Seagate Backup Plus 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STDT3000100)

It has been a long time since I said anything positive about Seagate. The last time was for the 2TB drive which used 1TB platters to create a very fast cool running drive and it was only that particular drive as the rest were utter crap and so were almost all other Seagate drives I have had since or before.This new version uses a newer case with holes on the bottom and sides to dissipates heat so it stayed under 50C after using it a few hours. While older cases it would get to 60C and I had to turn them off at that time. This drive is also HEAVY. Adding 2 or 3 more platters seems to make the drives almost twice as heavy as smaller drives, the 8TB WDC drives are also heavy. But this drive shakes when the head moves unlike the WDC drive. So you can actually hear and feel the head movement.On of the main changes seems to be the way the drive works, Unlike previous models where data was stored on a 20GB area and then that data was moved onto the SMR storage area, this newer model seems to store data directly on the storage area. I copied a 2TB drive over and it went at around 80MB/sec speeds.. With no spiking issues in between. It is still slower than PMR drives which would copy them at almost twice the speeds. But here it looks like once its buffer is full, it will write out the buffer directly onto the SMR track. So you can see how each track is being written in spurts unlike the smooth motion of PMR drives but unlike the older models where it would almost stop when the large buffer is being moved onto the SMR data area.So Seagate has learnt after a decade of trial and error like some kind of baby growing up. That is not praise for a multi billion $$$$ company that sells hundreds of millions of these things. Other than maybe some of the old guys running things might have passed onto greener pastures for changes that should have been done a decade ago. And it only took 3 or so years to perfect the firmware to get it to a working model. So this SMR firmware works even better than the advanced format firmware with boundary layer cross over where the 4k windows NTFS cluster over laps 2 advanced format sectors as the 512b translated sector is not aligned properly with the 4K NTFS cluster to the 4k advanced format drive sectors due to drive firmware or operating system mis-alignment (this was a major problem even if Microsoft had special routines to fix this issue as Seagate did not properly align the drive sectors with some firmware), the copy speed would fluctuate widely due to this mis match as the drive would basically do a read and then a write to create new sector data crossing 2 sector boundary layers almost imitating an SMR type drive. This will not happen with this drive as the entire track would be written out anyway. But it does show maturity of Seagate programmers in fixing some of the issues that caused problems before.Now changing data would still cause some problems but not as much as before. The big cache area used in the drive would basically cause time outs and crashes when copying large amounts of data with older firmware's so using a much smaller cache buffer seems to have fixed such problems. In essence now this is a real backup drive where you can backup your system image and such with speed AND also be able to use this as a storage drive. The difference being with the older firmware using this to store large amounts of data would cause errors or crash the operating system while a backup would only write out changes from the last backup you did so did not exhibit this problem.I hope people understood the technical problems which were explained. It took many years to understand these things and what caused them as the manufacturers themselves tell you very little and it was a lot of effort to learn from many people little bits of information on how it worked. Hopefully this review will help some people to better design their solutions by understanding the ways the drive works in different scenarious.

My previous review was for an older model 2TB Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive I bought and returned in June, 2014. Don't know why Amazon is lumping this New 4TB Drive review in with the old.This review is for the Seagate 4TB USB 3.0 Backup Plus External HD for Mac I bought 12/30/2015 at Amazon and received 01/03/2016:I love it! Pure and simple.It works perfectly with my new iMac's Time Machine backup. Just plug it into a USB 3.0 port, there's a power transformer/plug as well, then click on the prompts to use Time Machine Backup, how often to backup and what to backup, and you are good to go. It works silently in the background as it goes about its business. Unlike earlier models from Seagate, this one comes on and shuts off when it's supposed to: for scheduled backups every hour, or when you tell it to backup now. Very unobtrusive. And, 4TB for less than I paid for 2TB two years ago! Outstanding!The USB 3.0 port, the HD's only connectorSeagate Backup Plus 4TB Desktop External Hard Drive for Mac with 200GB of Cloud Storage & Mobile Device Backup USB 3.0 (STDU4000100), is as fast or faster than the old Firewire 800 or Ethernet connections between my old iMac & Seagate backup HD. It's also comparable in speed to my Seagate 1TB portable Lightning External Backup HD I use with my MacBook Pro laptop.You can also drag or move files to the drive as well. They go onto the drive's desktop or into a folder you create and move them to.You can use it as an additional storage hard drive by clicking that prompt, but why? Just get an expansion hard drive with as much as 8TB instead. There ARE instructions on how to format and use this drive with a Windows PC, but again, why? Buy the Windows backup drive. It also has models with more memory.I've been using the HD for a week now as I load new software and update it all to work with El Capitan. (My old iMac is still running 10.7, so everything had to be updated. PITA!) It seamlessly backs everything up using Time Machine and I couldn't be more pleased with it.I am not going to use the 200GB of "free" OneDrive Cloud Storage for 2 years. So I can't review that. You have to pay for the space after the 2 years. Seagate says it's a $95 value. So I'm guessing $45 - $50 a year after that? I wonder how difficult it is to transfer what you have stored in the cloud with one vendor to cloud storage with a different vendor?I highly recommend this Hard Drive. It's much improved and a joy to use.-------------------------Old Review for Seagate 2TB External Backup Drive:This is a good Seagate drive, at least I think so. I have two older Macs, an iMac and a MacBook Pro. Neither has USB 3.0. I tried to back up my laptop from scratch. Using USB 2.0 Time Machine said it would take 4 days! So, I asked Seagate what I could use besides USB. I was told there was an adapter with which I could use either Thunderbolt or Firewire 800. Wrong!There are no Seagate adapters that fit this drive. The only port the drive has is a Micro B port. The cable is a Micro B to USB 3.0.There are no work-arounds. If you don't have a Mac with a USB 3.0 port, you are screwed.LIke my other Seagate external drive that I use on my iMac, it starts and stops at totally unpredictable moments. I have to unplug it so it doesn't run for hours. It will spool up and run continuously for hours even after it backs up the computer. It gets very hot that way. This drive seems to behave the same way.PS: the Mac Time Machine software was corrupted the second time I used it. First Aid wouldn't fix it, so I sent the hard drive back and bought a 1Tb portable Seagate drive with Thunderbolt adapter. Hopefully it will work.