Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim Portable 2TB Drive Review

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim Portable Drive is a physically small external hard drive with a moderately large 2TB storage capacity — emphasizing lightweight mobility, with a dash of visual appeal.

Hardware

This Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim Portable Drive is available in two different storage capacities, a 1TB or 2TB model — retailing for $114.99 and $144.99 respectively. This pricing is MSRP and each drive model can be found at online retailers for considerably less.

Ultra Slim is the thinnest of all Seagate’s portable drives within the Backup Plus product line. Measuring in at 113.5 (L) x 76 (W) x 9.6 mm (H). Enclosed is a 2TB mechanical Hard Disk Drive (HDD) utilizing Seagate 7mm 2.5” HDD technology, this contributes to reduced height of 9.6 mm and brings weight down to just 4.75 ounces.

The housing is light-weight and of solid construction. Featuring a unique stylized top-half made of metal, the dimpled texture is available in either a gold or platinum colors. A bright white drive activity LED with a horizontal orientation is located towards the top left corner.

Bottom-half is less interesting with a matte black finish and embossed Seagate "S" logo along with product information.

There doesn't appear to be any way to open the housing without damaging the unit so I couldn't identify the on-board controller. That being said, the interface is USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 backward compatible) with a built-in voltage regulator allowing for a single power input from USB 5V bus power so there isn't a need for an additional power adapter or Y-cable. Included is a removable USB cable, Type-A connector on one side and a Type-B micro connector on the other with an overall length of 15 inches.

Specifications

• Capacity: 2TB
• Interface: USB 3.0
• Color: Platinum
• Max Data Transfer: 120 MB/s
• Dimensions: 113.5 x 76 x 9.6 mm (L x W x H mm)
• Warranty: 2 year

Performance

Performance testing was done under Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) using an ext4 file system. Factors affecting performance include: Capacity of the drive, interface of the host and overall system performance. Your results may vary.

Test System

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core @ 3.40GHz (8 Cores / 16 Threads)
• Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X370-PRO
• Memory: 64512MB (64GB DDR4)
• OS: Ubuntu 18.04
• Kernel: 4.15.0-29-generic (x86_64)
• File-System: ext4
• Interface: USB 3.0

Out-of-box the hard drive is formatted as NTFS (New Technology File System). This format can be used interchangeably between Windows and Mac, as well as Linux without the need for additional drivers. However, as a Linux user, I've gone ahead and reformatted the drive to ext4.

Performance results 

The green points and connecting lines indicate the samples taken; these correspond to the right axis, showing access time, plotted against the bottom axis, representing percentage time elapsed during the benchmark. The blue line represents read rates, while the red line represents write rates; these are shown as access data rates on the left axis, plotted against percentage of the benchmark duration.

Below the graph, values are displayed for minimum, maximum and average read and write rates, also average access time.

Timings of device reads

This measurement is an indication of how fast the drive can sustain sequential data reads under Linux, without any filesystem overhead.

Timing buffered disk reads: 350 MB in 3.01 seconds = 116.30 MB/sec