Best Seagate Portable / External Hard Drives

Based on 50 reviews
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philipjj616 posts
 

Fine one day Gone the next – I inherited this from my Dad and it worked long enough to transfer his data to 2 separate drives that are not kept in the same location. I opened it… Read more

up and the drive was fine, the board was gone so I can still access the data which makes the obligatory 3 separate backups for critical data. This system is almost bomb proof.

BobSNSW7 posts
 

It is still working after 9 years – I bought one of these units in 2011. The disk died after about 5 years. Using instructions found on YouTube, I open the case and replaced the disk… Read more

and it is still working. The only issue I had was that it conflicted with a NAS. I don't normally write positive reviews but my recent experience with Seagate exceeded all my expectations.

NachoNSW8 posts
  Verified

Faster than I expected for a HDD – I needed a portable external hard drive to do a Windows system image back up. The previous year I changed the old internal HDD 900GB to SSD 2TB and I… Read more

thought it was overdue for a backup. I had 1.2TB to back up. First looked at an SSD but was 3 times the price of a HDD. So I settled on a Seagate One Touch 4TB in Space Grey colour.

The trap for young players is that it is formatted in exFat. Windows will only to system image back up if the drive is NTFS so I quickly copied the small amount of files on the new HDD and proceed to do a quick disk format in NTFS.

My estimates was the write speed sat around the 125Mbp/s mark, which was comparable to a big old 3.5" Seagate Desktop External HDD I had. My old laptop HDD which is now in a portable enclosure only manages about 112Mbp/s so was a noticeable improvement. Took about 3 hours to back up 1.2TB off the internal SSD.

I did do a speed test with a small 250GB external SSD which clocked 280Mbp/s. I'm not doing full image backups and restores everyday so I will stick with this HDD solution for a few years yet.

Clare W.VIC5 posts
 

Terrible product and they don't bother to replace items under warranty – I have gone through 3 of these external hard drives in the last 2-3 years. At first they worked well but the last two have died within the warranty… Read more

period. First one I managed to save the data myself 2nd one I sent to them to repair it. I waited a month to be told my data is not saveable and if it was still under warranty the would send me a replacement. Never received a replacement despite having conversations with the customer service team before sending it off that it was under warranty still and they would send me a new one. I will never purchase seagate products again.

BigdaddyoNSW23 posts
  Verified

Spent over 5 days copying data onto this brand new external hard drive, then after restarting iMac the hard drive was suddenly empty, completely… Read more

erased. Shutting down the computer & unplugging all cables then restarting didn't achieve anything, ran disc first aid on it with no errors reported. Will be returning to the store & buying a SSD but definitely staying away from Seagate, this isnt the first time ive had a seagate hard drive fail, all the data gone.

Seagate STDR2000302

Seagate STDR2000302

1.0 
Fair ReviewerQLD2 posts
  Verified

Dangerous Rubbish. Do NOT BUY – I bought 2 of these hard drives. Both died after minimal work and very careful handling. Neither could be salvaged or their contents by tech… Read more

professional.

Seagate makes it impossible to contact them so you loose: *your money you spent on the hard drives *your work stored on the hard drives *then you loose your time vainly searching for contacts at Seagate or having to sort through endless frequently asked questions that don't apply still not to be able to fix the problems. *Then you loose even more time and even more money in vain taking the hard drives to tech professionals who can't get them working again either.

I have a Seagate expansion desktop drive as well that just died for no apparent reason taking with it years of hard work too. Seagate are the WORST hard drives I have ever used. They are total rubbish. 3 out of the 4 that I have had died. I have only ever had the Seagate hard drives fail.

All the other hard drives I have continue to work without fault.

Seagate pale in comparison to Apollo Imation portable hard drives and My Passport portable hard drives which are by far better value, more robust and after years of work still dependable.

The worst part about Seagate is that they are more than happy to take the doe but then intentionally make themselves totally unavailable to avoid dealing with customers when their products predictably fail.

In front of me right now I have well over $400.00 worth of Seagate useless junk that has entrapped hundreds of thousands of dollars irreplaceable work, thousands of important personal files and almost all my families photos.

I would not buy another Seagate under any circumstances. I warn other not to buy Seagate products. It is too risky to pay for and use a product that will predictably harm my business operations again by failing and taking my and my customers digital assets with it.