Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Performance Testing And Conclusion
Comparison Products
We chose three products to compare to the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB. We featured all three products in separate reviews, and they are excellent for their intended use-cases.
The Sony PSZ-HB2T and LaCie Rugged RAID were both designed for media professionals working on location outside of the office. The Sony and LaCie products differ in the number of drives inside the ruggedized enclosures but feature dual connectivity via USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. The Sony uses a single drive, and the LaCie uses two drives in a RAID 0 configuration to increase performance.
Like the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim, the LaCie Porsche Design is another recently released model. It features a USB 3.0 port like the product we're testing, but it offers increased capacity (up to 4TB).
Scaling Block Sizes
In our first test, we read and write data to the external drives at different block sizes to measure performance with a single outstanding command. The LaCie Rugged uses its RAID configuration to leap above the single drive models in every block size over 16KB. The Sony PSZ-HB2T leverages the USB 3.0 connection to deliver slightly higher performance with small block sizes than the Backup Plus Ultra Slim. Sony designed the PSZ-HB2T for application performance with professional software, and not as a pure backup device.
Full LBA Span Performance
HDDs read and write at slower rates as the heads move deeper into the platter. As you populate the drive with more data, the read and write speeds decrease at a linear rate. We measured the best-case performance at just under 130 MB/s, but at the other end of the platter, the sequential 128KB block performance fell to 60 MB/s. The other single-drive products followed the same performance curve.
File Transfers
To demonstrate real-world performance, we have three tests that represent the type of data often stored on portable storage devices. The first test involves transferring a Blu-ray ISO of a popular movie to the drives. The test consists of a sustained large-block sequential transfer.
In the second test, we transfer the entire directory of rFactor, a PC video game. The test transfers both small and large data blocks simultaneously.
The third test involves a 15.2TB directory of files similar to what you have in your My Documents folder. We're mixing photos, Microsoft Office documents, MP3s, PDFs and a couple of small game save files.
The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB performed well in our tests and even outperformed the LaCie Porsche Design 4TB we reviewed earlier in the year.
Conclusion
The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim doesn't compel us to run out and buy a new backup HDD. It's a solid external drive with a great software package, but we could say the same about the other models in the series. The drive doesn't jump out at us; it's a flat note when we expected some jazz.
What the Backup Plus Ultra Slim lacks in excitement it makes up for in value. A Seagate ST2000LM007, also known as the Mobile HDD 2TB, is inside the case. The HDD sells on Newegg for $105 as a bare drive, which is more than the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB. It's like buying the drive at a discount and getting the case, cable and software package free. Seagate priced the Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB at $99, and you get a lot more than the price suggests.
MORE: All Storage Content
MORE: Latest Storage News
MORE: Storage in the Forums
30-year-old Pentium FDIV bug tracked down in the silicon — Ken Shirriff takes the microscope to Intel's first-ever recall
Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.2 claims to improve Arrow Lake performance by up to 33%, theoretically matching the Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Empyrean Technology gives control to CEC after U.S. blacklisting — China’s top developer of chip design systems hands reins to state-owned firm
