500 GB Seagate Expansion™ Portable Drive, P/N 9SD2A4-500. This is the external drive I purchased the other day for my dad’s computer – a good choice from a capacity/cost/brand perspective.

I have been a fan of Seagate hard disks ever since I got my second MacBook with a Seagate drive and the performance improvement was easily noticeable compared to my 1-year old Fujitsu. Seagate hdds have proved more reliable in a home-made server environment so I kind-of got the hang to purchase these drives.

But what I was worried in the shop was real-world performance. Every shop assistant could only point out that the maximum speed of the drive is 480 Mbps – which is the theoretical maximum for a USB 2.0 connection – that was not helpful at all and got me convinced to purchase it from some other store.

After returning home, it was the time to start a test, and I must say that the drive has performed up to my expectations for a 2010 portable drive model. It has managed a sustained rate of 35 MB/s with a peak of 37MB/s, which is pretty decent.

NTFS transfer speeds where actually higher that copying files to this drive on FAT mode (35 vs 31 MB/s sustained rate), so I definitely recommend that you keep this drive formatted as NTFS and use it like that – even on a Mac.