Seagate Seven 500GB review: Only for the design concious

Seagate recently released its brand new logo and a new drive to go with it - the Seagate Seven. Unlike other Seagate external drives we have seen in the past, the Seven is purely an external hard drive with no wireless functionality attached with it. So let us have a look at the drive and see if this should make it in your Diwali purchase list. Build and Design: 8/10 The Seagate Seven looks unlike any other external hard drive on the market. In fact, from afar it doesn’t even look like an external drive - thanks to the steel body which almost wraps around the 5mm drive housed within. At just 7mm thickness, this is the slimmest external hard drive on the market. Along with the single slit of blue light indicator beside the Seagate branding, the Seven has a circular design on top and a USB 3.0 interface. It weighs around 178 grams. The drive comes with an 18-inch braided USB 3.0 cable which is quite sturdy. Features: 6/10 The Seagate Seven only comes in the 500GB capacity and has a USB 3.0 interface for data transfer. User available space is limited to 468GB. It also comes bundled with the Seagate Dashboard app, which lets you use the Seven as your backup drive whenever you connect it to your system. It lets share your media files on your social media accounts or even download content from Facebook, Twitter and so on your Seven drive. Out of the box, the Seagate Seven is formatted in the exFAT file system so you can use it directly with a Windows or Mac machines.  It comes with a 3-year warranty. 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: 6/10 We ran the Crystal Disk Mark test on the Seagate Seven drive and got sequential read and write scores of 107.1 MB/s and 107.5 MB/s respectively. Agreed these aren’t huge numbers, but considering the thin profile of the drive, one cannot expect the drive to be the fastest. This becomes more evident in the real world tests. 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 Seven drive and vice versa to simulate a file read. As seen in the charts above, the Seagate Seven 500GB drive gave a strictly average performance, with sequential speeds just about crossing 100 MB/s mark. The intra drive speeds were quite slow as well. Verdict and Price in India Seagate Seven is an unconventional form factor as far as external hard drives go. That Seagate has managed to fit in a 5mm thin internal drive to make the entire Seven package measure only 7mm thick is indeed commendable. And that is the only thing to consider if you are planning to get this drive, because its metal body will go fabulously with your MacBooks or any other silver/gray coloured Windows laptop. At an MRP of Rs 9,500 and an MOP of Rs 8,800, the pricing is clearly off the mark for most buyers for whom performance is also an important consideration. If you are looking at a value for money drive, you will be better off with the Seagate Backup Plus Slim which is available in the 2TB configuration for under Rs 8,000 on most online retailers. If performance is your requirement, then the HGST Touro S 1TB at Rs 7,500 is also a good buy.