Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have been happy with my 3TB GoFlex drive for keeping my active iTunes Library and other multimedia files. I was backing it up onto a 2TB GoFlex to store off-site where it would be safe, until 2TB was too small to hold everything. For a while I split the backup across a pair of 2TB drives, but wanted to give one of the 2TB to my daughter for college. I have a multitude of portable Seagate GoFlex drives as well, and none have failed me yet. So I bought the new 3TB Backup Plus so I could simply clone the 3TB iTunes drive in one step. I used the Mac OSX Lion Disk Utility to re-partition the Drive as "HFS+ Journaled", instead of the NTFS that it came formatted with. Then I did a test and copied a 16GB folder to it and it was pretty speedy (under 10 minutes on an old iMac). But this time I installed the Seagate software for the extra features, which I never did before with my other Seagate drives. BAD IDEA. I couldn't clone my first drive without the receiving drive switching to READ ONLY after between 2-16 GB transferred. Sometimes the drive would just stop responding. I did a search and found that this is a universal problem with people all over - the drives work great on Mac unless you install the Seagate Dashboard software. I found instructions to manually remove the software, and every thing is fine now. On a faster Macbook Pro with Caldigit USB 3.0 Express Card from Amazon (1/3 - 1/2 the speed of Native USB 3.0) I was able to see speeds over 180 GB/hour copying files from another Seagate drive on the FW800 port, and approximately 270 GB/Hr from the internal drive. In Summary - This is a great drive but I MUST WARN MAC USERS TO AVOID THE SEAGATE SOFTWARE FOR NOW, unless you think you are experienced enough to trouble shoot issues afterwards. If the Software hadn't bungled things up this would be rated a 5. If I hadn't figured out the software issue it would have been a 1.