Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive
This is a very small, cool-looking, and well-built portable hard drive. It is probably the smallest external hard drive that I’ve come across. In terms of performance, though, it lacks nothing compared to many of its much bigger alternatives. Here are some of my impressions.
**** Software ****
I have mixed feelings about the included software. In general I don’t use any of the software that comes with the hard drives that I buy. I prefer to use a variety of software suits that I’ve come to know and trust over the years. However, for the sake of this review I decided to give the Seagate’s Backup Plus a try. The results have, at best been mixed.
The two features that I really liked, and was able to use both on my Windows PC as well as on my Mac, are the mobile backup and the social media backup. The latter in particular came in really handy. Over the years I’ve posted tons of pictures on Facebook, and even though I have all of them locally saved, they are not easily accessible, especially in the form of online albums in which I had organized them. Logging into my Facebook account was really straightforward, and after about an hour or so all of my pics were backed up locally, each in a folder corresponding to its Facebook album.
The mobile backup was also pretty good. I was able to install the Seagate iOS app without any issues, it was easy to find my network and recognize the hard rive on it, and before I knew it all of my photos and videos were backed up. I don’t have too much of a need for this feature, since I regularly sync all of my iPhone files anyways, as well as upload the photos and videos to Picasa when I connect it to my computer. Nonetheless, it’s nice to know that I now have another option for that backup.
When it comes to computer backup the software performed great on my Windows machine. However, it doesn’t seem to have the option for Mac backup (or at least I didn’t see one). Furthermore, the hard drive would not even allow you to transfer the files to it natively from your Mac without installing a piece of included software. Since I was primarily intending to use this hard drive to backup my Mac computer, this was a major annoyance. In the end I had to reformat the whole hard drive and use the Time Machine for Mac backup.
Another annoyance about the included software is that it requires a detailed registration process. I am getting increasingly weary of all sorts of companies acquiring my personal info. In some cases this might be necessary, but I don’t see any need for it with software that comes bundled with the hardware that you already bought.
**** Design and Build ****
As already mentioned, this is the smallest external hard drive that I’ve come across. It’s as small as a 2.5” could possibly be. The metallic enclosure looks very well built and extremely durable. This looks and feels like a very high quality, reliable product.
**** Performance ****
This is a USB 3.0 connected hard drive, and it really shows. Transferring large, multi-gig files was a breeze. I did not actually bother to time the performance, but it was quite noticeably faster than what I had come to expect from my old legacy 2.0 USB drives. It took a while for it to backup all of my files (several hundred GB worth) from my old Mac, but that probably had to do more with its aging hardware than the intrinsic limitations of either this hard drive or the USB 3 connection.
**** Conclusion ****
This is an extremely well built and high performance small external hard drive. The software is worthwhile if you are a Windows user, but for those of us with Macs its more or less irrelevant. Nonetheless, I’ve been very happy with it thus far.
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