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.

I've had this hard drive for 5 years now! originally used it for Xbox to store games. Then I moved my gaming to PC and on my gaming PC it works like butter. I keep all my games and gameplay recordings on it. Supper fast and never have ran into any issues whatsoever. Recommended.

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.

This external drive for the size and price has been pretty useful so far for the price i have seen others. i mainly bought this so i can attach it to my home network and use it as a Network Attached Storage or (NAS) so i can access my movies i download on my various TV's, Xbox's and computers throughout my house. i am writing this review for anyone that wants to do what i am trying to do. If you are just buying it for extra plug and play storage for your PS4, Xbox one, or PC/Laptop it is just as simple as plugging in and it should be functional. (you may have to format to NTSF standards as it may be FAT32. upon attaching the drive to my network it displayed an error that there wasn't enough space to transfer a 600mb movie. come to find out the 200 megabytes of the drive is partitioned for internal bloatware from seagate and it was trying to favor that partition as apposed to the other 4.5 Tb of free space. i probably took the long way around but to correct the problem i used windows internal programs to delete that first partition then extended the second partition of the drive to include that 200 megs to make it one flush drive. after that process it worked perfectly fine after setting it up in my router. i did have to map a network drive to access it on my PC's (very easy to do if you are unfamiliar, just google). now i can access my drive anywhere in the house from a pc or laptop. as far as the xbox being my media center for movies i downloaded, i have yet to complete this task, although i believe you have to download the "Media Player" app from the xbox store and only then will the NAS appear and you will have access to it. i know it was a bit wordy but it took some research to figure out how to get this working the way i want to and hopefully i can help someone else cut to the chase. Thanks for reading!!

Very good quality, works perfect

I bought this HD for backup - Mac Time Machine. Easy to set up and works well. No surprises.