By Charlemagne Losaria
Apart from mobile phones and tablets, storage devices have seen its fair share of upgrades the past few years — from physical size to storage capacities.
When the first 1TB storage device was first introduced to the consumer market, it was considered an overkill. Just a couple of years passed and opinions have changed as to how much storage is enough.
To some, like myself, a 1TB portable hard drive is no longer sufficient to accommodate all my work files, applications, and media. I have had to constantly delete files, which I thought will no longer be of use, but ended up needing them again in the future.
Of course, one can simply buy multiple 1TB or even 2TB portable hard drives but it is not exactly a convenient solution. I know I am not the only one with this dilemma and this is precisely what Seagate wanted to address when they added the Seagate Backup Plus Fast to their roster of portable hard drives.
Aside from being a 4TB portable storage, one of the main features of this portable storage is it being ?fast?. Just how fast is fast, you might ask? Let?s find out.
What?s in the box
? 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast Hard Drive
? 1 USB 3.0 Y cable
? 1 Single USB 3.0 cable
? Instruction Manual
Build
The Seagate Backup Plus Fast is a USB 3.0 portable hard drive which is rather on the chunky side. Make no mistake about it — although very portable, the device is thicker and heavier compared to other portable hard drive we have seen.
To visualize the device?s thickness, imagine putting two regular portable hard drives on top of each other. On paper, it measures at 0.88 inch thickness.
Still, we are talking about a 4TB storage device here. It still beats bringing with you four 1TB storage device, so we can simply look pass the thickness of this device.
A black polycarbonate plastic (which resembles metal) was used on the device?s case with a small gap for a white led notification. The Seagate brand and logo is embossed upfront with a metallic finish to it.
The device build is quite solid and although the polycarbonate case can be pressed slightly, no apparent creaking sound can be heard. Since the device is USB 3.0 bus-powered, it does not require an external power adapter making it truly portable ideal for individuals on the go.
The device comes with two USB cables. One is a single USB 3.0 cable while the other is a Y cable for laptops that don?t provide enough power to power the device.
Performance
The Seagate Backup Plus Fast comes with the Seagate Dashboard Installer, a software that enables users to upload their media content directly to their favorite social networking sites and vice versa. The device works with Windows PC out of the box but will also work for those who use Macs as it comes with a Mac OS X driver.
The ?Fast? clause on the device?s name actually denotes something. According to Seagate, the device is able to transfer up to 220Mbps of data, albeit with a fine print clause of ?data transfer rate may vary depending on the OS environment.? Running a popular hard drive benchmark yielded the following result, which is quite close to the 220Mbps claim of Seagate.
So what do these numbers mean in real-world use? I decided to test this claim using a tried and tested way of testing transfer speed, that is, to transfer actual data on the storage device and recording the time how fast it did so.
I went ahead and plugged the device on the USB 3.0 port on my laptop, and proceeded with the data transfer. On my first real world test, transferring 7.17GB worth of TV series took exactly 4 minutes and 7 seconds. In our second test, a 7.14GB of series clocked in at 4 minutes and 12 seconds.
It is safe to say that 7GB worth of data can be transferred under 4 minutes — that is very impressive if you ask me. On my other hard drive, which is a Seagate Expansion, at least 14 minutes are needed to transfer the same set of data. The device does prove Seagate?s claim of being able to transfer two times faster compared to other hard drives.
Conclusion
The Seagate Backup Plus Fast is quite possibly the fastest 4TB portable hard drive out in the market, and with a price of roughly $270 (about P12,00), you?ll be thanking yourself later for making the purchase.
There is no denying that data storage will always be in demand. As long as they are in demand, storage manufacturers like Seagate will continue to find ways to bring more storage to consumers. It is safe to say that soon, we will be seeing slimmer, portable hard drives with more capacity to boot.
