I am attaching a collage of 2 photos, where you can see the relative size of the drive. I put a pen into a picture for relative size reference.
In the photos you see this drive laying on its side on top of the netbook computer and fitting into a very small space.
The drive is 5" wide x 7" long x 2" tall.
There is no on/off switch on the drive. If for some reason you need to reboot it, you have to pull the plug. Since I have crammed into a tight place, I had to place the side the unit to the front so I can easily reach the USB plug (which are now facing to the left side) (see photo #1 left side). The drawback of this, that the green light that tells me that the unit is on is now facing the right side inside of the shelve and not visible from the front (see photo #2).
The drive has a fairly large brick, and had to be placed on the edge of the power strip otherwise it would have covered two outlets.
I use this drive as an additional drive for home-build DVR. My DVR is a netbook computer running Linux. In addition to using this drive as a DVR, I also use it for redundant back of some critical files. The netbook has a relatively small size internal drive and this external drive nicely supplements my storage needs. This Seagate drive came formated with NTFS format which is a format used by the Windows file system. This format is also supported by Linux so I could have used it as is. However NTFS file system by its nature causes disk fragmentation when you delete and add large files and since in my use of this drive as a DVR I will be constantly adding and deleting large file I reformatted the drive as a Linux ext4, a file system that does not cause fragmentation when you delete and add large files. The reformat took a fairly long time (several hours) but was successful.
Before reformatting the drive I ran bad disk test on the drive and it showed no bad disks.
The netbook computer does not support USB 3, so even though this drive is capable USB 3 I am using USB 2 connection. However, USB 2 is sufficient for recording and playing the video content. I tested the drive's USB 3 connection with my main computer, and it worked well.
I use rsync Linux command to do backups. I use HDHomerun network card and its commands via Linux scripts to schedule recordings and write to the disk. I use a media player to play the recordings. I don't use any of the Seagate software that came with the drive.
Despite the minor annoyances mentioned above, I am pleased with the drive and recommend it.
You can find it on Amazon by following this link.
Ali Julia review ★★★★★
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