Seagate - Backup Plus Desktop 5TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Hard Drive - Black

I bought (2) 5TB STDT5000100 external USB pc harddrives 18 Aug 2015. With the increase in capacity, storage reliability, track shingling (which is new to me, I can't keep up with all the advances), and heat/enclosure issues I have a new concern and I am wondering if anyone else has done the same and knows/found an answer or solution. Before I put a new drive into service I do a full format and use test software to determine the soundness of the drive. Formatting the drive to NTFS for Win7 has shown no issues. When I use Seagate SeaTools for Windows v1.4.02 I Identify the drive and save the info in Seagate's logfile and then I run the basic tests starting with the Short Disk Self Test, Short Generic Test, Fix All Fast Test, Fix All Long Test, and Long Generic Test. I have ran these tests on a laptop running Win7 64bit Home Premium and a desktop running Win7 64bit Professional using the supplied power brick and cables that came with the external drives. I have run the tests in normal boot mode, Diagnostic Start mode, and Safemode. The laptop is an everyday full of software computer and the desktop is new with a clean install and only some test software now installed. The hard drives PASS Short Disk Self Test, Short Generic Test, Long Generic Test (90% of the time), and Fix All Fast Test. The hard drives FAIL at 43% of the Fix All Long test EVERYTIME on both computers. I have talked to Seagate once so far and was told that their drives should pass all the tests. I was told that if a hard drive didn't pass a test to return it for an exchange. Also note, the drives do have a heat problem and even with Seagate stating that their drives are now good up to 60C, that statement was in DIRECT reference to INTERNAL drives and NOT external ENCLOSED drives. The S.M.A.R.T settings DO NOT reflect the new 60C setting and smart is constantly showing warnings. Seagate's own website has said that if any drive FAILS a smart sensor to back up the drive and replace it immediately (or in my case exchange it). Now here's the kicker: I have exchanged SEVEN of these drives and am currently on my 8th and 9th drives which have also FAILED!! I had a survey from Seagate 8 September 2015 because of my phone call and at the end of the survey it asked if I had anything to say, and stated "We read all comments and are concerned with the satisfaction of our customers and products" or something to that effect. I told them of my concern and didn't know what else to do and that I could use their help in resolving this issue. I told them that I have used other testing software and the drives passed 99% of the time. I also tried using Seagate's DOS SeaTools v2.2.3 but their bootable CD DID NOT include drivers for recognizing USB ports!! I CAN'T remove the drives from the enclosure because that would VOID the two year warranty. Just one of the reasons I bought the drive. Also, just because I NOW suspect that it is their Seagate SeaTools for Win that has a problem, WHY should I trust that guess/assumption? If Seagate's hard drive cannot PASS it's OWN test software, why should I trust the hard drive!?! I have NEVER had this dilemma before. Why do I stick to this hard drive? 1. I bought one at a GREAT price and the other at a good price. 2. I have a 4TB Seagate external model and IT passes all the tests (Except it runs hot). 3. I can exchange them locally without incurring return shipping charges (but that won't last much longer). 4. I NEED the storage that is why I bought two. Questions I and my friends have asked ourselves and are now putting this out to the public: 1. Is this just a bad lot or a bad model being dumped? 2. Is it the Seagate test software? 3. Do I trust a 5TB drive with my data even WITH a two year warranty? 4. Does Seagate REALLY read the survey comments, and if so, WHY haven't I heard from them (they do have my information)? 5. Is it the attitude that drives are cheap, and Seagate is about profit, so who cares about the customer's data and peace of mind? Btw, one reason to FULL format a new drive after purchase is that virus' have been found on new drives that were NOT checked and NO ONE needs a headache to deal with that. I'm just a computer user and I have enough troubles with OS, other hardware, software, and user fallibility/ignorance. I should be able to buy a hard drive from ANY manufacturer and have at LEAST two well-known free pieces of test software to validate the status and functioning of the drive. Am I wrong you tell me? I'm sorry for the long review. I don't know if this helps in the decision making to purchase or not. I would be interested in learning if the 6TB and 8TB drives have this problem or not. In a raid, at least there is redundancy, but for us non-raid poor people, standalone and trust is all we have. Seagate look me up in your customer DB if you have any ideas. Those who wish to share Ideas please leave a comment. Please be polite and courteous. Thank you all.

