Seagate STCD500204 Slim 500GB USB 3.0 2.5 inch Portable Hard Drive - Silver

Great
I have another Seagate hard drive, but this one is much smaller and looks good. To be honest, I just drag and drop files because I am a little bit of a Luddite - I don't use the software that comes with this device to help you manage things. It can be set to automatically update user-generated content but I couldn't do this with Blogger so I was a little disappointed. But I think this is great because it is so portable and stores a lot.

Seagate STCD500204 Slim 500GB USB 3.0 2.5 inch Portable Hard Drive - Silver

Slim, sleek, stylish
As far as portable hard drives go, this is a VERY portable 500GB hard drive. It's not much bigger than a smart phone, and with 500GB of storage it is a very handy device to have around. It was recognised by my laptop straight away, and was ready for use within seconds. A great hard drive for anyone who needs a bit of extra space and is on-the-go a lot.

Seagate STCD500204 Slim 500GB USB 3.0 2.5 inch Portable Hard Drive - Silver

Nice, but a couple of points of note
This is a good Seagate drive and, being a premium product, it is at a premium price.

It is well made and reasonably fast. On a USB 2.0 I achieved 20Mbyte/s write speed and 30Mbyte/s read speed under Windows 8. However, on a USB 3.0 connection, I managed to get over 100Mbtyes/s - a cracking speed, especially for a portable drive. If you are not sure what type of ports you have, the tongue on the PC is colour coded as black for USB 2.0 and blue for USB 3.0.

The points of note:

- other reviewers have mentioned the cable being a special to type. When I looked closely at it, I could see that half of the fitting was a microUSB. So I tried running with one of these standard cables rather than the supplied cable to see if I could get around having to carry the special cable with me. Although the drive powered up and the PC gave its usual "plunk-plunk" noise as the drive powered up, it was never recongnised by the PC. Using the provided cable worked...

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