This is a very capacious and fast external hard drive for Mac users. It’s by far the most impressive external hard drive that I’ve ever used. The speed, however, doesn’t come cheap – the Thunderbolt capable hard drive is almost 2.5 times more expensive than the comparable USB 3 drive.

This hard drive was easy to setup, and it worked right out of the box with Mac’s time machine. I have not tried Seagate’s own software, as I am usually not a big fan of such software solutions form the hard drive manufacturers.

The hard drive was indeed really fast. I could not discern any noticeable difference between working with the programs and the files stored on this drive as opposed to the ones stored on my local hard drive. I think this is probably the biggest advantage of the Thunderbolt external hard drives – they easily add external storage without compromising on the speed and accessibility that are usually the bane of such data storage solutions.

I don’t have a very large hard drive (256 GB) and don’t use much of it anyway, so the speed of the backup was never that much of an issue for me. However, it’s good to know that when I upgrade to a larger drive I’ll have plenty of backup space and that a backup can be accomplished relatively quickly.

Conclusion.

If you work with large files all the time (pictures, audio, video) and need all the speed and storage that you can get for them, or have a large internal drive that needs to be backed up often, then this Seagate Thunderbolt drive is ideal for you and worth the price. Otherwise, you will do just fine with the USB 3 or Firewire 800 enabled drive for a substantially lower price.