Seagate Backup Plus Portable HDD (1TB) - A Social Spin on Portable External HDDs

A Social Spin on External Portable Hard Drives

Seagate recently refreshed their lineup of external hard drives by introducing the new Backup Plus. These new drives are meant to replace the older GoFlex drives and as befits a new series, they boast some interesting new features.

With the new drives, Seagate is also championing the importance of backing up your data - hence the name Backup Plus. And one of the highlights of the new drives is undoubtedly the ability to backup content on social media networks such as Facebook and Flickr. This is enabled through their easy-to-use Seagate Dashboard utility, which has been improved and reworked to be more user-friendly - another highlight of the new drives. All in all, with the new drives, Seagate promises to offer a fuss-free solution to backing up your most precious data.

Like most of Seagate’s newest drives, the drives are designed to work right out of the box with both PCs and Macs. By default, the drive is formatted in NTFS, but a special driver provided by Seagate ensures that Macs can have read and write access to the drive too. The new Backup Plus portable hard drives will come only in 500GB and 1TB flavors. The mechanical hard drive inside spins at 5400rpm.

Physically, the new Seagate Backup Plus portable hard drive is an elegant looking unit thanks to its brushed aluminum front panel. To keep things interesting, Seagate offers the drive in four colors - red, blue, silver and black. You can check out how the various colored drives look from our news of its launch.

The most unique physical aspect about the Seagate Backup Plus is its detachable port. As part of Seagate’ Universal Storage Module (USM) interface, the drive comes by default with an adapter that supports USB 3.0 connection (and as a result of backward compatibility, USB 2.0 as well). However, additional adapters can be purchased that supports the faster Thunderbolt and FireWire 800 interfaces.

Setting Up the Dashboard

The most significant changes, however, comes under the hood in the form of Seagate’s new Dashboard 2.0 software. The new software was designed to be more intuitive and user-friendly, and it succeeds. Load the application and you’ll be greeted with three options: Protect, Share and Save.

Protect lets you quickly and easily backup all the contents on your system with a single click. For more advanced users, you can create custom backup plans that lets you choose to backup only certain file types or even only backup specific files. You can even specify what time you want the backup process to take place.

Seagate’s Dashboard 2.0 introduced integration with social media sites like Facebook and Flickr and using the Save option enables users to easily download and backup their Facebook and Flickr content. With a single click, the Dashboard application will download all your Facebook photos and videos onto the external drive. And if you have organized your Facebook photos into albums, the application will create respective folders for them in the hard drive too so everything is neatly stored away.

Lastly, the Share option seems a bit superfluous as it lets users share content easily on their Facebook, Flickr or YouTube account. Although this feature works well enough, we can’t see why users won’t just log into their respective accounts instead as that is more straightforward.

Perhaps acknowledging the effectiveness of OS X’s own Time Machine backup utility, the "Protect" panel is missing for Mac users, leaving only the "Save" and "Share" options. That said, Mac users can easily configure Time Machine to use the Seagate Backup Plus as their backup hard drive.

All in all, the new Dashboard 2.0 application from Seagate works just as promised. It was easy to backup files from our system to the Backup Plus drive and it was also equally easy to backup photos from our Facebook and Flickr accounts.

Performance

To further evaluate the new Backup Plus portable drive, we are going to evaluate its performance across the three different interfaces - USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. Thanks to its unique USM adapter, we can easily turn the Backup Plus into a Thunderbolt-enabled external storage device.

To find out if the Backup Plus is able to take advantage of the high-speed data transfer speeds of Thunderbolt (which is superior to USB 3.0), we’ll be using an ASUS P8Z77-V Pro Thunderbolt motherboard which supports all three interfaces. With it, we will measure the drive’s performance across the three interfaces using AS SSD, CrystalDiskMark as well as a simple file transfer test to measure how long it takes to transfer a 1.72GB movie file.

Expectedly, tests done through USB 2.0 yielded the poorest results, but this was mostly only on the sequential read and write tests. When it came to smaller data blocks, there’s actually not much difference between the three interfaces. When pitting it against previously tested USB 3.0 portable drives, the new Seagate Backup Plus portable drive certainly held very respectable results beating almost every drive and rivaling Buffalo's Turbo mode with special drivers.

Interestingly, despite the superiority of Thunderbolt, both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connections recorded very comparable results on CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD. There's only so much a 5400RPM mechanical hard drive can eek out despite the evolving interfaces. The only significant difference between the USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt interface was in the timed file transfer, where using 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. One reason why this could be so is because Thunderbolt was designed to handle larger file transfers more efficiently and as such the protocol has less overheads as compared to USB 3.0.

CrystalDiskMark Results

AS SSD Results

File Transfer Timing

Back Ups Have Never Been Easier

The new Backup Plus portable drive is an accomplished portable hard drive. The new Dashboard application makes it extremely easy to backup your content and the ability to automatically download and backup your photos and videos from Facebook and Flickr is especially useful if you are an avid user of the two above-mentioned social networking sites. To add, Seagate also mentioned that they are looking to expand this feature to other social networking sites too.

From an aesthetics point of view, the new drive cuts some clean lines and is in fact redesigned to be more compact than Seagate's previous range of FreeAgent Go portable hard drives. We're glad Seagate has taken our feedback from past reviews to rectify its footprint to be more handy and friendlier on the pockets. In fact, it's actually more compact than all the external drives from last year in terms of volume. This is why its additional adapters don't have a good fit as they were designed to be paired with the FreeAgent GoFlex series.

Performance is decent especially when paired with an USB 3.0 port, since our benchmark results show that there was hardly any difference between an USB 3.0 and a Thunderbolt connection. For regular backups, we think the default USB 3.0 adapter that comes with the drive will suffice. However, if you are going to be using the drive to transfer large files, it might be worth investing in the Thunderbolt adapter (that’s assuming of course your system has a Thunderbolt port in the first place).

However, do note that the Thunderbolt adapter has only a single port, which means you have to use it at the end of the daisy chain. For users whose system has only a single Thunderbolt port, this could be problematic since this means you can only use this drive at the end of a daisy chain or drive a Thunderbolt display but not both. This is because  the current shortcoming of the Thunderbolt interface is that displays have to be at the end of the daisy-chain. And although we don't have a local pricing for the Thunderbolt adapter, we noticed that it's going for US$99.99 (S$125) on Seagate's online store, which is extremely pricey for the minimal performance boost. More frustratingly, the adapter's package doesn’t even come with a Thunderbolt cable at that price!

In terms of pricing, the 1TB variant of the Backup Plus portable hard drive we have for review retails at S$169, while the smaller 500GB variant can be had for S$119. At these prices, it is surprisingly competitive with other portable external drive offerings despite its added advantages.

In closing, the new Backup Plus portable hard drives are an interesting addition to the portable hard drive market. Although they are not any faster than existing portable hard drives that are already in the market, the new Dashboard application makes it easier than ever to backup your precious content. Also, the ability to swap interfaces makes the drives somewhat 'future proof'. Lastly, the functionality to save and backup your Facebook and Flickr content is handy especially if you are an avid user of these social sharing sites. All things considered, the new Backup Plus portable hard drive is very competent with very useful features and is easily recommendable.

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