I have purchased two of these drives from Best Buy in the 5TB size. I highly recommend that one use Seagate's SeaTools to test/burn-in this drive before committing any non-redundant data to it. When you get it home, Google "SeaTools," download and install the program, and under the "Basic Test" menu run a "Short Drive Self-Test." If this passes, run the "Short Generic" test, then the "Long Generic." The short doesn't take long, but the long test takes about 2 days (44+ hours) to run on a USB 3.0 port according to my experience. This is where my first drive failed after passing the first two tests. The "Fix All" options would not complete (fast is a reallocation of bad sectors and long is a full surface scan), and the drive would fail in the middle of copying data. I returned it, and Best Buy exchanged it for another off the shelf no question asked. This is exactly why I do not buy the same thing for a lower price online. Short of an additional trip to the store (which I don't mind at all), the hassle factor is low and Best Buy's value added service is worth the extra money in my opinion. Anyway, the replacement passed all the tests and has been working fine since - as has the second one I bought when the first filled up. I am now ready for my third. One other thing. These drive enclosures are not really designed well (function follows form) and do not dissipate heat effectively in their native position with the blue side down. The only vents in this model are in the rear where the cables plug in and on the bottom (blue) side, and since the enclosure is fanless, it relies on conduction with the aluminum ESD/Heat shield and convection with the environment to transfer heat. It follows then that the best position for this enclosure - short of heroic efforts to ventilate it - is standing it up on end with the cables facing up toward the ceiling and putting it as low to the floor as is reasonable. My tests have shown that temperatures are lower (8-10 degrees Fahrenheit) in this position than they are while laying flat as was intended. You can check this yourself via the "Drive Information" option also located under the "Basic Test" menu option in SeaTools. In conclusion, it is my opinion that this disk+enclosure is as good as it gets off-the-shelf and in this price range as long as you take some simple precautions by reducing your risks with pre-testing, environmental temperature control, and redundancy - meaning test the drive before you put data on it, keep it cool, and don't put data that you cannot afford to lose on just one drive. 5 stars for a great product minus 1 star for the uncertainty of a DOA or premature failure after my experience of a 33% (1-in-3) failure rate.

I purchased this brand because I have been using a similar yet smaller version, the 2TB, for my work photography files on a 2012 Mac Book Pro. I actually work on files directly on the drive for photo editing and it works great! So, when I wanted a new external drive for my personal and freelance work I went with this one. I have 3 other branded external hard drives: two 1TB and one 2TB. Although originally set up to work with both my Windows System and my MacBook Pro after reformatting them for NTFS, I can now only open them on one of my computers which means the files for the other computer can't be accessed anymore. It was very important for me to make sure that I can take my photos and graphic design files back and forth between my mid 2009 MacBook Pro and my Windows 7 system and to access older files. The WINNING FEATURE for me was the built in driver that walks you through setting this up to work on both a Mac and PC in NTFS. No reformatting required! I LOVE this feature. It also allows you to partition the drive so I could partition some TB for each computer and use the rest on the memory in a 3rd partition for shared files. I chose not to do this because I'm only going to use it for shared files. I will end up re-purposing my old external drives for Backup drives and then make a cloud back up as well, which was suggested to me by the very helpful Best Buy sales person. It was also very important to me that it is still compatible with the USB 2.0 since that is the one built into my Mid 2009 MacBook Pro. My older desktop Widows PC system was rebuilt and upgraded in 2014 so the USB 3.0 on the drive also is nice to have. I did the initial set up on my Mac as recommended and because that is the one that doesn't typically run NTFS. The setup program cautions you how to keep your Mac from turning it into a backup drive which would make it incompatible with the Windows computer. Also a GREAT feature and probably why I can't get into my other brand external drives from both computers anymore. So far so good. I'm currently consolidating all my files from each computer and each old external drive into this one. I've also recently upgraded to Windows 10. Although my PC seems to be having a few bugs with that, this Seagate drive still works great. I make sure to tell my Windows system and my Mac system not to use it as a backup when ever it asks. By experience, I recommend you don't skip that step, especially for the Mac.

When running Apple Mac OS X Yosemite FileVault 2 encryption on this drive, it only transfers at 20 MB/s for both read and write. Without FileVault it runs at 100+ MB/s. I used the same cabling to hook up a 3 year old Seagate GoFlex drive (also with FileVault 2) and got 100+ MB/s. But it was really pathetic to see my 5 year old Western Digital USB 2.0 hard drive (also with FileVault 2) going at twice the speed of this drive. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. And the worst part is that I actually paid shipping to RMA this, and they send you a refurbished drive (someone else's returned drive) rather than a new one. Out of curiosity I took it out of the enclosure (voiding the warranty, but I'm not going pay more shipping to get more refurbished junk, and my work requires the data to be encrypted so it's just a paperweight now anyway). I hooked it up to a powered SATA-USB 3 dock and it still got 20 MB/s, so the problem is built into the drive and not the SATA-USB connection. I have four other Seagate drives with no problems, and the price these days is fantastic, so I really wanted to make this work. If you search around enough on the internet, others have experienced very inconsistent performance with this drive. Whatever the reason, troubleshooting is a huge pain and ultimately a huge waste of time. If you have any issues with this drive whatsoever, don't waste your time figuring it out. Just return it and get something else.

