Update 5/4/2026 11:25am PT: Added comment from Temu spokesperson.

A Reddit user who gambled a mere $20 on a 4TB external HDD from Temu has revealed, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that the drive was actually a scam, showing that it contained nothing but innards of a microSD card reader with a generic memory card attached to it. According to the post on the subreddit r/pcmasterrace, they decided to risk purchasing the item off the marketplace because it only cost $20. By comparison, the 4TB variant of the WD My Passport external hard drive costs around $165. The SSD version, one of our best external SSDs, costs $719.99 on Amazon. It’s obvious that the item is fake, but since the absolute dollar value is minimal for the user, they decided to gamble on it.

"Temu requires sellers to ensure their products match their listings accurately and removes listings that do not meet platform standards. Buyers who receive items that do not match their description are eligible for a full refund under the Purchase Protection Program," a Temu spokesperson tells us.

I got a 4TB external drive off Temu and this is what they sent lmao from r/pcmasterrace

In fact, the scam was so obvious that Temu refunded the purchase "suspiciously easily." Instead of finding a 2.5-inch SATA drive inside its plastic casing, all they found was a microSD card reader hot-glued to the back. It’s unclear if they attached it to their PC to see if it reported and delivered the claimed 4TB capacity. This is unlikely, though, because the highest capacity microSD card readily available on Amazon is only 2TB and costs at least $289.99.

Even then, some scammers tamper with the storage firmware to make it show a larger capacity than what’s available. One reliable way of finding this out is through testing software like the H2testw utility or by filling up the drive with your files, only to discover that your data has overwritten itself because of the lack of space.

Fake drives have been around for so long, but it’s proliferating even more now because the AI-driven chip shortage is causing both SSDs and HDDs to skyrocket in price. This fake drive is easy to spot, as it probably feels lighter when compared to a real hard drive, but some dupes do a good job in copying the look of the original, and you’ll only discover that it’s not what it says it is when you plug it into your PC. Even then, some knockoffs offer performance close to what you’d expect, so much so that you’d only know it’s a fake if you know what you’re looking for.

Temu is known for selling cheap knockoffs; that’s why many Reddit users do not recommend purchasing storage drives and other sensitive electronics off the website. Nevertheless, it does come through sometimes, like this user who received a free RTX 3060 GPU, although they’re yet to see if they really hit the jackpot.

External 3.5-inch-based hard drives for backup and expanded storage have been common for decades (I brought one with me to college in 2000). But they typically required large laptop-style external power bricks, were often painfully slow, and were prone to random data-eating failure (ask me how I know). Seagate’s game-focused FireCuda X Vault drive (available in 8TB and 20TB options; we tested the 8TB) attempts to mitigate some of those past frustrations using a single USB-C connection that also powers the drive.

It’s also faster than portable hard drives (like the WD My Passport I tested in 2024), delivering a little under 200 MB/s writes in our real-world 50GB file transfer test. And if data loss concerns you, the FireCuda X Vault, like most Seagate drives, ships with two years of the company’s in-house Data Recovery Service. Of course, sub-200 MB/s speeds aren’t going to compete with even mid-range SSD these days, and at roughly 7.75x 2.1 x 5.25 inches and 2.75 pounds, it’s much larger than something like Sandisk’s solid-state Desk Drive (which I also tested at 8TB). But that 8TB desk-bound SSD is currently selling for $740, while Seagate’s 8TB spinning-platter Vault has an MSRP of $269. Is the Seagate Firecuda X Vault (which, apart from its built-in RGB, doesn’t look all that different from external 3.5-inch external drives I owned in the early 2000s) a smart storage option for gamers in 2026? Let’s walk through its features, put it through our external storage testing, and find out if it deserves a spot on our list of the best external hard drives and SSDs.

Specifications

Design and features of the Seagate FireCuda X Vault

The Seagate FireCuda X Vault looks and feels a lot like any other external 3.5-inch external drive, perhaps with a bit more gamer edginess, thanks to some plastic slats designed to look like cooling fins and a wrap-around top surface with some cutouts to let the RGB shine through. The entire outer shell is plastic, save for a large foam pad on the bottom that’s there to prevent the drive sliding around on your desk (and also to hide the access screws underneath). The drive doesn't exactly scream premium storage, but it doesn’t feel or look cheap, either.

