Looking at buying a seagate 4TB Ext HDD

[TheGeneralLee86]

I wanna know if there is any differences between one i am looking at on the Apple store and Amazon.com, here are the links:
Apple Store

Amazon.com

Can someone help me figure the differences because i think i will go with the one from amazon because i have a store card there and will get $30.00 off of it!

 

[Boyd01]

I have both the 2TB and 3TB version of that drive and like them. Seagate makes a thunderbolt dock that they snap into. I use this and connect my external monitor to the pass-through port. The Blackmagic disk test clocks it between 180-190 MB/s.

Anyway, it's funny that you posted this because I wanted to get the 4tb version myself and was having a hard time finding anyone who had them in stock (Seagate doesn't even stock them anymore). I think they have actually discontinued this whole line and replaced it with something similar that doesn't support the dock.

FWIW, Best Buy sells the 3TB version for $110. After shopping around, I just ordered two.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/seagate...8671137972&skuId=5597959&st=5597959&cp=1&lp=1

Getting back to your question, I believe the hardware is the same for the two drives in your links, however the one at the Apple Store is pre-formatted for the Mac. My 2TB drive was Mac-formatted and my 3TB was the PC version. I formatted it for the Mac and it works fine in the Thunderbolt dock.

But here is something odd, the drive includes an adapter for USB3 if you don't have a dock. My 2TB (Mac version) works fine with that adapter but my 3TB version does not, even though I formatted it for the Mac. The same drive works fine in the Thunderbolt adapter. I am not sure why that would be, and plan to investigate further when I get the new ones.

 

[CrickettGrrrl]

I bought the Seagate 3TB version at Costco a month or so ago for $119, last week I saw that the exact same one was reduced to $99. Costco was also selling the 4TB size when I bought mine, I'm not sure if it was still there and on sale last week as well.

I have a 2011 iMac so no USB3 for me 🙁 thus I only get USB2 speed, however it works just fine with Mavericks.