Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive Review - Review 2022

Equally time goes by, it seems like nosotros always need more storage. Even a 128GB telephone will make full up with files eventually, and for many, those files are photos and videos that can't be hands replaced. The 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive ($149.99 for 4TB) has the chapters to store hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pictures and videos, likewise as files from your laptop or desktop. It has the same capacity every bit the Seagate Fill-in Plus Fast ($450.00 at Amazon) , a top pick in the category, but at almost one-half the cost per gigabyte. That means that for general backups and storage purposes, the Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive is our Editors' Choice for portable external hard drives.

Design and Features
The bulldoze is a bones box that measures 0.8 past 3.i past 4.5 inches (HWD), and weighs about eight.half dozen ounces. It has a black-satin cease on its top lid, forth with a disk-activity light and Seagate's new swirly logo. The logo is also echoed in the lesser-panel molding. The base of operations of the drive lacks condom feet, and then it has a tendency to slide off of a non-flat surface. At that place is a micro-USB iii.0 port on the side for the included USB 3.0 cable. The 2022 version of the Seagate Backup Plus has a proprietary USM connector for Seagate's Thunderbolt adapter. USM has since become obsolete.

Formatted for NTFS out of the box, the drive volition piece of work right away with any Windows PC. If y'all're a Mac user, you will accept to install the included NTFS driver onto your OS X device in guild to apply the Backup Plus, but this only takes a few minutes. If you don't want to add some other driver, you can reformat the drive for HFS+ to apply it with your Mac exclusively.

The included setup programme also installs Seagate Dashboard, a utility that helps you support your data, and share your pictures and videos on social media, besides equally salvage pictures and video from your social media accounts. Seagate also includes a free ii-twelvemonth subscription to 200GB of cloud storage on Microsoft'due south OneDrive service, and the Seagate Lyve app. Lyve lets you turn the Fill-in Plus into a personal cloud drive, and so you can admission your documents on the bulldoze from your laptop, phone, or tablet (Android, iOS, Kindle, Mac, or Windows) via the Lyve app. You can as well share your pictures and videos with friends over the Internet by emailing them a link that opens in their browser. This is like to the services you get with the PogoPlug PC service, as seen in drives like the 2TB Toshiba Canvio Connect II($99.99 at Amazon) and the 750GB Canvio Connect ( at Amazon) . You will have to go along your desktop or laptop on for the duration, but it's an piece of cake fashion to share files over your network without having to ready a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance. The drive comes with a 2-year warranty, which ameliorate than most bones drives with a 1-year warranty, but not quite as lengthy equally the iii years offered by the 2TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra ($99.99 at Office Depot® & OfficeMax®) .

Performance and Cost
The drive performed well on our criterion tests, scoring 7,504 points on the PCMark05 hard bulldoze exam and 1,985 points on the PCMark7 examination. That's significantly faster than the Western Digital My Passport Ultra, the Adata HE720 ( at Amazon) , the Toshiba Canvio Connect II, and the Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC ($82.27 at Amazon) on the same tests. The Seagate Fill-in Plus Fast scored an impressive 87,971 points on PCMark05, however, which gives it the edge if you need speed for video piece of work or transferring a lot of files.

Seagate Backup Plus (4TB) 1

On the drag-and-driblet test, the Backup Plus took 12 seconds, which is better than average for a USB 3.0-equipped drive. The Seagate Backup Plus Fast, the Toshiba Canvio Connect II, and the Western Digital My Passport Ultra each took 13 seconds. That's virtually equally fast as yous can go without moving to a solid-state drive (SSD) or a RAID drive.

With 4TB of space, the Backup Plus Portable Drive's cost works out to an excellent $0.038 per gigabyte, which is a little more than half that of the 4TB Seagate Fill-in Plus Fast ($0.06 per gigabyte) and 2TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra ($0.065 per gigabyte).

Conclusion
The Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive is i of the largest-capacity portable drives available today. Adding to the appeal are the drive'south speed, extra features like the Lyve personal cloud service, and a relatively inexpensive price per gigabyte. It'south a much-less-expensive manner to shop your files locally than on deject-based services or ownership a NAS for your home. The Seagate Fill-in Plus Fast is a flake faster on some benchmark tests, but its double the toll per gigabyte; unless you're using it equally a scratch disk for video projects, that actress speed is non worth the difference in cost. Thus, the Backup Plus Portable Drive is our Editors' Selection for portable external difficult drives.