I picked up a couple Seagate 8TB Backup Plus Hubs for Mac at a compelling price during a holiday sale, as I needed a new TM drive for my High Sierra Mac Pro and one for my new Macbook Pro. I'm just now setting it up and my initial impression upon unboxing is positive. I really like the small, light form factor and two USB 3 ports on the front which actually increase the number of ports when connecting it rather than subtracting one. I did get some weird behavior after initially connecting drive and pluging in a MS mouse. Could have been bad connection. Since some issues with USB 2 devices are about the only known problem I have read about, I am not concerned about this.

• Software For Seagate Backup Plus

The drive seems pretty snappy and is very quiet. Does anyone have experience with the Seagate dashboard, an app for this device? If so, shared experience would be appreciated. Sometimes the software included with hardware can be worse than useless (although probably not from biggie Seagate).

I installed it to evaluate and to access all features. I'm going to stick with Time Machine but Seagate dashboard will allow for some other functions like power management, cloud uploads (to Seagate servers) and other things, probably mostly redundant with respect to other apps I have. If there are any red flags that come to attention I'll uninstall rather than wait for problems. Did the Seagate drives come with their own 'factory-installed' apps? As well-intended as these may be, often the presence of any kind of driver/formatting software/apps on the drives may cause problems with normal operations (in my opinion).

I'd remove all of it (archive it somewhere if you wish). There may be a Seagate app specifically intended for this purpose. I'd re-initialize (erase) the drives to HFS+ with journaling enabled, essentially turning them into 'blank slates'. I'd use them with the Mac. Again, my opinion only. Did the Seagate drives come with their own 'factory-installed' apps? As well-intended as these may be, often the presence of any kind of driver/formatting software/apps on the drives may cause problems with normal operations (in my opinion).

I'd remove all of it (archive it somewhere if you wish). There may be a Seagate app specifically intended for this purpose. I'd re-initialize (erase) the drives to HFS+ with journaling enabled, essentially turning them into 'blank slates'. I'd use them with the Mac. Again, my opinion only.

Click to expand.Thanks for reply. I've played with it by now and it seems innocuous enough; a nothing-burger. The drives are formatted HFS+ and didn't have apps stored on them but the app (Seagate Dashboard) was downloadable.

Software For Seagate Backup Plus

I installed it and it is minimally functional: it lets one disable the led activity indicator and also to generate thumbnails for videos without them. There is also a drive check function. Cloud functions are being discontinued, so it's very basic and low-level. If I find it's of zero use to me I'll remove it.