Conclusion

That said, all in all, I'm happy with the drive, as a drive. Having the cloud service would have been a nice bonus, but certainly not a necessity. There are plenty of options out there at better price points. Really, my major beef is the drive is designed to stand upright and has no base included to balance it. Because of this, I accidentally knocked it over 3 times. Large shocks and non solid state hard drives do not mix well. You can overcome this easily enough by turning the device to its side, but with no rubber feet the unit will tend to slide. I fixed this as I do most things - with duct tape.

One other drawback of note -- You will not be able to use Microsoft Backup to write and image to this drive. Trying to do so will produce I/o Error 0x8007045D. This is because of the way the blocks are addressed in drives of 2.5 TB or greater. This is actually more of a Microsoft issue than drive issue.

If collecting drive images is something you want to do you will need to grab Seagate Disc Wizard . This is a free custom version the Acronis True Image program which retails for around $50.00 and, frankly, is better than the Microsoft counterpart. The only downside is you can't schedule images with the free version, for that you'll need to buy the full version. Personally, I'm good with a calendar reminder.

So there you have it. Pros: Fast, giant capacity, Free True Image and simple. Cons: Cloud component sucks, not very portable and needs duct tape.

Hope that helps.