It is quite astonishing how external hard drives have not only become a must-have accessory for a lot of people, but also how quickly they have become thinner and faster and have even started offering smart features. Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Slim external drive is perhaps the best example of how the entire external storage ecosystem is changing.
Design
This portable HDD does not go for subtle, as proved by the fact that it is only available in gold and platinum colours. And it looks very different in what is essentially a sea of sameness as far as most external hard drives are concerned. The metal layer on top has a sort of design which resembles—and there is no better way of putting this—dimples. The base is made of a lightweight plastic, which has a slightly grippy finish.
Seagate is clearly not kidding when it calls this the ‘Ultra Slim’. This drive is 0.37-inch thick—in comparison, the Western Digital My Passport Slim is 0.49-inch thick. Despite all the thickness saving, the Backup Plus Ultra Slim drive feels quite well made and tough enough to be able to withstand some amount of rough handling.
Set-up and performance
This drive is designed for the ‘plug and play’ method, and Windows PC users can simply start using it without waiting. However, you can download an optional software that enables a bunch of extra features such as automatic backups, access of files on a mobile device, storing files and folders on Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage and also a photo backup service called Lyve. In fact, setting up your OneDrive account with this hard drive will add 200GB storage to your cloud storage account for a period of two years.
For all the slimness and lightweight design, the Seagate Ultra Slim Backup Plus is a USB 3.0 drive that isn’t short on performance either. During the file transfer tests, the transfer speed peaked at 132MB/s—this was done from a Windows 10 PC with flash storage. This speed will also depend on the performance of your own PC’s HDD or flash storage performance, but this is quite quick and should be useful for accessing heavy documents and media files. To be honest, it is not always that we see this sort of performance from a mechanical hard drive, and most of its rivals tend to fall short by 10-12MB/s in comparison.
Do you need it?
With a price tag of Rs.5,699 for 1TB and Rs.8,399 for 2TB, the Seagate Ultra Slim Backup Plus has suddenly become the new favourite recommendation for the next external hard drive purchase. Not just because it looks cool, but also because the backup software is genuinely useful and the overall performance is faster than that of immediate rivals.
