

Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim Review


The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim ($99.99 for 2TB) is a travel-friendly portable hard drive with a high storage capacity. While extras are limited, the cost per gigabyte, thin design, and transfer speeds are highly appealing. The 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive ($179.99 at Quill) hard drive has more features and double the storage for $50 more, but if portability is your main concern, this drive is a straightforward and affordable way to have more than enough space for your files and media on the road.

Design and Features
Living up to its name, the Backup Plus Ultra Slim ($99.99 at Amazon) is a super-thin drive, measuring 0.37 by 2.99 by 4.46 inches (HWD) and weighing 4.3 ounces. It can fit in your front or back pants pocket for travel, though it would take up most of the room since it's fairly wide. It's stylish, too, with a modish dimpled pattern on the top and a platinum finish (though it's also available in gold). The bottom portion is black, and the whole rectangular body is made of plastic.

At this size, it's larger and heftier all around than something really small (and pricey) like the Samsung Portable SSD T3 ($2,150.00 at Amazon) , but it's still slim and nowhere near what I would call heavy. The Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive, for instance, is much more substantial at 0.8 by 3.1 by 4.5 inches and about 8.6 ounces. As with the Backup Plus, there are no rubber feet on the bottom, which makes it prone to slipping around or off most surfaces.

Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim

The only connectivity option is a single USB 3.0 port, for which an 18-inch cable is included. It's formatted NTFS out of the box, so it will work right away on any Windows PC. It also includes drivers to run on a Mac, though, allowing you to use it on either operating system without reformatting. That's a nice bonus for anyone who frequently hops between systems.

The drive comes with the Seagate Dashboard software, which can back up your data, share pictures and videos, and save media from your social accounts. A nicer inclusion is 200GB of free Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage for two years, adding even more to your total capacity. The drive's 2TB, though, is a lot on its own—plenty of space for storing your documents, thousands of photo, movie, and music files, and anything else you might need access to on the go. If you have a slim ultraportable that perhaps doesn't come with a ton of internal storage, this isn't a bad option for more room. There's a two-year limited warranty on the drive, as well.

Performance and Pricing
In the Windows-based PCMark 7 drive benchmark test, which measures performance across a range of general-usage scenarios, the Backup Plus Ultra Slim performed pretty well, scoring 2,028 points. That's better than the non-slim Backup Plus (1,985) and the 2TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra ($99.99 at Office Depot® & OfficeMax®) (1,432), a similarly sized and priced drive with the same capacity.

On our drag-and-drop test, the Ultra Slim transferred a 1.22GB folder in 10 seconds, which is on the faster end. The non-slim Backup Plus took 12 seconds to move the same file, while the My Passport Ultra took 13 seconds. Overall, the Ultra Slim is not as fast as a solid-state drive such as the expensive Samsung Portable SSD T3 (a score of 4,908 on PCMark 7, a time of 6 seconds on the drag-and-drop test), but it's pretty quick, especially for the price.

The cost of the Ultra Slim works out to 4.9 cents per gigabyte. That's better than the My Passport Ultra (6.5 cents per gigabyte), and a little more expensive than the Backup Plus (3.8 cents per gigabyte)—it's a positive that it's not too much pricier than this standard hard drive. It's much more cost effective than something like the 1TB Fantom Drives DataShield Portable SSD DSS1000 ($136.79 at Amazon) (50 cents per gigabyte), where you're paying extra for advanced security features, and in comparison the $850 Portable SSD T3 breaks down to 42.5 cents per gigabyte. That's actually not a bad value considering the price tag for something so small and fast, but it further highlights the attractive pricing on the Backup Plus Ultra Slim.

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim represents a strong value, offering plenty of storage space and quick data transfer rates without going over $100. It's also stylishly designed, and though I could see some shoppers not loving the pattern, it at least spruces up what would otherwise be a basic, boring rectangle. It doesn't feature the 256-bit encryption of the Western Digital My Passport Ultra, but it is faster and less expensive. The Editors' Choice Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive (4TB) offers double the capacity and more features for $150, but if portability is a top priority for you, the Backup Plus Ultra Slim is smaller and even more travel-friendly.

Where to Buy

Our Best Hard Drive Picks

Further Reading

About Matthew Buzzi

Matthew Buzzi

Read the latest from Matthew Buzzi