Seagate Expansion Portable Hard Drive 2.5" STEA2000400 2 TB

On style

One of the most popular external hard drive options available is the Seagate Expansion Portable, which is in its second or third youth. Initially, the drive was sold in an ordinary inconspicuous glossy box, but after the boom in "designer" drives, the guys from Seagate decided to modernize the Expansion Portable, squeezing this hard drive into a fashionable case with a fractal coating. It seems to be nothing special, but it turned out really cool. Especially in reality, not in photographs.

Seagate Dashboard

In terms of speed, this is a quite standard “outsider”, which at its peak gives out a little more than 100 MB / s when reading and writing and sags during linear operations with large files. Of the unusual features, a feature that catches the eye automatically stops the spindle when idle, which can extend the life of the HDD. By default, it is disabled, but it is enabled in the proprietary Seagate Dashboard application. In general, this is an extremely useful set of utilities that allow not only to monitor the “health” of a disk or schedule backups, but also, for example, tie a disk to Seagate cloud storage and store backup system restore points or some other important data that needs to be duplicated once again . Seagate Dashboard also has a mobile application that can back up system data from smartphones and tablets.

Careful with SMR

The only thing you should pay attention to when buying is the model of the HDD itself, which is hidden in the case. The fact is that in very recent 2020 models, Seagate began to use hard drives with a “tiled” SMR record, so it’s better to turn to the all-knowing Google before buying. If you do not plan to build a RAID array, then there is nothing terrible about SMR. However, experts recommend looking for ordinary HDDs, since it is still not clear how durable hard drives with “tiled” recording are if they are used to their fullest, transferring hundreds of gigabytes of data to and from the disk every day.