Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB Review

By Chris Ramseyer
published

Early Verdict

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim shaves a few millimeters off of an existing product and gives it a facelift. Users don't get anything over-the-top, but this product works very well for its designed use-case. We prefer the $99 2TB model over the $69 1TB Ultra Slim, so we recommend you spend a little more to get twice the capacity.

Pros

  • +

    Excellent value

  • +

    Great software package

  • +

    Good looks

Cons

  • -

    Hard disk drive performance

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Specifications And Features

The Seagate Backup Plus product family only comes in only one shape, but several sizes. The Ultra Slim is a new take on a purpose built backup storage product. The new drive scales up to a 2TB capacity, but it is small enough to fit in the pocket of your jeans. New HDD technology has shrunk the footprint, but the Ultra Slim experienced more than just a 2mm Z-height reduction.

The mobile HDD market has a product to fit every need and budget. In years past, bulky cases that housed 3.5-inch HDDs dominated the mobile space. Those products still exist, but now serve extreme use cases that require capacities up to 10 terabytes. For most users, backup operations now take place on small portable devices that fit in the palm of your hand.

Seagate offers several products that fall into the small and portable category. The Ultra Slim 2TB model we're testing today falls under the Backup Plus umbrella, and it is accompanied by three products that differ by height and storage capacity. The Ultra Slim is the smallest of the group, but it still packs a massive 2TB of capacity for a low $99 price (1TB model available for $69).

Specifications

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Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim (2TB)

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Seagate Backup Plus Slim (2TB)

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Seagate Backup Plus Portable (4TB)

We listed the four Backup Plus products in our chart to highlight the difference between the various options. The Ultra Slim is the most compact product in this category. All four products utilize USB 3.0 to deliver high sustained transfer rates. Three of the four models share the same 120 MB/s sequential data transfer specification. The Backup Plus Fast offers increased performance up to 220 MB/s, but it uses two internal drives to reach the high rating.

The Backup Plus Slim ships in 1TB and 2TB capacities with gold and platinum color options. The drives feature a dimpled texture to compliment the shiny surface. Many of Seagate's newest products incorporate a design philosophy that we normally see from LaCie, which is now a Seagate company.

Pricing And Warranty

We found the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB online for as low as $69 and the 2TB model we're testing sells for $99. All of the products in the Backup Plus product family carry a 1-year warranty.

Packaging

Image 1 of 2

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim ships in a full-color retail package that outlines the drive and the included software. Seagate offset the drive in the package, which makes it sit at an angle behind the plastic window. The package gives shoppers a better view of the side and how thin the Slim Plus actually is.

Accessory Package

Inside the package, we found the drive, a USB 3.0 cable and a paper manual. The bundled software is on the drive in executable format. We'll cover the software further down the page.

A Closer Look

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After the acquisition, Seagate apparently adopted some of the basic tenets of LaCie designs. The new Backup Plus Ultra Slim moves away from the flat anodized finish found on the other products in the Backup Plus product family.

Outside of the new dimpled texture, the Backup Plus Ultra Slim is nearly identical to the Backup Plus Slim, which is 2mm thicker. You will have to pay around $5 per millimeter for the 2TB Ultra Slim compared to the Slim model.

The drive is bus-powered through a micro USB 3.0 port. It sips power, so it will also run fine when you connect it to a USB 2.0 port on your host system.

Software

We found the software already on the drive, and it has a simple-to-use executable file for Windows. Seagate also includes a similar setup file for MacOS in a DMG file. The drive also carries a warranty PDF. Seagate offers a special MacOS driver for the NTFS file system, but users have to download the driver from Seagate's website.

The software package is impressive, and you shouldn’t overlook it. The software provides two years of OneDrive services that include 200GB of cloud data storage. The OneDrive credit is worth $95 alone, which all but covers the cost of the hardware. The Seagate Dashboard handles data backup duty, but it doesn't stop there. The Dashboard also integrates with social platforms like Facebook and YouTube for easy sharing of multimedia files. Lyve brings a NAS-like component to the Ultra Slim so you can share your content across all of your devices, even mobile platforms.

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Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews consumer storage.
17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • daglesj
    Nice looking...shame it has a Seagate HDD in it though...
    Reply
  • thundervore
    18637129 said:
    Nice looking...shame it has a Seagate HDD in it though...

    My thoughts exactly.

