Are you seeking for a Seagate external hard drive? If yes, this post is worth reading. The post lists some best Seagate external hard drives with different sizes like 1/2/4/8TB. Moreover, this post shows you how to reformat it with MiniTool Partition Wizard.
Adding an external hard drive can easily expand the storage space of computers or game consoles. Apart from this common usage, external hard drives can be used in other situations such as creating a portable Windows.
This post focuses on Seagate external hard drives. Established in the 1980s, Seagate Technology Cor is the largest manufacture of hard drive and read-and-write heads. It is skilled in the design, manufacturer, and sales of hard drives.
What You Should Notice When Buying Seagate External Hard Drive
When you buy a Seagate external hard drive, these factors should not be neglected.
Types
There are two types of Seagate external hard drives. One is the HDD that features large capacity and is cheap. The other one is the SSD that delivers high performance but comes with small capacity. To figure out more differences between the two types, please read SSD VS HDD: What’s Difference? Which One Should You Use in PC.
Capacity
I briefly analyze how much files a 1TB external hard drive can hold.
- As to office documents, a 1TB external hard drive can hold 85,899,345 pages of Word documents.
- As to images, you can put about 310,000 photos in 1TB external hard drive.
- As to audio files, 200,000 songs or 17,000 hours of music can eat up a 1TB external hard drive, provided that an average song consumes 5MB (How Many Gigabytes (GB) Are in a Terabyte (TB)).
- As to video files, a 1TB external hard drive can hold about 500 hours of movies or 250 movies about 120 minutes long.
Port
Most Seagate external hard drives are connected to computers via a universal serial bus (USB) port. So, make sure there is a USB port on your computer. Or, you need to purchase an adapter.
Security
Several years ago, there was a big flaw in Seagate external hard drive that made it incredibly easy for hackers to steal users’ data. The drive had a function that allows it to connect to the internet, which was utilized by hackers — they used the default username and password that came with the drive to access it and download everything on the drive or upload new files to it.
Fortunately, this flaw was been noticed by Seagate. The company patched the vulnerabilities and issued a firmware update that can deal with all security concerns with these vulnerabilities.
Seagate 1/2/4/8TB External Hard Drive
Seagate has developed external hard drives with different sizes. According to the brand’s official website, the largest Seagate external hard drive is up to 16TB. However, this post mainly introduces the several kinds of Seagate external hard drives with commonly used capacity like 1/2/4/8TB. Scroll down to pick up one Seagate external hard drive you prefer.
Seagate Backup Plus Slim (HDD)
Seagate Backup Plus Slim boasts a minimalist brushed metal enclosure with an LED light. It is compact and weighs about 130 grams (or 4.6 ounces). As to form factor, this external hard drive 4.52 x 3.07 x 0.46 inches and you can slip it into your pocket.
Apart from the small and compact form factor, the Seagate external hard drive also boasts a decent performance. The read and write speed is up to 119.9MB/s and 119.5MB/s respectively.
Whether you are a Windows user or Mac user, you can use this Seagate 1TB external hard drive. The drive has been formatted to NTFS and therefore it can work right away with a PC. It can also work with a Mac computer as long as you reformat it.
How to connect it to a computer? Just plug it into your computer through USB 3.0. After that, you can use the helpful tools to customize backup and mirror folders.
Further reading:
Backup Activity: Seagate Toolkit allows users to create a plan customized for the content, storage device, and schedule of users’ choosing.
Mirror Activity: Seagate Toolkit lets users create a Mirror folder on PC or Mac that is synced to their storage device. In other words, whenever users make changes of files in one folder, Toolkit automatically updates the other folder with the changes.
The Seagate 1TB external hard drive is available and its price is $54.99 for 1TB. As to 2TB and 4TB, the price is $67.99 and $92.29.
Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch (HDD)
Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch is an external HDD. This drive features a woven fabric pattern, which is a nice touch. In terms of item weight and dimensions, the Seagate external hard drive is about 5.3 ounces and is 4.52 x 3.07 x 0.46 inches.
Except for the stylish appearance and lightweight, the Seagate external hard drive comes with password protection and 256-AES hardware encryption.
Leveraging USB 3.0 interface, this Seagate external hard drive delivers 123.3MB/s read and 122MB/s write. It can also work along with Windows and Mac computers as it was pre-formatted as exFAT.
