Seagate Backup Plus 3TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive for Mac (STCB3000900)

I really enjoy products that make my life simpler, and the Seagate Backup Plus series of hard drives do just that. I have both the 2TB and the 3TB versions, and they have both worked perfectly since plugging them into my new Mac Mini. No setup, just plug them in and start backing up. They are very quiet when in use (to be honest I've never heard anything from either one), and don't seem to put out any heat. I like the rubbery finish, and they feel very well made. I use an excellent backup program called Carbon Copy Cloner, well worth the money.I will say, however, that there are a few minor issues I will mention (minor enough to not deduct a point).Fist, it would be nice if they included some kind of a small stand, because these stand up just like a small book, and it's a little to easy to knock them over. It hasn't really been a problem for me because I have them located behind my monitor, out of the way, but I have to be extra careful when I'm hooking something else into the system. But again, that's really only a very minor quibble.Second, the 2TB model came without the USB 2.0 cable. Not a huge issue, as I am using these with the included Firewire 800 cable, but a little annoying that it wasn't included as specified. The 3 TB model did come with both the Firewire and USB cables. Again, a pretty minor quibble.Third, because these use an AC/DC transformer (wall wart), they take up an extra space when plugged into my UPS, so it would be nice if they would include a short AC cable from the transformer to the AC outlet, thus taking up only one space instead of two.So, only very minor issues, and not enough to stand in the way of me highly recommending the Seagate Backup Plus series of hard drives as an excellent and easy to use value for the Mac user.Edit (September 5, 2013). Almost a year, and no problems. It's nice to have equipment that works quietly in the background, never requiring attention. Good stuff.

When I first got this drive, I was very pleased. It's an attractive drive, and feels solidly built. I hooked it up to my iMac via firewire, and partitioned it into two drives - one to hold my iTunes library, and one for use as a time machine backup. Setup was easy, and the drive seemed plenty fast, and very quiet. It worked very well for about a year.Then the trouble started.I started getting messages from iTunes that the library could not be found. Sure enough, the drive had unmounted itself. Powering the drive off and back on would fi the problem, but it would happen again, seemingly randomly. Then the same thing started to happen with the other partition.Finally, the drive just died. I lost my entire iTunes library (fortunately it was backed up elsewhere) and my time machine backup history. Disk Utility was not able to re-format either partition, or the whole drive, successfully.I can't give it one star, because when it worked, it worked well and was quiet and fast. But I can't give it more than two stars because it can't be trusted to save and protect your data, and really, that's its whole purpose.

Despite the horrible packing job by the people in Amazon's distribution facility, I finally received a working drive. The first one evidently got banged around quite a bit en route, so it made LOTS of noise when I plugged it in and then every 30 seconds to a minute thereafter. If you order from Amazon, it comes in a cardboard box barely bigger than the drive itself with only one or two of those pillow cushion things shoved on one side of it to absorb the bumps and bangs. It is clearly insufficient. One corner of the drive box itself was crushed in a bit showing it had taken quite a hit at some point.Despite the shipping, I will say that, so far, this drive does a pretty good job. It spins up a little bit slowly when it wakes back up from sleep, so that can be pretty annoying while you wait on it. It goes to sleep pretty often...after about probably 5 minutes or so...and anything you do in the OS from opening Spotlight, to opening a new Finder window, to opening Dashboard makes it wake back up. There are times it wakes from sleep when I really don't need it to at all. I suspect it is because I have Spotlight indexing it as well, but if I am going to put files on it, then I want it to be indexed. It is the slowdown when trying to do anything after it has gone to sleep that made me take off a star on the device. If it came up quicker, I would put 5 stars no problem.I have it plugged into a USB 2.0 port on my late 2009 iMac, so I am obviously not seeing the USB 3.0 speeds that it is supposed to be capable of, so I cannot comment on its speed from that standpoint. Otherwise, it appears to run at full 2.0 speeds. I wish the replacement modules for the base weren't $50. I really would like to swap this USB 3.0 one to a Firewire 800, but if it is going to cost $50, then I most definitely will not be doing it. That is just stupid expensive.There are indicator lights on the base of the drive which shows you how full it is. They can be turned off via the software that comes with the drive. There is no way to adjust how much time passes before the drive spins down for sleep mode. I wish there was.Anyway, overall, I would say that this drive works pretty well. I would like to see the price drop by quite a bit, but that will take time. You don't have to do anything at all to configure it for a Mac. It just works straight out of the box when you plug it in. I had it out and had Time Machine sync with it within about 5 minutes I would say. The capacity reported by finder is 4TB. Disk Utility says total capacity is 4 TB (4,000,787,025,920 Bytes). I would say it is a good drive. It is very big and, knock on wood, appears to be reliable so far.