The sole port, which is USB-C, is housed on the rear center. And because this is a bus-powered drive, you’ll need to use a port (and a cable) that’s capable of delivering 15W of power. That might mean plugging the drive into the back of your PC if you’re using a desktop. And considering most modern systems don’t have more than two or three native USB-C ports, you might have to pick up a powered USB-C hub if you have other peripherals that need those ports.

The drive ships with a 0.5-meter (1.64 feet) removable USB-C-to-USB-C cable.

Software on the Seagate FireCuda X Vault

Seagate is going hard on software trials with the FireCuda X Vault. A small pamphlet in the box gives you access to a 1-month trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and two months of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Pro. While these are, of course, designed to suck you into an ongoing service, it is roughly $100 worth of software access if you were to pay for it yourself.

The drive itself ships empty, save for a shortcut to an online registration page and a PDF of the drive’s warranty.

You can also grab Seagate’s Toolkit software, which provides simple but straightforward controls for backing up, mirroring folders, and granular controls of the RGB lighting on the top of the drive. I also appreciate that the drive was recognized by Windows Dynamic Lighting, which let me customize the RGB well before I downloaded Seagate’s Toolkit.

Comparison Products

We haven’t tested many external spinning-platter hard drives in recent years, save for WD’s 6TB portable hard drive (based around a much smaller 2.5-inch hard drive), which is also bus-powered but still uses the archaic USB 3 Micro-B port. But Seagate also sent along its also-new One Touch HDD (available in 8TB, 20TB, and 24TB models, for $10 less than the FireCuda X Vault and competing capacities) drive, which is a bit slimmer (and seen above, left) and also gets power and data over USB-C.

To round out our charts and see what you can get in other form factors, we’ve included Sandisk’s 8TB Desk Drive (which is almost 3x the price, but much faster). We also tossed in Samsung’s slow (for an SSD) T5 Evo drive, as well as a fast flash drive, Kingston’s 1TB DataTraveler Max.

The solid-state options are, for the most part, much faster, as well as generally a lot smaller. But thanks to AI-driven price hikes in the past several months, you’ll pay a whole lot more for 8TB of SSD storage – even though hard drives are also more expensive than they used to be. Generally, unless price really is no option these days, if you need 8TB of storage or more (especially from a single drive), you’re going to opt for a hard drive.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Of course, the SanDisk desktop SSD and the Kingston flash drive beat the hard drives here (and in most tests). Seagate’s FireCuda drive manages to beat out the less-than-speedy Samsung T5 portable SSD, and WD’s smaller portable hard drive. But interestingly, it’s the Seagate One Touch that tops all the hard drives on this chart.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50 GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

In this real-world transfer test, Seagate’s FireCuda drive takes its expected spot atop the other hard drives in our test pool. But Samsung’s T5 is faster, as are the other solid-state drives here. Still, it’s good to see the FireCuda landing around the 200 MB/s read and write range, which is about what we would expect for a performance-focused consumer hard drive here in 2026.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

This sequential synthetic test is a sort of best-case test for SSDs, so you can see that those pricier-per-capacity drives are much faster here. But interestingly, we again see the Seagate FireCuda drive landing below its One Touch hard drive sibling on this test. Given the reverse was true (and there was a wider margin) in DiskBench above, it’s safe to say the FireCuda drive will be slightly faster in real-world file transfers, despite the numbers here.

Again, this synthetic small-file test sees the Seagate One Touch doing a little better than the FireCuda drive, but the two are effectively tied, especially when it comes to writes. One thing that’s clear from all these tests is that, while a smaller portable drive might be more convenient, the WD My Passport (with an internal 2.5-inch drive) is significantly slower than the newer, larger, Seagate drives (based around internal 3.5-inch drives).

Bottom Line

Seagate’s FireCuda X Vault is a bus-powered 3.5-inch drive, available in 8TB and 20TB options, aimed at gamers with some RGB lighting (which thankfully doesn’t require additional control software in Windows 11). It performs noticeably better than smaller portable hard drives we’ve tested, and is slightly faster than some other 3.5-inch alternatives.