However, this Seagate external hard drive has no rubber feet. As we know, HDDs vibrate when they work. Rubber feet would help mitigate a tiny fraction of this vibration and more importantly can raise and elevate the hard drive from the table surface to allow an air follow to avoid overheat.
At the time of this writing, the Seagate external hard drive is sold $62.49 for 1TB and $77.99 for 2TB.
Seagate Backup Plus Hub (HDD)
The Seagate Backup Plus Hub features a classic black appearance and has tons of storage — its capacity ranges from 4TB to 10TB.
It is cumbersome to take the external hard drive as it is 4.65 x 1.61 x 7.80 inches with a weight of 37.44 ounces. So, you can put it on the desk and use it with your desktop. Do not worry that this Seagate external hard drive will hog your desktop’s expansion options because it has two additional USB 3.9 ports.
Furthermore, it has software that lets it work with Mac and Windows interchangeably. But note that the USB hub might fail to work when the drive is connected to a USB 2.0 port.
On Amazon, you need to pay $99.99 for 4TB, $124.99 for 6TB, $153.76 for 8TB, and $203.23 for 10TB.
Seagate One Touch SSD
Are there any good Seagate external SSDs? Yes, Seagate 1TB One Touch SSD is an example. Seagate One Touch 1TB SSD is an ultra-small, high-speed, portable external drive. It has a minimalist textile design and is 2.95 x 2.19 x 0.39 inches with a weight of 2.29 ounces.
The external SSD also delivers good performance. According to the performance test, the sequential read and write are up to 429.7MBps and 309.0MBps respectively. As to the random read and write speeds, they are 136.6MBps and 21.94MBps respectively.
Both Windows users and Mac users can use this Seagate 1TB external SSD with their computers. Users can use it for streaming stored videos directly to a laptop, scrolling seamlessly through photos, and backing up content on the go.
However, this Seagate external SSD is not perfect in some aspects. Firstly, there is only one Micro-USB 3.0 port on the back, which is not as convenient as a USB Type-C port. More disappointingly, Seagate does not offer a Type-C cable or adapter, which means that those who use laptops just coming with Type-C ports need to buy such an adapter.
The Seagate 1TB external SSD is $139.99 on Amazon and the store offers a three-year limited warranty.
Seagate Barracuda Fast SSD
Seagate Barracuda Fast is another nice Seagate external SSD. This Seagate external SSD features a unique signature design. It is thin and square in shape and comes with a LED light that glows when the external SSD is plugged in. Coming with a reversible USB-C connector, it can be used with many devices like mobile phones, computers, PS4, and Xbox.
Have a look at the performance. According to Amazon’s product instruction, the speed of the Seagate external SSD is up to 549MB/s. According to the performance test available on websites, the external SSD hits 502.2Mb/s read and 467.1MB/s write.
Since this external SSD has been formatted as exFAT, out of the box this drive can work with both Windows and Mac computers.
However, this external SSD is expensive — it is $169.93 for 1TB on Amazon.
What You Might Do When Receiving the Seagate External Hard Drive
What might you do when receiving your Seagate external hard drive? The answer is REFORMAT. Seagate external hard drives have been pre-formatted as NTFS or exFAT but you will not be limited to the initial file system.
To reformat a Seagate external HDD or SSD, you can try MiniTool Partition Wizard. The free edition of this software can help you format to another file system with ease.
MiniTool Partition Wizard FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Step 1: Connect your Seagate external hard drive to your Windows computer.
Step 2: Download MiniTool Partition Wizard, install it on the same computer, and launch it to get its main interface.
Step 3: Format the Seagate external hard drive.
- Highlight the external hard drive in the Disk Map and then choose the Format Partition feature from the left panel.
- Select the file system you prefer and then click the OK
- Confirm the information and then click the Apply button to execute the pending task.
If you want to reformat your Seagate external hard drive on Mac, Quickly Format an External Hard Drive for Mac and Windows PC could be helpful.
Bottom Line
Have you found the Seagate external hard drive you want? If all the listed Seagate external hard drives are not proper for you, please share with me the reasons in the following comment zone.
You may have used MiniTool Partition Wizard. If you encounter some issues when reformatting your Seagate external hard drive, please send an email to [email protected].