Seagate 160 GB 3.5" USB 2.0 External Hard Drive ( ST3160203U2-RK )

This is the first HD that I bought so I was hesitant to buy this at first. But after using it for a couple of days, I never thought that transferring files to this HD is so easy. And its claim that it performs with whisper-quiet operation is true enough. The look of this thing is also unique, compared to Seagate's other external HDs. And the price is cheaper too. Give this HD a try, you won't regret it!

Back up is drop and drag. I had mine set up and going in about two minutes using XP. Works reliably, if not exactly instantaneously. Would be nice to have an automated back up feature or software, but 160 GB worth of back up at this price would be hard to beat. Besides, your computer might already have something on it, like Nero, that would take care of this anyway. I think it's a winner for people who want the occasional, super-easy back up of files. Looks good on the desk, too. Makes large back ups affordable and therefore doable.

I bought this external hard drive at Best Buy on sale for only $89.99 (regular price is the same as on Amazon). It seemed like an excellent price for the amount of available disk space, but I first checked reviews to make sure it wasn't some "cheapo" product.

When I lifted it out of the box, I noted its sturdy construction and compact design. Nothing eye-catching, but small and neat. I've also heard of certain other hard drives that tend to heat up after an amount of time: I forgot to turn mine off for a few hours, but when I touched it, it was barely lukewarm. From underneath my desk, I can't hear any audible sounds even when it's copying data. It really is "whisper-quiet."

It doesn't come with any installation CD's. If you have Windows XP, 2000, or ME, you don't even need to download any drivers. Just plug it in and it's ready to use! The disk was nicely packaged with a power supply and USB 2.0 cable.

This component does exactly what it says it will do. It writes at a pretty good speed, and drag'n'drop is super-easy in both directions. Even though Seagate doesn't claim it (at least I haven't found any text), it has a plug'n'play feature which I've been able to play music directly from the drive. Easy to use and highly recommended!

Nice,quiet and reliable drive.I don't care if it's only 2mb cache,what im looking for is long term reliability.This drive got the best reviews out of all of them out there,so i went for it and im glad i did.

This drive is whisper quiet, easy to install and use, and in my experience, plenty fast. I recently encoded my CD collection in flac format and am using this drive to store files. I also used foobar2000/LAME to convert the flac files to MP3, all on this drive. During the process of converting the files, which is pretty IO-intensive, I found the drive to be completely reliable and the speed to be more than adequate.

Up until now my way of backing up my data was to have my newest computer, the one I actually do my work with, networked to an older machine. I would backup my files across the network from the new machine to the old machine.

The problem was that I ended up with a number of old machines that I want to get rid of.

I discovered the world of USB plug 'n play external hard drives and finally settled on Seagate because all the computers I have ever owned had Seagate drives and they've never failed. Not even the two Seagate drives in my 1993 Dell 486 machine. They still work too.

So, I plugged this thing into the wall and into my PC, and I've got 160 Gb of data storage (actually a little less but it's still a lot). I held my breath a few seconds while my PC detected it and assigned it a drive letter, and locked up for about 20 seconds. Then it was fine.

I can't see any difference in speed between copying files to this drive and copying files across my network. It sure is smaller than having an entire computer just to back up files!

However, it is big and heavy enough so that it won't get pulled off the desk and onto the floor just by the weight of the cables attached to it.

It's so quiet I can't even tell that it's there.

And, in case you're wondering, I turned the drive off while my PC was on and I got this nasty message telling me I had unplugged a USB drive unsafely, or something like that. Then the drive letter dissapeared. I turned the drive on again and clicked on "explore" for "my computer". It froze for a few seconds and then the drive letter came back and it worked fine.

I don't recommend that. It's a better idea to turn off your machine and then turn off the drive. Then turn on the drive before you turn on your computer so the drive is up and running when your machine boots up.

So far so good. If this thing has a problem I'll update the review.

