Pros: compact, works, inexpensive especially if on sale, convenient that power brick is needed only when additional power is required

Cons: some throughput hit (about 13% on a 2.5" external USB3 drive), others have noted fragility of case

Pros: I've been using this as a backup drive for the past 6 months and its SMART attributes are still perfect (even after having been jostled by a cat while running) save for two high-fly writes that occurred very early (Seagate-designed drives always have strange values for raw read errors and seek errors: only the high bits of the value indicate errors, the lower ones are just operation counts).

I've copied about 1 TB of data (much of it multiple times) to the drive across most of its surface given my partition layout. Transfer speeds as measured by HDTach are outstanding, varying from 200 MB/sec on the outer tracks to 100 MB/sec on the inner tracks on average (though the speed graph is very jagged, +/- 10% across the range); random accesses average 14.3 ms.

Cons: In its Backup Plus enclosure it runs a bit warm for my taste (about 10C warmer than my Samsung HD204UIs in passively-cooled unvented enclosures, though to be fair they're 5400 rpm drives rather than 7200): 44C with the USB base connected, 38C - 42C with the base off, both @ 20C ambient and with the drive vertical (I suspect temps would be higher if it were horizontal, given the vent locations). On the other hand, some studies suggest that this may be within the ideal temperature range (mid-30s to mid-40s) for longest life, so I won't deduct any eggs for that.

Other Thoughts: As I noted I bought it in a Backup Plus package, but normally run it as an eSATA drive (I Dremeled down SATA power and data connectors to fit when its base is removed. Strangely, it comes with a 2-year (vs. 1-year) warranty in this configuration.

I've been leery of Seagate drives for the past few years due to deteriorating customer feedback, but the Black Friday price on this (elsewhere) was just too good to pass up and I"m glad I gave Seagate a chance again (though I'm still not comfortable with the feedback I see here).