The Great 1TB USB 3.0 Portable HDD Shootout
By
Seagate Backup Plus, Verbatim Store 'n' Go, Western Digital My Passport
Seagate Backup Plus
Released in the middle of 2012, the Seagate Backup Plus is a handsome drive that comes in a brushed aluminum front panel, which is available in several colors. It’s remarkably slim too and is one of the lightest drives in this shootout. What’s unique about the drive is that it features Seagate’s Universal Storage Module (USM) adapter, which lets users change the interface of the drive using adapters. By default, the drive comes with a USB 3.0 adapter and additional Thunderbolt and FireWire adapters can be purchased separately.
Perhaps more crucially, the drive features an updated version of Seagate’s Dashboard backup application. Designed to be more user-friendly and intuitive, the application makes it easy to backup contents and even has a nifty feature that allows it to backup your photos on social media sites such as Facebook and Flickr.
Verbatim Store ’n’ Go
Featuring an aluminum enclosure that’s available in a multitude of shades (black, silver, yellow, pink and orange, just to name a few) the Verbatim Store ’n’ Go drive felt slightly chunkier and heavier in our hands when compared to the other drives in this shootout. Like the other drives here, the Verbatim drive has a 5400rpm hard disk with a 8MB cache.
The drive comes bundled with a copy of Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials software for easy backing up of content and also comes with a special energy saving software. What’s more impressive about this drive, however, is that it is backed by a 7-year long warranty - the longest by far in this shootout.
Western Digital My Passport
Western Digital is one of the biggest names in storage and the My Passport product line has been a favorite amongst users for a very long time. The newly updated My Passport drive has a new design, featuring an all-plastic enclosure with a textured front panel with a matrix design. Apart from black, the drive is available in other colors - white, blue, red and silver. In terms of size, the My Passport drive is not as slim as the other drives, but it is appreciable shorter in length.
The drive comes bundled with Western Digital’s own backup and security utility, which works on both Windows and Mac machines. It’s not as capable as Seagate’s Dashboard application and lacks certain features such as making scheduled backups, but it works well enough as a basic backup utility.
