Seagate Backup Plus hard drives for mobile devices: Carry your digital assets with you!

08th June 2014
Seagate Backup Plus hard drives for mobile devices: Carry your digital  assets with you!

June 8, 2014: Mobile devices account for the largest number of captured video and photos today. Seven out of every ten pictures  are snapped, using a smartphone rather than a digicam,  finds a recent survey by analysts IDC, of global digital imaging practices.  
But we all know what happens to phones!  We tend to drop them or lose them -- placing at risk all those precious digital memories in their pixel-heavy files, unless we take pre-emptive action. The name of the game is Backup.
Thumbnail-sized USB Flash drives are not an option; their capacity is still limited to a 100 GB or so. So it's back to good old, hard disk drives -- and Seagate, a  leader in this particular storage technology has gone as far as one can go in squeezing terabytes -- that's  1000s of gigabytes -- into  incredibly small space.
They have just launched  in India,   the Seagate Backup Plus Slim series, the world's thinnest  external terabyte-scale hard disks  and I got to try out the  maximum capacity drive in this family, the 2 terabyte  version  for a few days.
Fitting easily in the palm  of your hand and just over a centimetre in thickness, the metal- encased  the Backup Plus Slim weighs less than 160 grams and   will  slide easily into  pocket or purse. It comes preinstalled with Seagate Dashboard,  the backup software that promises to protect, save and  store your files. Designed with a canny feel for what people do with Social Media,  the software  has buttons that make it very easy to  save from,  or upload to,   your page at Facebook, Flicker or YouTube, using your phone or tablet to connect. The drive comes with  a  cable designed for the new ( and much faster) USB 3.0 interface. 
Typically, you would attach the drive to your phone using the micro USB port of your  device. You would need to  install the free Seagate Mobile Backup app on an iOS or Android mobile device.
It is always difficult to check out claims of transfer speeds, unless one works under  test bench conditions. But from my brief trials with real data, I would say the Backup Plus Slim will allow you to  write data at around 120 MBPS and read at around 85 MBPS.  That should be good enough for most of us.

But if you  need to carry your data with you for semi-professional reasons, maybe you should opt instead for Seagate's  Backup Plus Fast,  which will do the job  at twice the speed.  It manages this by using, not one  disk platter, but two, working back to back, thus halving the read/write time.   The price you pay is  in diminished portability: the "Fast"  drive  is twice the weight at 307 grams and more than twice the thickness  at 8.25 cms. 
For most of us  thinner is better and  we might  accept the slower transfer speeds for the beautifully compact  form factor of  the Slim drive.

The Backup Plus Slim  is available in three sizes: 500GB Slim: Rs 4,250; 1TB Slim: Rs 6,000; 2TB Slim: Rs 10,500. The Backup Plus Fast is currently available in India in just one size: 4TB for Rs 25,000.   Do check the online shopping sites: I found these drives selling for a few thousand rupees less than the MRP.  Happy storage-on-the-go!
More on Backup Plus Slim
More on Backup Plus Fast           -- Anand Parthasarathy