Backup your data and social media content.
Seagate recently announced a new range of
Backup Plus external hard drives, both in portable and desktop form factors.
The new drives are meant to replace the outgoing GoFlex series and as befits a
brand-new lineup, the Backup Plus drives boast a number of new features.
Physically, the new Backup Plus portable
hard drive has a more compact footprint and a clean, elegant look. Seagate also
offers the drive in four colors – red, blue, black and silver.
Seagate
Backup Plus Portable HDD
As part of Seagate’s Universal Module
Storage (USM) interface, the drive has detachable ports, which can be swapped
in future for faster interfaces such as Thunderbolt and FireWire 800. By
default, the drive comes with an adapter that supports USB 3.0, which is also
backward compatible with USB 2.0 too.
The Backup Plus portable hard drives are
equipped with 5400RPM mechanical hard disks and are available in 500GB and 1TB
capacities. The new Backup Plus drives are also designed to work with PCs and
Macs. The drives are formatted in NTFS, but a special driver provided by
Seagate ensures Macs will be able to read and write to them as well.
The most significant improvement made to
the new drive is as the software level, specifically the new Seagate Dashboard
2.0 application. With the new Dashboard application, three main tabs – Protect,
Save and Share – let users quickly access the application’s main functions.
With “Protect”, users can easily backup their
content on their system with a single-click. Advanced users can even customize
their own backup plans, such as choosing our specific files to backup and even
choosing what time you want the backup process to take place.
The
revised Dashboard application is extremely user-friendly and lets you backup
and save content with ease.
The highlight of the new Dashboard
application has got to be the ability to easily download and save all your
Facebook and Flickr photos and videos onto the external drive, and this can be
accessed through the “Save” tab. And if you have organized your Facebook photos
into albums, the application will even create matching folders so that
everything is stored away neatly.
The Dashboard application also has a
“Share” function that lets users quickly share their content on Facebook,
Flickr and YouTube.
We tested the performance of the drive by
using three different interfaces – USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt.
Expectedly, tests done through USB 2.0 yielded the poorest results, but these
were mostly on the sequential read and write benchmarks. When pit against the
ultra-fast USB 3.0 Buffalo MiniStation Extreme, we found that the new Seagate
drive is more than capable of holding its own, even if the Buffalo drive had a
special Turbo mode with customized drives.
Between USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt, the
results were very comparable and the only significant difference between the
two was that during a timed file transfer of a 1.72GB movie file, the
Thunderbolt adapter gave us a quicker timing of 11.7 seconds as opposed to 17.3
seconds when using the default USB 3.0 adapter.
In closing, the new Seagate Backup Plus
external drives are a welcome addition to the portable hard drive scene. Its
winning combination of blazing performance, an easy-to-use Dashboard
application and reasonable price makes it very easy to recommend.
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Details
·
Capacity: 1TB
·
Volume: 14.5x81.1x123.4mm
·
Weight: 224g
·
Interface: USB 3.0
·
Price: $169
Specifications
·
Hard Disk Spin Speed: 5400RPM
·
Other features Seagate: USM
·
Warranty: 2 years
Verdict: 9/10
·
Design: 8.5/10
·
Features: 9/10
·
Performance: 9/10
·
Value: 8.5/10
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