Apart from the lighting and a trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, there isn’t much particularly gaming-specific about it. But if you’re looking for a place to store your streaming footage or a massive game library, it does the job while costing a lot less than a comparative spacious SSD. Its primary downside is also its primary convenience. One USB-C cable can power the drive while providing data access. That’s great for anyone who has dealt with external drive power bricks in the past. But how many USB-C ports do you have that are capable of delivering this drive’s 15W power requirements? If you plan to keep this drive plugged in, you might also need to invest in a capable dock or USB hub with power delivery and multiple USB-C ports.

Maker Will Whang has designed and open sourced an MK4001MTD USB Bridge. This is a USB mass storage compatible device which facilitates the use of the world’s smallest mechanical hard drives (obsolete for many years) with modern tech.

Toshiba launched its 0.85-inch MK4001MTD hard drives in 2004, offering an attractive-at-the -time balance of capacity and pricing. However, as they were sidelined quite rapidly due to the advance of flash memory tech, not many device designs adopted them. This has led to these tiny HDDs, and the data upon them, basically getting lost in time.

Whang explains that several prior attempts had been made at accessing the obsolete MK4001MTD drives, but they had fallen at various hurdles. So, the maker decided to start collecting working (and non-working) units to see if they could crack this particular old storage nut.

Starting with the basics, Whang compared drives and reader interface pads that looked similar to the MK4001MTD. Yes, it looks somewhat like an SD card with an MMC-style connector. So, various old/spare readers were used with the Toshiba drives to see what happened. Eventually, Whang decided to build their own reader based around the USB2240 flash media controller chip. It thus became possible to use a logic analyzer to see what signals were going where.

Unfortunately, it became clear that “this was not behaving like a normal SD or MMC storage device.” So, more analysis would be necessary, which would extend all the way into a reverse engineering effort.

For this next stage of the project, Whang acquired a beaten-up but usable Nokia N91. This mobile device was one of the rare MK4001MTD adopters back in the mid-noughties.

After getting the old phone to boot, so they could capture the traces, the purpose of each pad became much clearer. “The traces confirms this is a 4-bit SD/MMC interface and N91 service manual pin connection is indeed correct. The bus activity showed CMD52 traffic, which immediately pointed toward SDIO rather than a normal memory-card mode,” says Whang. “Looking further into the command contents, it also appeared that ATA-style commands such as IDENTIFY DEVICE were being transported over that interface.”

With the rough idea about what was going on, the maker decided to leverage OpenClaw to look after the software side of a USB reader solution. The AI agent was broadly successful, notes Whang, as it “successfully reverse-engineered the logic traces by building its own SDIO decoder, then wrote firmware for the Pico that exposes the drive as USB mass storage.”

Encouraged by the OpenClaw success, Whang decided to turn to Oups 4.6 and later GPT-5.4 for an improved result, which worked with their breadboarded Pico and a hand-wired drive.

Hardware design stage

Now happy with the software, firmware, and interface design, Whang decided to fire up KiCad and design a custom PCB for a neat, professional-looking solution. It shares the design language of the maker’s prior 1-inch MicroDrive project.

The result is that USB access to the MK4001MTD works reliably but is a pedestrian 0.42 MB per second read/write speed, at best, with the SDIO clock set to 10 MHz. This Toshiba drive was a measly 4GB (less than a DVD capacity), but at such a slow transfer speed, it would take about two and a half hours to read a full HDD or write it to full.

Whang concludes that they are happy with the collaborative work with a reasoning-focused LLM, and future projects might follow a similar structure. All the source code, hardware design files, and more have been shared on GitHub under the most liberal “I don’t care” license.

If you're always running out of storage for your backups or media collection, you need a big deal on an even bigger hard drive. Luckily, there's a huge discount on a Seagate external HDD that will knock your socks off. A whopping 28TB of hard drive storage space is available, which leaves you with a huge amount of space for documents, photos, and videos.

It's all down to Amazon, which has dropped the price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 28TB HDD to £419.99, ready for you to pre-order before deliveries begin in a few days' time on 17th December. There simply aren't many other options available with this capacity, and the options that do exist involve individual drives that often cost you hundreds of pounds more, so you'll want to jump on this deal before it releases.

• Check out the deal at Amazon

For just under £15 per TB, you're getting a traditional 3.5" hard disk drive inside its own portable enclosure. The enclosure features its own power supply, which you'll need to hook up to a nearby socket, while using a USB 3.0 cable to connect this drive to your PC or laptop for file transfers. You're also getting Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery service included, just in case your drive fails and you need to try to recover your data.