I was thrilled when I received this item and started using it immediately. It seems nice and reliable (I think), BUT it is so slow it's not funny. This is the first time in my life that I give a review and I am even late for work but I got to say it. This thing is just sloooow. It takes forever to transfer data. I have to transfer 8g at it will probably take 9 hours. Now I leave it overnight and hope that is finished in the morning. Maybe it is this item only. I know my PC is fine. Just be careful.

After buying a new Dell XPS system, I first intended to remove a Maxtor 200 gb drive from my old system and put it in the new computer. Uh uh... the new computer uses the serial ATA (SATA) cables and connectors whereas the old drive is standard ATA. No way Jose. So... I decided to add an external drive instead of going through the hassle of putting a SATA drive in. The Seagate 160 GB unit works perfectly. Setup is actually faster than opening the box. Plug the power connector into your surge protector, connect the USB 2.0 cable and it pops up on "My Computer" faster than you can get there. From that point, it is a simple "drag and drop" operation to backup your files. It is quiet, cool and small on my desk. Couldn't ask for much more at a little over $100 bucks.
I'm not gonna give it a licking, so I hope it keeps on ticking.

I just bought this because my hard drive is almost fried .. and was totally worried about it...
VERY easy to install, very QUIET when backing up and doesn't take up much space..recommended for the non-gaming, easy user like me

I thought that 40 gb would be sufficient since I don't download huge files. But I did want to remove personal info files from my pc which is connected by a dsl line for security reasons. I found the price to be reasonable and took a chance. This drive is easy to use and I've been using it to transfer files from 2 older pcs. I haven't used other external drives but I have no complaints about its performance.

I started out last year with my first external hardrive, a Seagate 160GB. I store a lot of music in wave format and also movies, so I needed an additional external hard drive. Simpletech was on sale and a lot cheaper at the time than Seagate...so I bought it. What a HUGE mistake. After having loaded a lot onto it, the entire hard drive fried. Plus, when it did work, it made a lot of annoying mechanical noises not present in the Seagate at all. Seagate is truly the way to go. External vents for breathing and cooling of the unit. Plus it's quiet as a mouse. I keep the seagate on all the time for the past year and a half and I've not had a single problem with it. Though you may find a good deal on a hard drive from a different company, why chance losing all of your valuable information.

Once out of the package, was installed in about 90 seconds with no issues on my old Windows XP machine.

My first task was moving 6GB of video files onto the new drive. Transfer took less than 6 minutes (over 1GB / minute). I was able to play / navigate high quality video files directly from the external drive without any noticeable frame drop or seek lag. Basically could not tell the difference between this drive and my internal system drive! The small cashe size does not seem to hamper any of these tasks.

NOTE: I have not attempted to record video directly onto the drive, but given the performance I have seen it would probably be OK.....although it probably would be best to always record to the internal drive and use the external as overflow space.


Pro:
-Easy set-up
-Almost totally silent
-Much faster performance than expected
-Runs cool (unlike many other portable drives)
-Inexpensive (paid $99 locally)

Con:
-Heavy / unstylish paperweight (do you care?)


Benefits:
-Now have enough room to defragment my existing system drive again!
-Extends the life of old machine
-Will make data migration to future machine much easier
-Can now gather more video files before being forced to edit, burn DVD, and dispose of the source files.

This is a great little piece of hardware.

I bought it for my MP3's and movies, and I'm very pleased. It's totally "plug-n-play"; there aren't even any drivers that need updating, assuming you have XP up to par.

It gives 160GB (well, 149 in actuality) of space to work with. After moving nearly 50 gigs over to it at once, on the first day, it froze up. After that minor incident, I've had no problems, though, and my machine runs alot faster because of it. With my 100G of music already on it, I'm very happy with it. It has given me no fuss--it doesn't even give me any noise! It's as silent as a fart, and that's a big plus.

I found mine at Wal-Mart for $114 and I think that I made a good purchase. If you're on a budget, this is about as good as it gets. Seagate's 300GB is also highly recommended, as I've worked with it before. A+!

I bought this drive to back-up my desktop and laptop PCs. USB connection was a snap and moving files onto it didn't take too long at all. That's includes about 50GB of video media files!