    No matter what Seagate does I will never forget the 8TB I lost I one swoop.
    Reply
  • 3ogdy
    DaglesJ and Thudervore have just read my thoughts. A Seagate HDD? No thanks, I still remember how they asked me for over $1000 in order to recover data from a 7200.14 2TB Barracuda that literally did nothing but sit in a case - all less than a year into warranty (they also asked me for the serial in order to invalidate the warranty with me on the damn phone - I can't believe it to this day I've been through this nightmare with Shitgate!). It wasn't my first dead Seagate either. Have multiple other drives lying around here. I'm done with this company and it's problematic producs they don't stand behind. Good design, too bad it's Seagate hardware.

    Nope, not touching that POS.

    REMEMBER: If you frequently fix computers and make I.T. decisions for people you hate, buy them Seagate hardware.
    Screw their pricing. Their plan is to sell super cheap hardware, then make tons of money off recovery services that cost an arm & a leg.
    Reply
  • takeshi7
    18637390 said:
    DaglesJ and Thudervore have just read my thoughts. A Seagate HDD? No thanks, I still remember how they asked me for over $1000 in order to recover data from a 7200.14 2TB Barracuda that literally did nothing but sit in a case - all less than a year into warranty (they also asked me for the serial in order to invalidate the warranty with me on the damn phone - I can't believe it to this day I've been through this nightmare with Shitgate!). It wasn't my first dead Seagate either. Have multiple other drives lying around here. I'm done with this company and it's problematic producs they don't stand behind. Good design, too bad it's Seagate hardware.

    Nope, not touching that POS.

    REMEMBER: If you frequently fix computers and make I.T. decisions for people you hate, buy them Seagate hardware.
    Screw their pricing. Their plan is to sell super cheap hardware, then make tons of money off recovery services that cost an arm & a leg.
    Hard drives fail. It's just a fact of life. You should have had a backup. Then you never would have needed expensive recovery services. There are 3rd party recovery services as well.
    Reply
  • dstarr3
    18637869 said:
    Hard drives fail. It's just a fact of life. You should have had a backup. Then you never would have needed expensive recovery services. There are 3rd party recovery services as well.

    Hard drives do fail. And most of those are Seagates. The last time I used Seagates, I bought a pair of 320GB drives. One for use, one for backup. The main one failed and was replaced. While I was restoring the backup, the backup hard drive failed and I lost most of the data on it. Been a loyal WD customer since. Have I had WD drives fail? Yes. Has the frequency of failed drives dropped substantially with WD? Also yes.
    Reply
  • ohim
    18637248 said:
    18637129 said:
    Nice looking...shame it has a Seagate HDD in it though...

    My thoughts exactly.

    No matter what Seagate does I will never forget the 8TB I lost I one swoop.

    In digital era if you don`t have backup you don`t have the info, if you put all your data in one drive then it`s your fault not the drive manufacturer. I have only Seagate since my 486 and only 1 drive failed on me till now, indeed they had some bad series but it happens.
    Reply
  • prince_13
    maybe give a chance on seagate :D
    Reply
  • prince_13
    i just wonder which is better external HDD ? toshiba or seagate ? :D which one is good ?
    Reply
  • 3ogdy
    18640190 said:
    i just wonder which is better external HDD ? toshiba or seagate ? :D which one is good ?

    I'd recommend HGST because of reliability. Toshibas are cheaper and I have some of their drives too. Haven't had a problem with them, honestly.
    Reply
  • 3ogdy
    18637869 said:
    18637390 said:
    DaglesJ and Thudervore have just read my thoughts. A Seagate HDD? No thanks, I still remember how they asked me for over $1000 in order to recover data from a 7200.14 2TB Barracuda that literally did nothing but sit in a case - all less than a year into warranty (they also asked me for the serial in order to invalidate the warranty with me on the damn phone - I can't believe it to this day I've been through this nightmare with Shitgate!). It wasn't my first dead Seagate either. Have multiple other drives lying around here. I'm done with this company and it's problematic producs they don't stand behind. Good design, too bad it's Seagate hardware.

    Nope, not touching that POS.

    REMEMBER: If you frequently fix computers and make I.T. decisions for people you hate, buy them Seagate hardware.
    Screw their pricing. Their plan is to sell super cheap hardware, then make tons of money off recovery services that cost an arm & a leg.
    Hard drives fail. It's just a fact of life. You should have had a backup. Then you never would have needed expensive recovery services. There are 3rd party recovery services as well.

    Oh, look! Here's someone who says I should buy 2x4TB HDDs and use only half of that because the other one is just to make copies of my files, all while SPENDING TWICE AS MUCH ON THE SAME SHIT. That's thanks to one's reasonable expectations of a product's usability & lifetime.
    Why? Well, because a dog gamn company can't get its excrement together, make reliable hardware and then stand behind its products (looking at you, SEAGATE)

    Reply