The blue Seagate (on the bottom) is the slimmest, followed by the HGST (in the middle), and the Samsung (on the top).Ģ.5″ (laptop type) - 5400 rpm - Micro USB 3.0 interface Gallery (L to R) The WD My Passport Ultra, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim, and the Toshiba Canvio Connect (L to R) The Samsung P3 Portable, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim, and the HGST Touro Mobile - (The Samsung and HGST added to this review on 1 apologies for the scale difference.) While all the drives are rather small, the blue Seagate (on the bottom) is the slimmest and narrowest, while the WD (in the middle) appears to be slightly larger, and the Toshiba (on top) is neither thick nor thin. Update 1! Two new drives have been added to the review: The HGST Touro Mobile vs the Samsung P3 Portable.įor this review, we picked out a portable USB 3.0 hard drive from 5 major manufacturers, WD, Seagate, Toshiba, HGST, and Samsung and put each drive through its paces. Oh, and they were somewhat slow running over the USB 2.0 port.įortunately, technology has reached a point where portable, self-powered USB 3.0 hard drives the size of a deck of cards can hold a full 1 to 2 TB! And they’re fast, too! And until recently, most external hard drives were big, bulky, and required a power brick to be plugged in just to run them. Tape drives were never a good choice for consumers, CD-Rs and DVD+Rs were too small and too slow. This leaves only one question: Where to back up to? And Mac OS X has had its excellent TimeMachine feature for quite a while now. (Much less an easy way to restore a backup, if needed.) But Windows 7 has a good backup system now and Windows 8 has an even better one. Originally the problem of backing up was not having a reliable, yet automated program. And even those of us who do take backups, well, we don’t do it often enough. It is 2015 and almost no one takes backups. Don’t waste your money on this model, just opt for last year’s Backup Plus or the Expansion range, unless you absolutely love Mylio Create and want to try Adobe Creative Cloud.It is this author’s opinion that 2015 should be the ‘Year of the Backup’. Let’s return to the Backup Plus Slim, though: should you buy it? The simple answer is probably not, there are cheaper hard disk drives out there from Seagate itself. If that trend continues, a 1TB external SSD will cost less than a 1TB hard drive this time next year. A recent glut of inventory means that SSD prices have fallen significantly, dangerously approaching the symbolic floor of $100 per TB, about twice what a hard disk of similar capacity costs today. Speaking of which, it might not be long before we wave goodbye to hard drives anyway. Seagate itself said back in 2012 that 60TB hard drives may come to the market by 2020, but instead fired up a 60TB SSD (which uses flash memory) in 2016. That explains why the platter capacity has stagnated at 1TB since, well, September 2015. As it stands, the big players do not seem to have any intention of investing R&D in smaller platters to go in the drives equipped by the Backup Plus Slim. Should Seagate have swapped the LM0007 for the LMZ15, a newer, potentially faster hard drive? Maybe – but then there’s very little incentive to do so. That’s great if you have any inclination towards the creative side of computing, but not so great if you only want quality storage on the cheap (the drive comes with a two-year warranty, by the way). The drive comes with the brand new Mylio photo management software and a two-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, but no storage applications like, say, the WD My Passport Ultra range. It was cool to the touch during use, and barely audible. The Backup Plus Slim scored between 141 and 144MBps on reads and around 137MBps on write speeds, while a 10GB file was transferred at 128MBps. It is a slightly-better-than-average performer as shown in our CrystalDiskMark and Atto benchmarks. Surprisingly, though, that drive costs more on its own than when packaged as the Backup Plus Slim. This product uses the old ST2000LM007 drive, as we mentioned, a disk which has two 1TB platters spinning at 5,400 RPM with 128MB cache. Here’s how the Seagate Backup Plus Slim performed in our benchmark tests:ĬrystalDiskMark: 141MBps (read) 137MBps (write)Ītto: 144MBps (read, 256mb) 137MBps (write, 256mb)
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