Seagate 500 GB USB 2.0 External Desktop Hard Drive ST305004EXA101-RK (Black)

From Seagate
	Price: $99.99
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Features - Plug n¿ play with no software to install - Simply drag-and-drop to save files - 7200 RPM performance, 500GB - Built-in power management ensures energy-efficient operation - USB 2.0 Interface Product Description Seagate external desktop drives provide extra storage for your ever-growing collection of files. Instantly add space for more files, consolidate all of your files to a single location, or free-up space on your computer¿s internal drive for improved performance. Setup is straightforward, simply plug in the included power supply and USB cable and you are ready to go. It is automatically recognized by Windows® operating system, so there is no software to install and nothing to configure. Saving files is easy too, just drag-and-drop. It¿s not just easy to use, but it¿s fast and energy efficient too. Enjoy fast data transfer speed with USB 2.0 connectivity and 7200 RPM drive performance. Built-in power management ensures energy-efficient operation. Seagate has delivered proven, reliable storage solutions for over 30 years. As of 2008, Seagate has shipped over one billion hard drives. Seagate continues to stand behind its quality by including a 2-year limited warranty. Customer Reviews Works great on my Mac - I've always been satisfied with Seagate and this is a great price and great quality Date: 2009-09-11 | Rating: 5 I can't speak to the issues that some of the other reviewers have had, but I have to say I've been very impressed by this drive. You've got to plug it in so it's not really an "on-the-go" kind of drive, but that's not what I needed. I have a couple of FreeAgent Go drives for that (and the reason I went with Seagate this time is because I've been so impressed with the other Seagates). This time, I wanted a big drive that I could use as a Time Machine backup for my MacBook Pro, and as a backup for all of the video files I've shot over the years. So far I've been very happy with this drive. One thing I noted right away is that it actually has slightly more than 1TB of space! With every other external drive I've ever used the actual amount of usable memory has been a bit less than advertised, even after I've reformatted them. With this one you get what is advertised. It's a USB 2.0 data connection, and from what I've seen manages to move files more quickly than my older Western Digital 500GB desktop firewire drive. For comparison, I tried moving a 2.15 GB video file back and forth between my laptop's hard drive and a few of my external drives. This one was fastest at both downloads and uploads - it would download the 2.15 GB file in one minute, 17 s. as opposed to 1 min., 40 for the portable FreeAgent Go and 1 min., 37 for the Western Digital. Uploading results were similar: it would upload the same 2.15 GB video file in 1 minute, 10 s. while the other drives uploaded in about 1 minute, 20 s. So, it's pretty fast and does exactly what I need - I've got no complaints and am very happy about the price (which turns out to be almost exactly what I paid a year or so ago for my 320GB portable drive and much less than what I paid about 3 years ago for my 500 GB desktop drive). What's not to like? One more thing, for Mac users. While this drive is set up out of the factory to plug and play on Windows it can easily be converted to a handy Mac drive. Here's how: 1. plug it in to your Mac, using the USB 2.0 cable provided with the drive 2. open up your applications folder, search for the utilities folder and then run "disk utility" (or, just search for "disk utility" in finder or spotlight and click on it). 3. you should see an icon for your "1 TB Seagate Desktop Media" drive in the left column of "disk utility" and also a drive partition (as I recall it was called "desktop" but I changed the name) underneath that. 4. click on the icon labelled "1 TB Seagate Desktop Media" and you'll see a few options in the window; click "partition" 5. after this steps will vary depending on what you want to do with this. For what I wanted, I decided to create two partitions on my hard drive. So, under "volume scheme" I selected "2 partitions" then clicked on the top one and set it to 250 GB and that left 750.10 GB on the other one. For the "format" I selected "Mac OS X Extended" but you'd want to select the journaled option if you want to use either of these drives as a "boot disk". I didn't. Then hit "apply" and it will erase everything on the disk and break it into two sections. Now