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
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
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
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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