Absolutely love the extra space this hard drive provides. I was a bit concerned buying this after hearing many complaints about overheating. I even connected a small fan I had laying around and put it under the drive to make sure it doesn't overheat however it doesn't really seem necessary. The fan I have connected isn't really in the way so I have no plans to take the hard drive off of it but even without the little bit of cooling that it provides I doubt there is anything to worry about with this drive. There was also a concern that this drive would be slower for me than my other ones which I'm happy turned out to be wrong, I had no trouble getting this drive to transfer at a minimum of 130mb/s on regular files. I'm very happy to have a large amount of external storage now, it allows me to back up all of my data and take it with me on the go if I need to leave for a trip. At the time of this review I've only had this drive going on 10 days now, I will update it if anything happens but I don't expect anything to happen given that this is a mass backup drive that I only plan to hit a handful of times a day backing up a couple gbs here and there. It should also be noted I bought this drive on prime day for $199.99 well under the normal $224.99 asking price. A friend of mine also bought this drive on my recommendation and he's been quite pleased with it. He has actually had his for a couple months now with no problems. I plan to keep up with him on the condition of his drive since he has not only had it longer but uses it as his main OS drive so that gives me two drives to reference for this review.

I have used Seagate External Drives for years and this is the first one that has have ever given me problems. The first one I got from the store gave me error messages right out of the box when I connected it to a USB 3.0 port on my one year old iMac, if it would mount at all. I returned it and Best Buy swapped it for a new one, no problem, and that one eventually mounted OK, but took forever (several minutes) to do so. I wanted to use it with Time Machine so I reformatted it for Mac Extended (as per my other Seagate external drives which work just fine), and the computer keep giving me mounting errors, telling me it has been ejected incorrectly. I finally got it to mount after resetting the USB controller on my iMac, but it still periodically gives me error messages and time machine will lose contact with it if I let it go to sleep. Whenever I restart my Mac it is 50-50 if it will mount at all the first restart. IMHO this drive is just not compatible with the iMac hardware. Also, be aware that this drive is designed to work only in a horizontal position even though the illustration on the box shows it mounted vertically.

I just received this unit about a week ago. This is replacing a 2TB Seagate Back Up Plus Slim that is full. The price on this was about the same as the 4TB Slim version, and since a little space wasn't that important to me, I went with the extra storage. Set up on these units are very easy and I am not a techie. I can get around on the computer and do most tasks but not a high level tech. The problem you face if you are replacing a slim unit is that the software on the slim is considered an upgraded version so you need to delete the old version of Seagate Dashboard. Your system will block this "older" version from downloading. Since I was deleting the software for Seagate, I deleted the Lyve software as well. Once deleted, I was able to install in minutes. Software walks you through installation. In case you are interested in the Lyve photo storage, it is going away the beginning of the year so don't bother installing it on your other devices unless you want to send all your photos from phones, tablets, laptops, pc, etc to one area easily and then you can export to a storage device easily and quickly. We now have over 13k photos and videos from trips on one device so that was easy. The initial backup from my pc took overnight but is now set for continuous back up. Highly recommend. This box isn't that big, yes the slim is smaller but if you have a few inches near your system this is priced right. Good luck!!!

I held off composing this audit until my issues were settled. When I first setup my 5TB Reinforcement In addition to Drive I couldn't get the product to work of course. I reached Seagate bolster and got a snappy reaction with recommendations on settings for Windows 7 Star. I made the recommended settings yet at the same time had a product issue. A portion of the issues were no or ease back reaction to tapping on decisions. Reinforcements would stop after 8% was duplicated. I could read and keep in touch with the drive utilizing Windows Voyager so I felt the Dashboard programming was to blame, I reached bolster again and was advised how to download an updated Seagate Chief Programming which tackled every one of my issues. It offers significantly more choices then I will ever require yet it is likewise quick simple to utilize. This is the best reinforcement programming I have ever utilized and a major change over the Acronis 2016 programming I had recently obtained and expelled from my PC. Concerning the drive it's little, calm, cheap and quite quick thinking of it as' running on USB3. My 16TB server is topping off with motion pictures and photographs and when it's an ideal opportunity to get more stockpiling I will likely choose another of these drives yet somewhat bigger.