As for daily wear, I have no answer as it is back in its box until next month's back-up.

This driver is excellent! Definitely a plug and play solution, didn't/doesn't/hasn't crashed windows and when my system shut down due to power failure, the driver picked up where it left of with my transfer, not losing any data. I would purcase another and would also recommend it to friends and colleagues.

Before i bought this product, i was contemplating which brand name hard drive i should go with. I was told Seagate was top of the line. It truly is. No problems at all, easy to setup and use, and a fair price. I highly recommend Seagate over any other brand name (I've heard problems with other brands)

I've always been a Seagate fan, so we bought this for our office backup. Do not do as we did and rely on it as your only backup. Despite excellent care and almost never being moved, ours crashed after 2 years. It would cost at least $100.00 to recover the data. We're not only not buying another one, we're never buying another Seagate anything.

I am satisfied with this Hard Drive. XP recognized it right away, and it is very quiet. Highly recommended. My only gripe, and
I understand the Fat32 format is common on USB Drives, but why cannot they be formatted in NTFS? I was told by Seagate of a way to do this however, when I tried their method, a window appeared to the effect that if I continued the Drive could be become unuseable.

Brand new dell and brand new external drive. The CMS Bounceback software will not work with it. When it tries to find the backup device I get the Blue screen of death and then crash. I finally found that Stomp makes a backup software similar to Nova Backup and that worked finally. The drive actually comes with NO SEATOOLS OR BACKUP SOFTWARE. I was not impressed. This may be because this drive has a lower price/performance than some of their other drives. My advice, step up to the 1 touch USB2.0/Firewire drive. I have one that works flawlessly. Or even better put one of Seagates internal drives in a Vantec Enclosure. I have had the best luck with that option.

It's amazing, just plug and play and you will have a very quiet and reliable device to store and backup all your files. I'm using it at home with Windows XP Home Edition SP2. You don't need any additional software nor drivers.

the drive works just fine. hard to go wrong with Seagate.

Great drive. I like the smaller size. Seagate always offers the most innovative product features because they spend more on R&D than any competitor. Best construction of all I've used. Interface software is transparent.

It took literally about a minute to set up with XP Home.

The drive comes formatted with the FAT32 file system; you'll need to format or convert it to NTFS. (You can use it with FAT32, but the filesize is limited to 4GB.)

Someone posted instructions on converting to NTFS, but I got an error message when I attempted it. However, Microsoft recommends formatting a drive if the drive doesn't have data you need to preserve. Just right click on the drive icon in My Computer and click on "Format." I kept the default options, which included NTFS, and everything works fine.

Now I've got my documents and email all backed up, so I know that a hard disk crash will be an inconvenience rather than a disaster. Overnight I'll do a full-system backup.

I backed up 18 GB direct to the external drive in less than a half hour. After reading that someone was having issues with transfer speed, I copied a 900 MB folder to the drive; it took less than a minute.

What a great deal, $69.00 when I bought it.

It comes set-up for FAT32. Hop on over to Seagate's Knowledge Base, Type in Format after you fill in the basic info and it sends you to an article that tells you how to set-up the drive for NTFS. A minute or so later and you are done, all without reformatting.

Here is the info to save you looking. Goto RUN, type in "convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs". No quotes. All done.

So this model is not the latest case design, it sits behind my laptop, so I cannot see it anyway.

All my RAW files and .jpgs are moved over and I am flush with drive space.

I had no problems. I was attracted to the great deal this prodct offered and thought I might have to sacrifice something in the process but I really didn't. It works great!

I purchased this Seagate hard drive and have been extremely pleased with it. It is indeed virtually silent and blazingly fast. It backed up 18 GB in 12 minutes for me. It also was recognized in about 1 second by my computer after I connected to the USB port, so there is no down time when using it.

