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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ATimson - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
I've heard bad things about PS4s with >2 TB of storage (Rest Mode stops working, sometimes they randomly won't start up). Maybe things would be better with a 2.5" drive, but I'm planning on sticking with my 2 TB for now!pika2000 - Sunday, August 9, 2015 - link
Not going to trust a single hard drive for anything anymore. For backing up to spinning platters, I prefer a system with redundancy like drobo. Why? I have had 2 external drives, Seagate and WD, both failed in less than 6 months. In fact, I had always have failed hard drive once a year (be it in desktop, external, laptop, even inside my drobo), regardless of brand and age. Always.It's amazing how much faith we put in this completely unreliable media. Having such high density storage makes things worse as you are tempted to put more data, and more will be lost when the drive breaks.
People are criticising the price of SSD, but considering the cost of replacing drives at least once a year and the stress they gave me when they fail, I think the price of SSD is not that bad.
Notmyusualid - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
At the moment I'm seeing more issues with SSDs, than mechanical storage.I now keep no irreplacable data on SSDs anymore.
I don't trust 'em. And oh yes, recently been burnt by Samsumg and their TLC sh1te.
RossMeryy0 - Sunday, August 16, 2015 - link
That sounds really nice to help people keep enough hard drive free space and also keep a good performance. But, in daily use, also remember to clean drive up regularly in case of some low disk space error issues. Of course, drive data backups are also supposed to be prepared well all the time.http://www.icare-recovery.com/howto/seagate-backup...
darkfalz - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link
For some reason Seagate don't include any rubber feet on their Portable 2.5" drives anymore. So they just slip and slide around if moved. I added some feet but honestly, it should be on the product itself. Otherwise 4TB in a 2.5" USB powered portable is very nice.Miller1331 - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
After having 2 die on me within the last year I would be weary about buying any more Seagate productstokyojerry - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Amazon U.S. currently sells the 4TB Backup Plus for $119.99, a good deal in and of itself. I wonder though, what is the difference between the " STDR4000901" model Amazon sells and the product reviewed here. ST4000LM016. Lack of UASP support? Some other issue?