Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Silver USB 3.0 for PC Laptop and Mac, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography (STDR1000101)

Hard to go wrong here. If you are using this as an external drive, this product has 2TB in very small space and is USB powered. The drive itself only takes 0.7-2.3W to operate! On Mac OSX 10.9.2 running the included Paragon NTFS driver, I was able to see write rates in 8-10 MB/sec with USB 2.0. On a Windows 7 Machine I averaged 18 MB/Sec; 14 MB/sec running the latest 8.1 update.I pulled the drives from two of these units (instructions below - photos to be added soon) for use in my laptop. This product is the only way I know of to obtain the 9.5mm tall, 2.5-in 2T Samsung Spinpoint M9T drive(s). Note: the 2TB version has 1 drive, the 4TB has 2 drives. After installing them in my laptop (has 3 internal HDD bays with SATA connections, 1st bay has OS, apps, etc. on 500GB SSD), I tested data txfr speeds. I moved 1.5 TB of data from one drive to another with average speeds of 194 MB/Sec in Windows 8.1. Laptop now has 4.5 TB of hard drive capacity.Have also successfully installed one in a PS4! Next project will be to install one in a Macbook Pro. Great way to get a lot of internal storage space for little money (Purchased early April 2014 for $103.99 directly from Amazon with 2-day Prime shipping).Removal Instructions (WARNING -THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY - BUYER BEWARE):1. Obtain small, flat-bladed screw driver and gently insert between the aluminum top and the plastic bottom.2. Rotate screwdriver slightly to pry the top off. At this point slide the screwdriver around the perimeter and the top will come off.3. Once the top is off, you will see the top of the internal drive. Carefully remove from the plastic lower without prying or subjecting the drive to significant shock. It is easiest to remove by lifting the side opposite the USB connector.4. Once the drive is out of the plastic enclosure, you'll need to remove some aluminum tape and wax paper from the drive. Be careful when doing this to avoid ESD which may damage drive circuitry.5. Once the tape and paper are removed, the USB to SATA board can be carefully removed from the drive. It is an interference fit without any fasteners.6. You now have a bare 2TB, Samsung Spinpoint M9T drive that is only 9.5 mm tall! Great for laptops and the PS4.7. Install in your new device per your device manufacturer's instructions.Enjoy!

So far so good, I have been using mine as a primary game drive for my new Xbox One X and has been performing great for the past couple of months. The drive enclosure is well made and comes in a variety of colors, the colored part is anodized aluminum with the rest being black plastic. One of the good features is that the drive does not need an external power supply so if you plan on using it with a laptop make sure that the port you plug it into has power supplied to it, some laptops do not provide power to all of the USB ports. Mechanical hard drives marketed to consumers and enthusiast PC builders today are not as reliable as hard drives of several years ago and all of them are priced as every other disposable consumer electronic devices, you may get one that will last for years while another one will fail far sooner than you would like. With this knowledge the question of drive failure is not if it will fail but is one of when this will happen. If you like the vast majority are using mechanical drives for primary storage due to their affordable cost to their large capacity and you consider the data you have placed on the drive to be valuable to you and something that you cannot afford to loose like important business or school files or perhaps you have lots of personal photos etc stored on them then you really need to be doing backups of your data on a regular schedule. Drives are so inexpensive today I generally buy two, one for daily use and the second one to mirror the first one. There are several really good free and open source tools that are available but the one I like and use is called Synchronicity and can be found here (just change the dot to a . and remove the spaces) synchronicity dot sourceforge dot net Synchronicity is very powerful as well as easy to set up and use and did I mention that it is FREE as in free beer as well as being open source? Open source software is great even if you are not a software developer, open source means that the source code is freely available and if you obtain the software from an official download source you will have a very high confidence that it will not contain any viruses or any other forms of malware, the reason? Other open source software developers have taken a look at the source code and have not seen any malware in the program this is why I personally choose to use Linux as my main operating system, no big brother data mining my personal information from my OS. I would recommend these drives and I plan on purchasing a few more for myself.