Seagate

Seagate

You might find the Seagate brand on both internal and external hard drives. Since there are so many options available to computer users, you'll want to match the right kind of hard drive with your specific use case. This shouldn't be too difficult, since desktop hard drive solutions are offered in a wide variety of form factors and capacities.

If you want a drive to backup saved game files or play media on your console, then you'll need a portable hard drive that supports the FAT32 file system. Fortunately, all Seagate external hard drives that feature two terabytes or less of storage space support this file system. You can also use portable hard drive units that have more than this amount if they come with a 4kn label, as these external hard drives will also accept FAT32 data structures. Once you have your hard drive configured, you'll be able to use it with any storage device that has USB ports. This gives you the option of moving backup files between a game console and other devices with your hard drive.

Seagate provides backup data integrity protection on portable drives in two ways. You can use the external USB interface to measure SMART data with any USB drive utility. Those with Windows or Linux PCs can also run a consistency check on their portable drive over the external USB adapter. Bad block detection is built into the firmware on all portable Seagate USB drives. You could also reformat NTFS external hard drives with HFS+ or APFS data structures to use them on a Mac.

All of these backup storage drives support reformatting. You can therefore use external hard drives originally given a Mac OS X Extended file system with PCs. Those who want to move backup copies of data from mobile devices with USB ports might also want to reformat their external hard drives to match the data structures their mobile devices prefer. Seagate external hard drives also support this kind of usage, which allows you to transfer data through a hard drive without use of a network.

External USB as well as internal hard drives that feature two terabytes or less of storage capacity can support any of the following schemes provided they're connected to a desktop machine that can work with them:

• Master Boot Record
• GPT
• SGI
• Sun
• Apple Parition Map

Each Seagate hard drive comes with a rated capacity, which your machine will be able to access in full. Since hardware numbers are measured in metric while many types of software use customary units, you might notice a difference between the label on your drive and what your machine tells you about your drive. You're still getting the full storage amount even if software numbers look a little lower than the figures printed on your hard drive.