Newegg Techmas day 3 sale... Seagate 3TB/5TB portable external HDD $76.99 AP/$109.99

[VirtualLarry]

https://www.newegg.com/12-Days-of-M...rchInDesc=Seagate&PageSize=36&order=BESTMATCH

Picked up a few of these. Not really sure how good a deal this is, haven't been folowing portable externals for a while. The fact that they have a 5TB is fairly new to me.

 

[mdram]

5tb is same price on amazon

 

[VirtualLarry]

So, not really a sale price?

 

[NeonFlak]

At work we have not had good luck with any of the Seagate portable's that are 2.5in/don't require external power. They have really inconsistent performance among the same product lines and even on the same device. The Hub is a good product, but you need to know upfront that you are getting an archive drive. So be ready for the odd performance that comes with an archive drive. Even at its slowest though, its faster than the Seagate 2.5in portables in our experience.

 

[VirtualLarry]

So should I have gone with Toshiba or HGST (not sure if the latter still makes "Portable External" HDDs under that name)?

I've had good luck with both, and some older Seagate drives.

Are the new Seagate 5TB 2.5" HDDs, all SMR or tiered-storage?

They would be primarily for backups, but I want the ability to copy a continuous TB or more string of files to it, without transfer rates bottoming out. (NAS backup.)