Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I picked this hard drive after a lot of searching, scanning through reviews and comparing models. I was torn between picking a 500 GB or a 1 TB hard drive. I was looking at some WD drives and this one. I needed a drive for just routine backups. I have over 100 GB in Dropbox, but using it exclusively for all my backup is not very convenient. It takes very long to upload and not absolutely everything can fit in it. The point is that I didn't need a hard drive to lug around a large media library with me. I mostly stream stuff and I have a rather large drive in my notebook anyways. This is why 500 GB would work for me and I didn't desperately need a terabyte of space. While some other drives had double the space for just a few more dollars, I went with this one because of its size and weight. This thing is slim and looks very decent. Taken out of the rather easy-to-open packaging, this device was not that special looking. It doesn't have cool colors, designs or accents. It's a rather plain device with a silver metal top and a black plastic bottom. The top will match your Mac. The drive overall feels very good when held. The bottom may be plastic, but it doesn't feel like a flimsy thing despite the very light weight. It comes with a very small, but just long enough USB cable. You could put both into a pocket and not notice. It's that slim. It comes with a 2 year warranty, while some drives come with longer warranties, but I don't worry too much about that because I will not be storing sensitive data on it. The USB 3.0 transfer rates are fast enough. I was able to copy my entire iPhoto library file (about 15 GB) in a matter of 10 minutes or so. Same with my 10 GB iTunes folder. It comes with some software that allow you to upload to Facebook and whatnot, but I decided I didn't need it and I was able to wipe it all easily (it's downloadable on the Seagate website). You can install some software to read and write to the drive using Windows computers, and it's also easy to format the whole drive using the exFAT file system and easily use it with Windows and Mac interchangeably (as long as you are running Windows Vista SP1 or above and OS X 10.6.5 or above). I am very happy with the purchase overall.