Raise your hand if you think you need more storage space in your devices. Anyone think that if they just had more storage space, their lives would be easier to maintain? With all that content that you keep churning out day in, and day out, the need for more and more storage space is a given. And since most of us use mobile devices in our day to day lives, the extra storage space better be portable.
Seagate seems to have come up with a solution, for now, with the launch of the USB 3.0 powered, Seagate Backup Plus Fast external hard disk drive. This 2.5-inch portable drive packs in 4TB of storage space. Inside the box, the HDD comes with two USB 3.0 cables – one is the usual USB 3.0 cable, while the other is a Y cable for extra power.
Inside the enclosure, Seagate packs in two Samsung M9T drives of storage capacities of 2TB each. Seagate also includes Dashboard, which offers users the ability to schedule and automate backups for their computer, social networks and mobile devices.
In addition, Seagate also offers a free Mobile Backup app for iOS and Android mobile devices. This app allows you to back up all of your content to the drive, when on the same network, or to the cloud when on the go. In addition, you can use the Save and Share features to download and upload content from social network sites such as Facebook and Flickr.
The overall design of the drive is nothing fancy and the enclosure is not user accessible, like most portable hard disk drives on the market. So if something goes wrong with the drive, you will have to contact their support center is it’s still under warrantly.
Coming back to the Seagate Dashboard application, this nifty piece of software is included with the entire Backup Plus family, and with it users are able to have a simple, streamlined method of ensuring that all of their content is backed up. Overall, we found the Seagate Dashboard is very simple to use as it allowed us to easily protect, share and save data.
Though everything looks good on paper, it all boils down to the performance when it comes to storage devices. In our real world tests, we were able to clock 2MB sequential speeds. The Seagate Backup Plus was able to deliver around 235.7MB/s of write speed, and 181.2MB/s of read speed. You need to however take into account, the fact that, the Seagate Backup Plus Fast uses RAID0 to achieve it’s high speeds and capacity. However, in this scenario, there is always a bit of data loss risk in case one of the drives fail.
All said and done, though, the kind of performance this 2.5-inch drive offers is the best we have seen so far in any portable HDD. The Seagate Backup Plus Fast 4TB also comes with an attractive price tag, a 3-year warranty, good build quality, and amazing performance, thus earning itself Review Central’s Editors’ Choice award.
Price: AED 1299 (4TB), AED 259 (500GB), AED 339 (1TB), AED 599 (2TB)
