Seagate Backup Plus Slim (1TB) review: Mobile backup gives it an edge over rivals

Seagate Backup Plus drive is in its second generation and we were impressed with it back when the first **Backup Plus** had launched. With the second generation **Backup Plus drives,** Seagate has introduced a slimmer design along with a reworked user interface. Let’s take a look at whether the drives are worth your money.

Build and Design

[caption id=“attachment_222685” align=“aligncenter” width=“538”]  Seagate Backup Plus Slim comes with a USB 3.0 interface[/caption]

Just like its predecessor, the new Seagate Backup Plus Slim comes in a variety of colours. Seagate has gone with a minimal design approach and has done away with the GoFlex type adapter, which you could disconnect from the SATA port of the external drive, to add on a USB 3.0 or a FireWire adapter. It comes in four colours: red, blue, black and silver. The Backup Plus Slim drive has a mere 12.1mm thickness on the sides, which makes it very pocketable. There is a thin slit at the top which hides the LED light that glows when the drive is powered on. Despite the plastic, the build quality is sturdy.

Features

The Seagate Backup Plus comes in three variants - 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. We got the 1TB drive in blue for testing. It houses the Seagate ST1000LM024 1TB laptop drive which has a 5400PRM drive and 8MB of cache memory. The Backup Plus drive has a USB 3.0 interface.

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The main feature of the Backup Plus drive lies in its name. It not only backs up data on your system, but it also features social media and mobile backup.

Under the social media backup feature, you can upload images to Facebook, Flickr and videos to YouTube via the Backup Plus drive. At the same time you can also backup your images from Facebook and Flickr. This can be achieved using the Share and Save buttons under Social menu.

Mobile backup allows you to backup your phone data, images and videos. For this you will need to download the Seagate Mobile app. It is surprising to not find any security-related utility on the Seagate dashboard. You will also notice a Cloud backup feature, but it comes with a 30-day free trial after which you are asked to pay a subscription fee. [caption id=“attachment_222667” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  The reworked dashboard of the Seagate Backup utility now also sports Mobile Backup[/caption]

Test Setup

Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K

Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4

RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX

OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB

Source Drive: Corsair Neutron GTX, 240GB SSD

PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Performance

We connected the Seagate Backup Plus to the native USB 3.0 port on the ASRock Z87 Extreme4 board. ATTO Benchmark was run using data sizes from 0.5KB to 8192KB with the total length being 256MB and we got scores such as 116.71MB/s for sequential reads and 118.69 MB/s for sequential writes. Crystal Disk Mark 3.0, the other popular synthetic benchmark for hard drives, also gave scores of 116.8 MB/s for sequential reads and 116.7MB/s for sequential writes. The other scores can be seen in the table below. [caption id=“attachment_222688” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Crystal Disk Mark scores[/caption] For the real world performance test, we transferred a 10GB single RAR file and a 10GB assorted file to get real life sequential and random file transfer speeds. To simulate a file write we transferred files from the Corsair source drive to the target Seagate Backup Plus drive and vice versa to simulate a file read. After each read and write operation we restarted the system to clear out any cache. Finally we performed the intra-drive test. The results are as follows. [caption id=“attachment_222668” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Sequential file transfer speeds[/caption]   [caption id=“attachment_222665” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Assorted file transfer speeds[/caption]   [caption id=“attachment_222666” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Intra-drive file transfer speeds[/caption]  

Verdict

As you have seen above, the Seagate Backup Plus drive performs better than other competing drives which we have tested in the past. At an MRP of Rs 6,000, the Seagate Backup Plus drives comes at a cost per GB of Rs 6.44. This is quite a good deal considering you are not just getting a fast drive, but also a means to backup your images and videos from your social networks as well as your mobile devices.

One glaring omission is the absence of any kind of security feature such as encryption or password protection. Hopefully, Seagate can address that with a separate downloadable utility.

If the extra backup features don’t really entice you, then you can go for regular 1TB external HDDs which start from Rs 5,100. But we would really recommend you spend a few bucks more and get the Backup Plus over plain vanilla storage drives, since their utility will come in handy in the age of mobile and social media.