in another Tech Insights article titled Beyond 2TB on the Desktop(). Wait, wait, wait. Let me get this straight. So what your telling me is you know about the compatibility issues yet you continue to provide this product? Really? Ok, ill let this slide for now.

Let's continue onto the Second thing, Seagate could have been proactive about this Advanced Format. A perfect example of pro-activeness is Western Digital's solution which pretty much requires three steps to fix. Those steps are: (1) download this file, (2)install it and (3) press enter a few times. Voila!

Reason number three, and by the way this three is bigger than the big three in Miami, the name. Backup Plus, really? My thought process after reading the name was something along the lines of, "Well this sure sounds like the perfect hard drive to back up my PC." Followed by this line of thought after I saw the price, "Wow! What a great price! If that's the case, I'll take two kind sir!" $300 later and I'm left with a massive amount of useless storage.

Overall, my problem is mainly how Seagate went about it. They knew about the compatibility issues, they weren't and have not been proactive about fixing it as far as I know, and they were extremely misleading with the name. So this tech in hindsight should probably be called Backup Minus because if Amazon had negative stars (Would that be black hole ratings?). Then this drive would be getting a whole lot of those!

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I have both Mac and PC in my home so it's important for me that the ex HD works for both. I've tried other models and they don't work as smoothly as this Seagate. I formatted this Seagate to exFAT32 and it has been working flawlessly on both my Mac and PC. FYI, Mac products default format is "Mac Journaled" or "HFS". If you format your HD to this, then your HD wont work on your PC. Conversely, PC products default format is NTFS. If you format your HD to this, then your HD wont work on your Mac. The only format that both Mac and PC use is exFAT or FAT. Therefore, if you want to use your HD interchangeably with both Mac and PC then you must format to FAT