when you plug in the hard drive two icons will appear on your desktop, as if there were two separate external drives. I use the smaller one for regular backups and the larger one for storing all of my old video files. I'm sure there are lots of other ways to get an excellent value from this sleek and handy little drive. Enjoy! The 1TB Seagate USB 2.0 Drive is great! Date: 2009-10-18 | Rating: 5 I (like everyone else) always read the reviews of an item before purchasing it. I was very skeptic about making this purchase due to the bad reviews that i've read, but a friend convinced me that it was a good deal, and I went ahead and followed through with it. Let me tell you I WAS (and still am) VERY pleased with this purchase! The drive installs easily, however the only set back is that the drive isnt a true 1TB Drive, only 931GB's of the drive are usable. Aside from that, everything runs perfectly with no problems what so ever. A suggestion to anyone purchasing this, is to run a surface scan on the drive prior putting anything on it. This way if there are bad sectors, they can be fixed (which is part of the reason why so many people suffer with having their drives die on them). Once running the surface scan, if all is well with no bad sectors or errors (My Seagate was perfect with no errors or bad sectors), feel free to use at your leisure. I recommend this to ANYONE looking for an external hard drive! Seagate 1 TB USB 2.0 External Desktop Hard Drive ST310005EXA101-RK (Black) Date: 2009-11-30 | Rating: 5 This is the second Seagate 1 TB USB 2.0 External Desktop Hard Drive ST310005EXA101-RK (Black) I have bought now. 5 stars across the board. I own an XP desktop and a Vista laptop. The hard drives are better for me, to transfer data The Seagate units are simpler to use than opening the case and expanding storage. This unit was less expensive than the first one, by a few dollars. Add storage Instantly Date: 2009-12-15 | Rating: 5 Bought this 1.5TB drive in local Fry's in Bay Area over the weekend since it was cheaper there. Drive is neatly packaged with cellophane film on the top to avoid finger-print/scratches/dust on the shiny/glossy surface. There is a small green LED activity light in the front but its very tiny and doesn't annoy a bit like some of the big bright LEDs on other external hard drives. This is 7200 RPM drive and comes with its own power-supply adapter which must be used to power-up this drive. It is not a portable drive and is not USB-bus powered. This drive doesn't come pre-loaded with any backup/encryption software. However it does come up with a small .exe file which when run takes you to Seagate's product registration page where it automatically fills the Drive Serial Number, so you just enter your name/email and register the product. I like registering as it helps locating the details of the drive in case you have to call customer service for repair/replace under manufacturer's warranty (which is 2 years for this drive). You can altogether not run it at all if you don't want to register. Everytime I plug in this drive, it makes a large clicking sound once but after that it goes quiet while running. I plugged it into a Macbook Pro and created 2 partitions, one for MAC (HFS) and other for Windows (NTFS). I then used Time-Machine software that came with my Macbook to take a backup on MAC partition. It was quite smooth with no issues. I then unplugged the drive and connected to a Windows 7 laptop and it recognized the 2 partitions immediately, HFS being Read-Only and NTFS being Read-write. I then took my Windows 7 backup using in-built Windows backup software and it also went quite smooth. So far no issues with the drive. It does tend to attract fingerpints/dust on its shiny surface since I removed the cellophane from it. Good Value for money Date: 2009-11-14 | Rating: 5 Normally I buy a hard drive using the formula Price/GB and compare different drives for functionality and price per GB. At the time of buying this drive 1TB and 2TB were over priced. This drive was the best value for money. It works perfectly with my PS3. I need storage for DSLR, Hard Drive Hi Def Camcorder and a lot of downloaded movies. I switched from a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500GB which I used for about 2 years and it is still running great. I tried LaCie NAS (Ethernet Disk 1TB) but it is a little slow for my purpose (PS3 access of DSLR images). It comes with a 100-240V AC supply with 12V 2A DC output. External supply means surge and other electric supply problems don't affect the drives usability and aids easy work around.