Seagate Expansion Portable 4TB USB 3.0 STEA4000400 Review

Key Features

• SuperSpeed USB 3.0
• Backward compatibility with USB 2.0
• USB powered

Introduction

Seagate Expansion Portable 4tb USB 3.0 STEA4000400 is a very portable very affordable external hard disk drive is comes highly recommended for those of you who need extra storage space on the go. It is a typical external hard disk drive, so to say. It is small enough, measuring 4.8 by 3.2 by 0.6 (inches). It is small enough to be easily tucked into your back pocket; much like your phone. It is sold in a Spartan retail package that contains the actual drive and a USB 3.0 cable that is about a foot long. It is a bus powered drive and hence requires just this single cable to transmit both power and data. This 4 TB version not only offers the immense storage space, but also fast performance. Its design also makes it a perfect fit for non-computer, for instance game consoles or media players. The drive also has lower space siblings, namely the 500GB, 1TB and 2 TB versions. Slow rotations in internal storage often translate to slower performance; but not in this case. Seagate Expansion Portable 4tb USB 3.0 STEA4000400 internal storage utilizes a lowly 5400 rotations/ minute, as opposed to the popular 7200 rotations per minute. It therefore ends up using less power but surprisingly keeps good performance statistics. While using a USB 3.0 cable, it registers a speed of around 120MBps and 130MBps for write and read respectively. When using a USB 2.0 cable, the speed (for read and write) hunts around 30MBps, which is standard for this kind of cable. Faster drives have performance enhancing features such as RAID-0 which are unfortunately missing in this drive. Overall, the performance of Seagate Expansion Portable 4tb USB 3.0 STEA4000400 is as good as this kind of drive can offer.

Does it connect to ps3?

This external hard disk drive is originally preformatted in NTFS file system. To get it to be compatible to game consoles, you must reformat it to the relevant file systems, which is a quick process. Once that is one, you will be able to quickly and efficiently save apps and games.

Does it work on a Mac?

As I said, the Seagate Expansion Portable 4tb USB 3.0 STEA4000400 comes preformatted in NTFS which is not naturally compatible with Mac. It can however be easily reformatted within a few seconds into HFS+ so that it can work on your Mac. It saves you the cost of having to buy a more expensive Mac-designated drive. For those of you who want to use it for windows and Mac interchangeably, you can format it to the exFAT file system.

can it be connected to TV?

It does connect to smart TVs and lets you enjoy your saved images and videos. It however subject too USB compatibility and audio and video formats supported by your TV as well as capacity limitations.

Conclusion: Should I buy it ?

This is a low power consumption yet surprisingly fast drive that offers amazing storage space. So yes, it comes highly recommended.