It is true that it comes with no software, which is puzzling and a little annoying. However, there is an easy resolution. Go to Seagate's web site and download their free, excellent DiscWizard software. You'll need a broadband connection to do it because the file is 100 MB, but the software is extremely easy to use and enables you to backup software more easily than drag and drop, especially if you wish to back up your whole computer. You can also use the software for other functions, like creating a second disk drive. The software was extremely easy to install and to use once downloaded, although there is one trick: the software requires at least one Seagate hard drive present on your computer before downloading or before working once downloaded. But as long as the external Seagate hard drive is hooked into the USB port you'll have no problem.

I hope this helps! It's a cheap but excellent product.

The desciption of this item is misleading. Is it ST3160812U2-RK or ST3160203U2-RK that is being sold? The title says ST3160203U2-RK but the product details says ST3160812U2-RK !

I had no problems. I was attracted to the great deal this prodct offered and thought I might have to sacrifice something in the process but I really didn't. It works great!

I purchased this Seagate hard drive and have been extremely pleased with it. It is indeed virtually silent and blazingly fast. It backed up 18 GB in 12 minutes for me. It also was recognized in about 1 second by my computer after I connected to the USB port, so there is no down time when using it.

It is true that it comes with no software, which is puzzling and a little annoying. However, there is an easy resolution. Go to Seagate's web site and download their free, excellent DiscWizard software. You'll need a broadband connection to do it because the file is 100 MB, but the software is extremely easy to use and enables you to backup software more easily than drag and drop, especially if you wish to back up your whole computer. You can also use the software for other functions, like creating a second disk drive. The software was extremely easy to install and to use once downloaded, although there is one trick: the software requires at least one Seagate hard drive present on your computer before downloading or before working once downloaded. But as long as the external Seagate hard drive is hooked into the USB port you'll have no problem.

I hope this helps! It's a cheap but excellent product.

The desciption of this item is misleading. Is it ST3160812U2-RK or ST3160203U2-RK that is being sold? The title says ST3160203U2-RK but the product details says ST3160812U2-RK !

It took literally about a minute to set up with XP Home.

The drive comes formatted with the FAT32 file system; you'll need to format or convert it to NTFS. (You can use it with FAT32, but the filesize is limited to 4GB.)

Someone posted instructions on converting to NTFS, but I got an error message when I attempted it. However, Microsoft recommends formatting a drive if the drive doesn't have data you need to preserve. Just right click on the drive icon in My Computer and click on "Format." I kept the default options, which included NTFS, and everything works fine.

Now I've got my documents and email all backed up, so I know that a hard disk crash will be an inconvenience rather than a disaster. Overnight I'll do a full-system backup.

I backed up 18 GB direct to the external drive in less than a half hour. After reading that someone was having issues with transfer speed, I copied a 900 MB folder to the drive; it took less than a minute.

What a great deal, $69.00 when I bought it.

It comes set-up for FAT32. Hop on over to Seagate's Knowledge Base, Type in Format after you fill in the basic info and it sends you to an article that tells you how to set-up the drive for NTFS. A minute or so later and you are done, all without reformatting.

Here is the info to save you looking. Goto RUN, type in "convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs". No quotes. All done.

So this model is not the latest case design, it sits behind my laptop, so I cannot see it anyway.

All my RAW files and .jpgs are moved over and I am flush with drive space.

Before i bought this product, i was contemplating which brand name hard drive i should go with. I was told Seagate was top of the line. It truly is. No problems at all, easy to setup and use, and a fair price. I highly recommend Seagate over any other brand name (I've heard problems with other brands)

I've always been a Seagate fan, so we bought this for our office backup. Do not do as we did and rely on it as your only backup. Despite excellent care and almost never being moved, ours crashed after 2 years. It would cost at least $100.00 to recover the data. We're not only not buying another one, we're never buying another Seagate anything.

I am satisfied with this Hard Drive. XP recognized it right away, and it is very quiet. Highly recommended. My only gripe, and
I understand the Fat32 format is common on USB Drives, but why cannot they be formatted in NTFS? I was told by Seagate of a way to do this however, when I tried their method, a window appeared to the effect that if I continued the Drive could be become unuseable.

