As time goes by, it seems like we always need more storage. Even a 128GB phone will fill up with files eventually, and for many, those files are photos and videos that can't be easily replaced. The 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive ($149.99 for 4TB) has the capacity to store hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pictures and videos, as well as files from your laptop or desktop. It has the same capacity as the Seagate Backup Plus Fast ($299.99 at Amazon) , a top pick in the category, but at almost 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 drive is a basic box that measures 0.8 by 3.1 by 4.5 inches (HWD), and weighs about 8.6 ounces. It has a black-satin finish on its top lid, along with a disk-activity light and Seagate's new swirly logo. The logo is also echoed in the bottom-panel molding. The base of the drive lacks rubber feet, so it has a tendency to slide off of a non-flat surface. There is a micro-USB 3.0 port on the side for the included USB 3.0 cable. The 2012 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 will work right away with any Windows PC. If you're a Mac user, you will have to install the included NTFS driver onto your OS X device in order to use the Backup Plus, but this only takes a few minutes. If you don't want to add another driver, you can reformat the drive for HFS+ to use it with your Mac exclusively.
The included setup program also installs Seagate Dashboard, a utility that helps you back up your data, and share your pictures and videos on social media, as well as save pictures and video from your social media accounts. Seagate also includes a free 2-year subscription to 200GB of cloud storage on Microsoft's OneDrive service, and the Seagate Lyve app. Lyve lets you turn the Backup Plus into a personal cloud drive, so you can access your documents on the drive from your laptop, phone, or tablet (Android, iOS, Kindle, Mac, or Windows) via the Lyve app. You can also share your pictures and videos with friends over the Internet by emailing them a link that opens in their browser. This is similar to the services you get with the PogoPlug PC service, as seen in drives like the 2TB Toshiba Canvio Connect II($119.00 at Amazon) and the 750GB Canvio Connect ($85.00 at Amazon) . You will have to keep your desktop or laptop on for the duration, but it's an easy way to share files over your network without having to set up a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance. The drive comes with a 2-year warranty, which better than most basic drives with a 1-year warranty, but not quite as lengthy as the 3 years offered by the 2TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra ($129.00 at Buydig) .
Similar Products
Seagate Backup Plus Fast
Toshiba Canvio Connect II (2TB)
Western Digital My Passport Ultra (2TB)
Adata DashDrive Elite HE720 (500GB)
Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC
LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2
Toshiba Canvio Connect (750GB)
Apricorn Aegis Padlock DT FIPS (4TB)
LaCie Fuel
Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive (5TB)
Apricorn Aegis Padlock SSD (480GB)
G-Technology G-Speed Studio (24TB)
Monster Digital Overdrive Thunderbolt (1TB)
SanDisk Connect Wireless Media Drive (32GB)
Seagate Backup Plus Slim (2TB)
Western Digital My Passport Pro
Performance and Cost
The drive performed well on our benchmark tests, scoring 7,504 points on the PCMark05 hard drive test and 1,985 points on the PCMark7 test. That's significantly faster than the Western Digital My Passport Ultra, the Adata HE720 ($3,153.25 at Amazon) , the Toshiba Canvio Connect II, and the Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC ($76.49 at Amazon) on the same tests. The Seagate Backup Plus Fast scored an impressive 87,971 points on PCMark05, however, which gives it the edge if you need speed for video work or transferring a lot of files.
On the drag-and-drop 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 about as fast as you 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 Backup 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 one of the largest-capacity portable drives available today. Adding to the appeal are the drive's speed, extra features like the Lyve personal cloud service, and a relatively inexpensive cost per gigabyte. It's a much-less-expensive way to store your files locally than on cloud-based services or buying a NAS for your home. The Seagate Backup Plus Fast is a bit faster on some benchmark tests, but its double the price per gigabyte; unless you're using it as a scratch disk for video projects, that extra speed is not worth the difference in cost. Thus, the Backup Plus Portable Drive is our Editors' Choice for portable external hard drives.
The Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive gives you 4 terabytes of speedy storage you can take with you, as well as a personal cloud, all for a very reasonable price.
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