Seagate Expansion 640 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive ST906404EXA101-RK

This 640gb portable hard drive is great. In this time of expanding file sizes where a 2gb flash drive or a 40gb external is basically useless, everyone must have a big portable drive if you plan on taking HD videos with you! The Seagate 640gb Expansion drive is the answer. Despite only having 1 usb cable connector (I've seen many portable HDDs with 2) it transfers at a modest 20mb/s most of the time, which is usually plenty fast considering most USB sticks are much slower. The HDD does have a power port (where you can connect an external power supply) but I have not used it because the actual plug is not included, maybe it increases the transfer speed further? I gave this hard drive 5 Stars for durability as well, mainly because of two things. I have dropped it before (not a big height only 2 feet or so off of a bed), and we usually have the Hard Drive connected to our media pc by our television which is always in sleep mode, as with most hard drives I have, when it remains connected to the computer in sleep mode the HDD continues to spin for some reason. SO, with that I can assume its durable withstanding god knows how many hours of spinning for no reason, and that drop. I've also taken it traveling on planes and it always does fine. In the end, this is a perfect HDD to use if you need to make lots of videos portable. Its got a huge amount of space (formatted I believe it comes to 596gb) and it really is portable, durable, and easy to use!

Over the past couple of years, I have purchased five of these drives in various capacities (250 to 500 GB). I couldn't be more pleased with their small size, reliability, price, and that they self-power from a single USB port. My (Win XP/Win 7) ASUS netbook, Dell Laptop, and ASUS P8P67 Pro motherboard-based desktop's USB 2.0 ports have never complained and run flawlessly with these portable drives. I also have a 250GB unit plugged into a NetGear (N600) WNDR3700 router that serves as a network drive. Out of the box, the first step I take is to format the drive (NTFS, 4096 byte allocation size) and give the drive a unique volume name. For a 500GB drive this takes about 6 hours to complete. I consider this long format process to be a burn-in test for the new drive. I have never used any of the supplied Seagate software. I don't have any bench-marking software to test the data read-write speed of these drives. Normally, a Windows system image backup of 75-100 GB takes about 2-3 hours. Formatting a 16 GB TrueCrypt AES-128 bit (FAT) container volume takes about 6 minutes (30-50 MB/s). The only minor issues I have with these drives is that the specialty 18" USB 2.0 cable could be a bit longer (I use an Amazon Basics USB extender cable) and the shiny black case is a finger-print magnet. I see where Seagate now offers a higher speed USB 3.0 interface with the same small lightweight foot-print. Hopefully, those will prove just as reliable as their older USB 2.0 models.

Acquired my first Seagate expansion drive through Dell when I bought my first Dell laptop about six years ago. When I started to use the laptop for gameplay, I found I was running out of room and called Dell, which suggested the expansion drive, and they had Seagate. So I ordered it, and found to my delight how easy it was, plug and play, and to this day the drive works wonderfully and does what it does with no problem. Alas, since time does pass, I have since bought a new computer and gave my old Dell to my cousin who was starting college. My Seagate was running out of space, so I decided to get a new one to complement the new Dell laptop I bought. I checked out other drives but found myself going back to Seagate, and checked out what they had to offer. I was delighted that Seagate is also selling through Amazon, and got it at an amazing price, going from my original 160GB to 500 GB. This new model does what it advertises, is lighter and sleeker than my old one, but I do worry about it being more plastic-ky than my original which is more solid and had been dropped more than once but works fine. Praying I don't have an accident with the new one. In the meantime, I'm also surprised it comes with a single 2.0 USB instead of the two prong one that used to come with their older models, but I was able to use both my old one's cord and the new one with no problem with my computer. The backup DOES take some time, which I was hoping wouldn't take so long but perhaps this is just the way it goes with first-time use as I'm making a full onetime backup of everything. Amazon shipped within a week, as they predicted, and so far, things look good. Will update when the backup is done and I doublecheck that everything's on there and able to be retrieved and viewed.

awesome, still works 2 years on.