I bought this drive to back-up my desktop and laptop PCs. USB connection was a snap and moving files onto it didn't take too long at all. That's includes about 50GB of video media files!

As for daily wear, I have no answer as it is back in its box until next month's back-up.

This is a great little piece of hardware.

I bought it for my MP3's and movies, and I'm very pleased. It's totally "plug-n-play"; there aren't even any drivers that need updating, assuming you have XP up to par.

It gives 160GB (well, 149 in actuality) of space to work with. After moving nearly 50 gigs over to it at once, on the first day, it froze up. After that minor incident, I've had no problems, though, and my machine runs alot faster because of it. With my 100G of music already on it, I'm very happy with it. It has given me no fuss--it doesn't even give me any noise! It's as silent as a fart, and that's a big plus.

I found mine at Wal-Mart for $114 and I think that I made a good purchase. If you're on a budget, this is about as good as it gets. Seagate's 300GB is also highly recommended, as I've worked with it before. A+!

Once out of the package, was installed in about 90 seconds with no issues on my old Windows XP machine.

My first task was moving 6GB of video files onto the new drive. Transfer took less than 6 minutes (over 1GB / minute). I was able to play / navigate high quality video files directly from the external drive without any noticeable frame drop or seek lag. Basically could not tell the difference between this drive and my internal system drive! The small cashe size does not seem to hamper any of these tasks.

NOTE: I have not attempted to record video directly onto the drive, but given the performance I have seen it would probably be OK.....although it probably would be best to always record to the internal drive and use the external as overflow space.


Pro:
-Easy set-up
-Almost totally silent
-Much faster performance than expected
-Runs cool (unlike many other portable drives)
-Inexpensive (paid $99 locally)

Con:
-Heavy / unstylish paperweight (do you care?)


Benefits:
-Now have enough room to defragment my existing system drive again!
-Extends the life of old machine
-Will make data migration to future machine much easier
-Can now gather more video files before being forced to edit, burn DVD, and dispose of the source files.

Nice,quiet and reliable drive.I don't care if it's only 2mb cache,what im looking for is long term reliability.This drive got the best reviews out of all of them out there,so i went for it and im glad i did.

This drive is whisper quiet, easy to install and use, and in my experience, plenty fast. I recently encoded my CD collection in flac format and am using this drive to store files. I also used foobar2000/LAME to convert the flac files to MP3, all on this drive. During the process of converting the files, which is pretty IO-intensive, I found the drive to be completely reliable and the speed to be more than adequate.

Up until now my way of backing up my data was to have my newest computer, the one I actually do my work with, networked to an older machine. I would backup my files across the network from the new machine to the old machine.

The problem was that I ended up with a number of old machines that I want to get rid of.

I discovered the world of USB plug 'n play external hard drives and finally settled on Seagate because all the computers I have ever owned had Seagate drives and they've never failed. Not even the two Seagate drives in my 1993 Dell 486 machine. They still work too.

So, I plugged this thing into the wall and into my PC, and I've got 160 Gb of data storage (actually a little less but it's still a lot). I held my breath a few seconds while my PC detected it and assigned it a drive letter, and locked up for about 20 seconds. Then it was fine.

I can't see any difference in speed between copying files to this drive and copying files across my network. It sure is smaller than having an entire computer just to back up files!

However, it is big and heavy enough so that it won't get pulled off the desk and onto the floor just by the weight of the cables attached to it.

It's so quiet I can't even tell that it's there.

And, in case you're wondering, I turned the drive off while my PC was on and I got this nasty message telling me I had unplugged a USB drive unsafely, or something like that. Then the drive letter dissapeared. I turned the drive on again and clicked on "explore" for "my computer". It froze for a few seconds and then the drive letter came back and it worked fine.

I don't recommend that. It's a better idea to turn off your machine and then turn off the drive. Then turn on the drive before you turn on your computer so the drive is up and running when your machine boots up.

So far so good. If this thing has a problem I'll update the review.

