Seagate Backup Plus Portable USM

slow & feels like a Brick – Had to get the original 4TB Backup Plus Portable & it is Dingo Ugly. Blue brushed aluminum front with white sharp rectangular Thick case. Looks like a prop from an early 70"s Doctor Who TV episode. I can live with that but this thing is slow as treacle. Don't be fooled by it being branded USB 3, well it is USB 3 but it runs as slow as a floppy… Read more

disk. Copy and paste from PC to this HDD takes ages. Honestly it is the slowest USB 3 I have ever used. I only bought this thing today and it is Glitchy already. It has frozen on me twice in the middle of the first two backup jobs. Not a very promising outlook for a rescue HDD. It only has a 12 month warranty so I will be trying to claim the updated version as a replacement because I do not think it will last much longer than a year. Also whatever you don't drop it or knock it around because the dodgy "Toyish White plastic" case is so flimsy I am sure that it will not take any abuse what so ever. But you get what you pay for & it did only cost $128.00 bucks.

Works well – Had this product for years and only just decided to buy a higher storage portable one. This was previously being used for my data on the laptop, then formatted to use with my PS4 and will now be either keeping for a backup or selling it. Would recommend to everyone.  Show details

Fast, good build quality and relatively cheap – I need to store large amounts of satellite data for my university studies. I did some research and the reviews (Engaget, Cnet & PCmag) all recommend two drives namely the 8TB Western Digital (WD) My Book and the 4TB Segate drive. From the reviews the WD is marginally faster than the Segate's but not noticable to the average user. I chose two 4TB… Read more ·  1

Segates in preference to one 8TB WD because the Segates are powered via the USB cable, whilst the WD requires an external power adapter. From my own experience, USB powered external drives are far preferable as you don't need to find a spare power point before using it and externally powered drives are typically larger than USB powered drives.

Separating my data into two drives also allows me to process each drive independently on two PC's, whilst I couldn't do this with the one single large drive. Although this is not a factor for most users. I chose two case colours (red and blue) to make it easy to discern between the two drives.

The units are already preformatted for NTFS and, as expected, works flawlessly as any other USB 3 drive with Windows 10. I had minor challenges to mount the drive for Linux (Bash for Ubuntu on Windows), but easily solved using the command "sudo mount -t drvfs F: /mnt/f". I did have a problem sharing the USB on my WiFi router which I expect is due to the large file size not being readable on the old router and would require partitioning into two smaller virtual drives to accomplish this.

For an external drive it is seriously fast, possibly even matching the speed of my internal SSD drive in my laptop. It takes about 20s to read and write a 1 GB file. This is similar to the review which quoted 12s for the write. Sustained throughput reading from the one drive and writing to the other drive is 125MB/s, and windows reports that this is only half the drive's speed. Therefore, best results will be obtained with large files of about 800MB size. This can be adjusted by optimising the clustering size (for IT experts).

The units are about the size of a deck of playing cards, very portable. Hard and good quality material (I read somewhere that some testers drove over it with their car. Not recommended, but I think it is a trestimant to the ruggedness of the casing. Small well designed led light to indicate that it is on, perhaps they could make it flash to indicate activity but very satisfied with the look and feel of the device.

Out of stock in the local shop (JB-Hi Fi) but 20% on-line discount using "click and collect" at another location. Worth considering on future purchasing to use on-line. Slightly difficult to compare as they use their own stock code and I was worried it was an earlier version (slower) of the drive so check box codes against manufacturer.

All in all, very satisfied with the drive(s).

Lose 10% – Advertising a 5TB drive that in actual fact is only 4.54TB is poor. You lose 10%(approx.) before even putting anything on it. I've been told "It's required to run it"... If I had a 1TB drive it does not lose 50% to 'operational requirements'... go figure...

Beautiful design - Fast file trasfer – I bought this from dick smith and I have had this model for 3 months and use it for backing up my files. It works great with no issues. I also love its design. Nice shape and small. 3 years warranty included which is peace of mind. I definitely recommend this.

If you need a reliable drive for backups, look elsewhere – Absolutely and horribly unreliable drives. I've had 4 drives, 3 of which failed after about 4 months. 2 of these were used for daily work backups I must say but still... The 3rd I used maybe every 2-3 months for backing up my home documents. I have another that is I think on the blink and doesn't work reliably with Seagate's own proprietary… Read more

software and keeps disconnecting. Should not have bought so many. I'm guessing that is why they were so cheap. Nobody in their right minds would buy these drives if they knew how mind bogglingly unreliable they were. Try a decent Western Digital portable hard drive you'll be much happier, I've switched out all the Seagates and use them as throw away drives. Using WD for my more important backups.

Handy Little Drive – If your looking for an external hard drive I definitely recommend the seagate, I can't say much for the software as I format all my hard drives but one of the best things I found with this apart from the attractive slim design is the usb to hard drive attachment cord which it a lot hardier and actually stays in the device unlike other brands (mainly the previous WD drive I had).