Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay Review

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I recently bought a Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay (which I will refer as the unit)  to allow me to back up my personal photos and videos. The unit looks like a cable tv decoder but much heavier since it contains two hard disk.



What I liked 

I like the fact it comes with RAID 1 (mirrored) configured. One of the fear I have is losing all my precious collection should the hard disk crash. The unit also allows me to replace the hard disk. I assume that this will allow me to upgrade to a higher capacity when it becomes more common. Hopefully the unit will support the higher capacity then - seen cases where the firmware may not support the higher capacity.

The Seagate Media software supports Android and allows me to back up the photos and videos I take on my phone directly to the Personal Cloud when I connect to a wi-fi anywhere in the world. However, I am disappointed that it does not backup the mp3 files from my phone.

The unit also allows me to start and stop services I do not use, so I could turn off everything related to Apple (since I do not own any apple devices).



The unit support direct torrent file download and me to control the bandwidth used by the torrent download.

What I do not like

The Seagate Dashboard is unable to detect the personal cloud. This was the software meant to automate the backup for my computer. When I install the software, it detects it but does not detect after I shut down and restart the software. I use synctoy from Microsoft as a workaround.

I cannot figure out why the personal cloud takes at least eight minutes to start up - longer than even my old Windows XP machine (when I had it).

The documents on Seagate website is not up to date. Majority of the document refers to Seagate Central. I was not able to find a complete document of what the LED light means.  I do not know the unit is completely shut down - maybe when the light is off. I like to shut down my electronic devices when there is a lot of thunder and lightning outside but the unit just takes too long to shut down. Not sure pulling the plug before it complete shutdown is good for the unit. It is a tough call, risk damaging the unit myself or risk the lightning taking out the unit.

Even though the unit comes with two USB slots, copying files from my external hard disk to the personal cloud uses my network.  Why does it not have an option to perform direct copy? While transfer the content, it affects everybody else in the house. Alternatively, I can hook up my computer and the unit to a separate router but this requires a lot work and a separate router.

I was unable to display my content via DLNA to my ezCast adapter attached to my television but this is due to ezCast and Seagate’s fault.

What I would like to see

I would like to have an option to perform direct copying between the unit and external devices connected to unit (via USB).

It would be really helpful if the unit will be able to startup and shutdown faster.

I wish there was a version of SDrive app for Android. The SDrive available on Android is only meant for business NAS devices and not for personal cloud.

I noticed that the business NAS comes with an antivirus app but not the Personal Cloud. Would be nice to have one to check on files we drop into the unit.

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