I was thrilled when I received this item and started using it immediately. It seems nice and reliable (I think), BUT it is so slow it's not funny. This is the first time in my life that I give a review and I am even late for work but I got to say it. This thing is just sloooow. It takes forever to transfer data. I have to transfer 8g at it will probably take 9 hours. Now I leave it overnight and hope that is finished in the morning. Maybe it is this item only. I know my PC is fine. Just be careful.

After buying a new Dell XPS system, I first intended to remove a Maxtor 200 gb drive from my old system and put it in the new computer. Uh uh... the new computer uses the serial ATA (SATA) cables and connectors whereas the old drive is standard ATA. No way Jose. So... I decided to add an external drive instead of going through the hassle of putting a SATA drive in. The Seagate 160 GB unit works perfectly. Setup is actually faster than opening the box. Plug the power connector into your surge protector, connect the USB 2.0 cable and it pops up on "My Computer" faster than you can get there. From that point, it is a simple "drag and drop" operation to backup your files. It is quiet, cool and small on my desk. Couldn't ask for much more at a little over $100 bucks.
I'm not gonna give it a licking, so I hope it keeps on ticking.

I just bought this because my hard drive is almost fried .. and was totally worried about it...
VERY easy to install, very QUIET when backing up and doesn't take up much space..recommended for the non-gaming, easy user like me

I thought that 40 gb would be sufficient since I don't download huge files. But I did want to remove personal info files from my pc which is connected by a dsl line for security reasons. I found the price to be reasonable and took a chance. This drive is easy to use and I've been using it to transfer files from 2 older pcs. I haven't used other external drives but I have no complaints about its performance.

I started out last year with my first external hardrive, a Seagate 160GB. I store a lot of music in wave format and also movies, so I needed an additional external hard drive. Simpletech was on sale and a lot cheaper at the time than Seagate...so I bought it. What a HUGE mistake. After having loaded a lot onto it, the entire hard drive fried. Plus, when it did work, it made a lot of annoying mechanical noises not present in the Seagate at all. Seagate is truly the way to go. External vents for breathing and cooling of the unit. Plus it's quiet as a mouse. I keep the seagate on all the time for the past year and a half and I've not had a single problem with it. Though you may find a good deal on a hard drive from a different company, why chance losing all of your valuable information.

I bought this external hard drive at Best Buy on sale for only $89.99 (regular price is the same as on Amazon). It seemed like an excellent price for the amount of available disk space, but I first checked reviews to make sure it wasn't some "cheapo" product.

When I lifted it out of the box, I noted its sturdy construction and compact design. Nothing eye-catching, but small and neat. I've also heard of certain other hard drives that tend to heat up after an amount of time: I forgot to turn mine off for a few hours, but when I touched it, it was barely lukewarm. From underneath my desk, I can't hear any audible sounds even when it's copying data. It really is "whisper-quiet."

It doesn't come with any installation CD's. If you have Windows XP, 2000, or ME, you don't even need to download any drivers. Just plug it in and it's ready to use! The disk was nicely packaged with a power supply and USB 2.0 cable.

This component does exactly what it says it will do. It writes at a pretty good speed, and drag'n'drop is super-easy in both directions. Even though Seagate doesn't claim it (at least I haven't found any text), it has a plug'n'play feature which I've been able to play music directly from the drive. Easy to use and highly recommended!

This is the first HD that I bought so I was hesitant to buy this at first. But after using it for a couple of days, I never thought that transferring files to this HD is so easy. And its claim that it performs with whisper-quiet operation is true enough. The look of this thing is also unique, compared to Seagate's other external HDs. And the price is cheaper too. Give this HD a try, you won't regret it!

Back up is drop and drag. I had mine set up and going in about two minutes using XP. Works reliably, if not exactly instantaneously. Would be nice to have an automated back up feature or software, but 160 GB worth of back up at this price would be hard to beat. Besides, your computer might already have something on it, like Nero, that would take care of this anyway. I think it's a winner for people who want the occasional, super-easy back up of files. Looks good on the desk, too. Makes large back ups affordable and therefore doable.