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

Pros: Large capacity; light weight; USB-powered so, no external power brick! Cons: None Bottom-Line: The Seagate Expansion 750GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive represents a (very) viable alternative to yet another USB flash drive for me. The Seagate Expansion 750GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive is an extremely light weight, well-ventilated, whisper quite 5400 RPM portable drive featuring 8MB of cache, and USB 2.0 connectivity. Seagate placed the small drive inside a black enclosure designed to absorb shocks. Seagate offers drives of this type (5400 RPM) from 250GB - 1TB. Installation The Seagate Expansion 750GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive is truly plug-n-play, and truly portable. There is no external power supply (Yeah!); power is supplied by the host computers USB port. Seagate provides a (very short) USB cable connector. Once plugged into my laptop, or desktop, the Seagate Expansion 750GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive powered up; Windows 7 recognized the drive, and assigned it a drive letter. The Seagate Expansion 750GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive ships pre-formatted, so once it is plugged in and recognized, it is ready to use. Note: the drive has no power switch. But the drive is so quiet that the only indication the drive is on is the yellow LED on the top of the unit. Even when files are being transferred there is no discernable noise emanating from the enclosure; there is only a slight vibration; the drive sat meekly on my desk to did it job in silent efficiency. As I stated above, the Seagate Expansion 750GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive ships with Seagate's backup software, which I promptly deleted by reformatting the drive. In any event the more useful portion of the back-up software is only a trial version, so what the point? Seagate claims a rather extraordinary 5,000 G non-operating shock resistance, whereas most vendors quote 1,000 G, but I have to admit that I am a little skittish about the lack of some sort of case to put the drive in for transport. But I suppose if Seagate didn't feel the need to provide one, or even recommend same, I have little to worry about; and there is the 5000 G to consider. To test the transfer rate of the Seagate Expansion 750GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive I copied some 6GB of music files from my laptop (Dell Studio 17 with 4.0GB of RAM; 7200 RPM 500GB hard drive; Windows 7 Home Premium) via a USB 2.0 port in about six minutes; roughly 1GB a minute. Of course I was surfing the Internet and I had Outlook open at the same time, so that may or may not have affected the copy process. Your transfer rate will vary of course. My Thoughts The Seagate Expansion 750GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive represents a (very) viable alternative to yet another USB flash drive for me. At under under $75.99 and with 698GB of usable space, the drive is a very cost effective way to add a substantial amount of portable hard drive space in a very light weight package and a universally acceptable interface. And it's a Seagate, a name associated with quality and reliability.

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.