Data Backup Digest

At the time of its release, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim was the thinnest portable hard drive on the market that offers a 2TB capacity. With a price point of around $50 for 500GB, $70 for 1TB and $120 for 2TB, it’s certainly an affordable drive – but does it stand up? Many praised its predecessor when it first launched, so let’s take a look at whether this second generation drive is worth your cash.

First of all, for those bothered by this type of thing, the drive is available in black, blue, red and silver (in actuality only the top of the drive is coloured). They’re all the same, minus the colour, so that’s really just going to be a personal preference, or whatever you can get your hands on. The drive has aluminium casing and actually feels quite sturdy, even at the light weight of 5.6 ounces. Those who are actually going to use the drive on-the-move should be well served here.

The drive is formatted in NTFS for Windows straight out the box, although you can download a driver to make it functional on Macs (reformatting not required). The drive has a USB 3.0 interface, although it’ll still work with USB 2.0 devices.

One of the main features of the Backup Plus Slim is the Seagate backup software that comes preloaded on the device. This dashboard offers up three types of backup: PC, mobile and social.

The PC backup will, as the name suggests, back everything up from the PC that you link the drive to. You can customise the extent of your backups, like which files to back up. Alternatively, you can let the software decide what should be backed up. Once all set up, the drive will update whenever changes have been made. However, this function is only available for Windows, so Mac owners looking to this feature as a selling point might want to try elsewhere (or indeed download alternative backup software, like R-Drive).

The mobile backup can handle both iOS and Android devices and will keep copies of your smartphone data, like any documents or photos that you have stored on it.

Finally, the social backup allows you to upload images to Facebook, Flickr and videos to YouTube. You can also back up the media from the former two sites at the same time.

The dashboard also allows you to backup to the cloud, but this is a paid feature. There is a free trial available for thirty days, should you wish to test the service.

CNet tested the drive and found that it had write speeds of 119MBps and read speeds of 120MBps. Tech2 also benchmarked similar figures, with 118.69MBps for sequential writes and 116.71MBps for sequential reads.

Compared to other drives on the market, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim performs very well indeed. The fact that it comes with the Seagate Dashboard to handle backup across a variety of mediums is a great selling point and will be sure to entice those buying the drive purely for backup. For those looking for a slim, light and well-performing drive, you can’t go too wrong with this drive.