Seagate Backup Plus 5TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Silver USB 3.0 For PC Laptop And Mac, 1 year MylioCreate, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography, & 2-Year Rescue Service (STHP5000401)

My rating is based solely on capacity for cost. This is the best deal I could find on 5TB portable storage. Read/Write speeds are more than fast enough for my uses. I could also care less about the included software. I start by formatting portable drives to use only as portable storage. I use this and most any portable data storage device as a way of keeping certain data with me. I may transfer files from my work computers to my home computers or vice versa. I got by for years with a 1TB model. I NEVER rely on any one HDD as the only place I keep important data. If it's important to me, it's always on two or more hard drives.If I consider it to be data I can't afford to lose, it will be on at least three HDDs and in a minimum of two locations.This is a budget portable HDD so don't expect it to be as trustworthy as an enterprise class NAS or server HDD.Enterprise quality HDDs come bare bones and always cost more than any external or portable HDD of equal capacity. I've seen many HDDs fail in the past several years but other than replacing the dead drive itself, it's little more than an inconvenience.By now it should be common knowledge that HDDs can and at times do fail. If you care about your data hope for the best but be prepared for the worse. This is a hard concept to get through to many people that have never had a HDD fail. For some reason these people can't grasp that it can happen to them. It can happen to anyone and with any HDD regardless of cost or quality. If you do lose all your data, it's from poor backup practices and not because any particular HDD failed. I understand the negative feelings from a new HDD that dies in a short period of time.

This drive has it's purposes and for me it's just fine. The drive itself seems sturdy and the capacity is great for the price. (89.99 at the time of review for 5TB) The main drawback is the transfer speed. I'm getting an average of 22mb/s with large files while all my other drives operate between 90 and 140mb/s. If you plan on writing to this drive a lot I suggest getting something different. If it's just for an offline backup like in my case it's a great deal. Sure it'll take well over a day to transfer the 2.4tb of files i have but i did test the other way transferring files from and the speed is on par with all my other drives. Which i need because this is a backup of installation files for pc games which would take forever to install from the drive at 22mb/s. So just to summarize my point, for the price it's good for backups, but if you're going to be transferring to this drive a lot with a lot of rewriting and you don't have hours upon hours of extra time to spare get something else. I can't attest to what the other size drives perform like but in my mind this is a very limited drive. Oh and just to be clear i'm using USB 3.0 on a port I've used on many other drives which all perform at speeds up to 140mb/s so it's not the wrong port or a bad port.*EditSo I was pushing my graphics card too much while the transfer was going on and i had to restart the pc as it froze. When i restarted i continued the transfer and the speed jumped from 20 to 120mb/s. I'm not sure why as this has never happened before but I suggest restarting your computer with the drive plugged in if you're getting slow speeds because the drive is physically capable of transferring at high speeds. I would have given it a full five stars but I've never had a drive do that before so it still deserves half a star drop because i just got sort of lucky figuring that out. My original score was 4/5.

This thing has been performing exactly as it should.I use it as my time machine backup on Mac and for spillover space when I run out of space on my Mac.- I have partitioned this drive many times (including with different file formats per partition: NTFS in one, exFat in another, Mac OS Journaled in another).- I use it as my time machine backup for two macs and a windows backup for 1 windows partition- I've used it to transfer and store large files and folders- I have used it to restore my Mac operating system after mc os system restorations and upgrades and downgradesAnd this thing has never once complained. It's never failed to boot, failed to eject, slowed down read and write speeds, or anything of the sort.I got it on sale a few years ago when there were other, more popular and promoted models available...Workload-wise, this thing has been through a lot for a dedicated back-up drive. And it still sounds and works very reliably.But I never shake it, never misconnect it, and I store it in AC. I treat it with the respect it requires. So at least under good conditions, it's faithful.

Now this is not the fastest drive, it is a SSD and not a HDD external hard drive. I take a lot of videos and pictures. I also have a ton of movies and music that I transferred over to my hard drive for the portability.Well I had two smaller ones and was running out of room. So I purchased the 5TB then transferred everything over to the new hard drive, keeping the old drives as a backup. I still have plenty of room on the new drive. It took for ever to copy all the info over to the new drive, but, I had probably close to 4 TB of info!! No issues transferring the data though.This drive is about the thickness of two 2TB drives and about the same width and length. Very portable. Once I load a video or pictures onto my computer it transfers over fairly quickly to the drive, not as fast as some of the higher dollar but quick enough and for the price you can't beat it!!I would recommend this drive to anyone looking for an affordable drive with good capacity.