Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB USB 3.0 Drive Review
by Ganesh T S on August 4, 2015 8:00 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
In the introductory section, we had mentioned about some value-adding features of the Backup Plus Portable drive. In order to take advantage of these features, the Seagate Dashboard app needs to be installed first. The app allows configuration of the backup sources, restoration of backups, connection to cloud services such as Dropbox / Google Drive / Nero Drive and associating the drive with those services (if applicable). The general interface and available options in the Seagate Dashboard can be seen in the video below.
The Dashboard also allows upload and download of photos / videos associated with a Facebook or Flickr account. In terms of other features, the free 200GB on OneDrive is available only after the product is registered (launching the registration through the setup program in the drive automatically populates the necessary serial number field). Lyve is yet another standalone application that can be used to back up photos and videos to the drive as well as the cloud. The download link is again provided on the page launched by the setup program in the drive. Seagate also provides Paragon drivers for Windows and Mac OS - allowing the former to read and write HFS+ drives and the latter to read and write NTFS drives.
Coming to the business end of the review, we need to discuss the pricing. The 4TB Backup Plus Portable was launched with a MSRP of $240, but the street price for the STDR4000100 seems to be closer to $200. The performance of the disk is what one would expect from a traditional PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) drive. Our DAS suite benchmark doesn't reveal any SMR (shingled magnetic recording) firmware tricks. (Update - 10/21/2016: The drive uses platters that operate partly in PMR mode and partly in SMR, along with multi-tier caching (MTC) which includes DRAM and flash - The efficiency of MTC ensures that an empty drive maintains as much consistency as a PMR drive even under heavy traffic.) Pretty much the only improvement idea that we can think of is a larger internal buffer. On the whole, at $0.05 / GB, it is one of the most cost-effective and easily portable storage media currently available for purchase. The value-added features such as the free OneDrive storage and the functional Seagate Dashboard app serve to sweeten the deal.
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Notmyusualid - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
Yes, they are all standard SATA connectors. I have 1 x 1TB, 2x2TB (which are going into my little home-brew NAS), and today, 1x4TB, which I immediately ripped open and fitted inside my Alienware 18.All the others were standard SATA z-depth, this 4TB surprised me with its shear size & weight, it was easily 15mm depth. It took a simple 15 minute modification to my HDD cage to fit it alongside my 850 Pro 512GB, and it went in with ease. (but this is a monstrous laptop - don't go thinking you can do the same at home, you could be lucky, but I very much doubt it).
I'm seeing max R/W speeds of +130Mb/s, give or take, on ATTO, which bests the 1TB at ~110Mb/s,and the 2TBs I forget, but I think they are less than this new one.
So now I've got 2x SSD 512/500, and 4TB mechanical storage in my 'laptop'.
Quite satisfied.
shadowjk - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
What are noise levels like on this thing?Miller1331 - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Probably pretty loud like the majority of Seagate's other productsNotmyusualid - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
I'm transferring 1.2TB to it now, and I don't hear it... I literally have to put my ear flat on the machine to hear it at all. Colour me impressed.jseliger2 - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Has anyone used one of these with Time Machine on a Mac? My current Time Machine drive is behaving strangely, and, consequently, this review comes at a timely time.farhadd - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I haven't, but I'm sure it'd be fine. I've helped friends set up countless external USB / firewire drives as Time Machines. Just make sure you reformat it GPT / Mac OS Extended (Journaled) prior to using it.farhadd - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Instead of Mac users installing NTFS drivers for write compatibility, I'd just reformat the drive ExFAT, which is fully read / write compatible on any Mac OS 10.6.5+.mikato - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
exFAT - no journalling, only a single file allocation table and single free space map, higher chance of data loss or failure when disconnected while writing. Probably not optimal for most people though it does work that way.I'd post a link but the comment thing seems to think my comment is spam then.
DanNeely - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I first heard of that a few years back; kinda makes me wonder if things like this are using HDDs originally intended for PCs that then got repackaged because they didn't sell, or if this is still too expensive a price/capacity tier to sell enough to justify a second design.knightspawn1138 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Am I the only one that sees this and thinks of dremel-ing out the HDD cage in my PS4 to make room for this bad boy?