The Seagate Portable 5TB External Hard Drive is an external hard drive that adds 5 terabytes of storage to your laptop or desktop using a free USB-A port. The Seagate Portable uses USB 3.0, which connects to the most common USB ports on computers today. You don’t need a separate adapter, since it draws power from the same cable that connects it to your computer. It won’t fit in your pocket, but it’s still fairly easy to carry as the whole drive is about the size of a paperback book and weighs 9.2 ounces.
The Seagate Portable 5TB External Hard Drive is currently $209 on Amazon, down from its $220 list price for a 5% discount. Also, it costs slightly more than 1TB model.
Affordable external storage for all your important files and documents
The drive’s capacity is 5TB, enough to store an entire home photo library, most home video archives, and a full Steam or console game library at the same time. That’s about 1.25 million photos at 4MB each, 350 hours of 4K video, or over 1,000 hours of 1080p footage. The average PS5 or Xbox Series X ships with roughly 800GB of internal storage, so the drive expands game storage by about six times what the console holds out of the box.
Transfer speed on the mechanical drive inside tops out at 120 MB/s reading and slightly less writing. USB 3.0 supports up to 5 Gbps at the port, or roughly 625 MB/s, well above what the mechanical drive itself outputs. Plugging into an older USB 2.0 port drops the maximum speed to around 60 MB/s, but the drive still works. A 100GB folder of photos or a 30GB game folder moves onto the drive in about 15 to 25 minutes at USB 3.0 speeds.
Setup is essentially plugging the drive in and dragging files onto the new drive icon. Windows and macOS recognize the drive automatically without installing any drivers, and Linux mounts it in the same way. PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X all read from the drive to expand storage for downloaded games or media. A 1-year Rescue Data Recovery Service is also included, which lets you send the drive to Seagate for professional recovery if it fails within the first year.
Seagate’s Portable series is the entry point in the company’s external drive lineup, with capacities from 1TB up to 5TB in the same pocket-sized case. The 5TB shown here is the top of the Portable capacity range before stepping up to the desktop-sized Backup Plus Hub series. At $209, down from $220, the current sale takes $11 off the list price. For a backup drive on a home laptop, a console storage expansion, or a travel archive for photo work, this fits.