You'd usually pick up an external hard drive like this one if you weren't too worried about extremely fast transfer rates. This isn't an SSD, after all. It's also a good alternative to a full-blown NAS, and isn't as expensive.

If you're looking for a drive you can install directly into your PC, that's not totally out of consideration, either. Some of these enclosures use enterprise-grade Exos drives, which you can remove from the enclosure itself. Shucking, as this is called, will almost certainly void your warranty, but it can be a great way to pick up a high-capacity HDD at a much lower cost. You'll also need to research what these drives actually contain if this is your aim, however, as it can be a bit of a minefield.

This 28TB Seagate Expansion HDD is encased in an enclosure made from a rugged black plastic, measuring 7 x 2 x 5 inches, and sits on small rubber feet on the bottom of the chassis. You'll find the power and USB connections at the back of the drive, but as I mentioned already, you can't power this over USB. This needs the external AC power adapter to run, so make sure to keep a spare socket nearby.

You'll also need to be close enough to your PC or laptop. You do have an approx. 45cm USB 3.0 cable, so there is a little bit of length to play with here, although you can purchase a new data cable later. Setting this drive up should be as simple as plugging it into your PC or laptop, as long as it has power.

Should you run into any issues with the drive, especially if you think it's failed, you can call on Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery service, which guarantees you a single in-lab attempt by professionals to recover the data. There's no guarantee this will work, but it's nice to have the option to try, just in case.

This £419.99 28TB Seagate Extension Desktop HDD is a very affordable price for a drive of this capacity, especially with the option to shuck it. If you want it, you can pre-order it before dispatches begin on the 17th December. There's no guarantee that it won't sell out before then, however, so be sure to get your orders in quickly.

If you're looking for further savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard or CPU Deals pages.

If you're serious about your storage, then you're not going to be switching completely to SSDs (at least, not yet). Nothing quite beats the traditional hard drive when its come to sheer storage capacity, which is why a serious data hoarders is going to take a strong interest in this WD external hard drive deal, available with a huge £148 saving for Black Friday.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

This WD Elements 16TB external hard drive is down to just £258.99 on Amazon right now, and while the drive has yo-yo'd in price, according to Camelcamelcamel data, this is still a historically good discount, even if it isn't the lowest it's ever been. This great deal is also priced well against the wider market, with drives featuring similar capacity and specs priced higher, even with discounts.

The WD Elements 16TB is designed to be a portable place to store all of your treasured files, whether it's your photos, music, movies, or improved documents. 16TB of storage is significantly more storage than the common PC or laptop might typically hold, putting it closer to a NAS in terms of the sheer volume of space you'll have at your disposal.

Unlike a NAS, however, you're not hooking this up to your network with an Ethernet cable. This connects to your existing system easily with a standard USB 3.1 Gen 1 port, so compatibility shouldn't really be a concern, and a Windows PC should detect it with no fuss.

The good news, for those who like cracking open their equipment, is that the WD Elements 16TB features a shuckable drive. That means you can easily remove the physical drive, hidden inside the enclosure, and reuse it in your PC or NAS. This will void the two-year warranty that comes with the drive, however, so make sure you're happy with that before you proceed.

Measuring 5.31 x 1.89 x 6.53 inches and weighing 0.9 pounds, this isn't a physically heavy or large drive to handle, and can be moved around, even if it isn't as portable as an external SSD might be. It does require external power, however, and you'll need to keep a spare socket nearby to hook it up with juice, as it can't be powered over just USB.

If you're looking for a large repository for your files, this £258.99 WD Elements 16TB drive is ready for you to plug in and start loading. Mac users will need to format it with a file system that macOS can read, but that isn't too much bother, either.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, or CPU Deals pages.

Fake hard drives have become more common over the past decade or so, as online marketplaces have connected third-party sellers and buyers. That's exactly what happened to Reddit user u/BulyudiPorti, who purchased a Seagate external hard drive — or at least thought they did — and received a hollow drive with barely anything inside.

datahoarder from r/DataHoarder/comments/1nykjtr/fake_seagate_external_drives

As seen above, the user opened the drive only to find a small circuit board driving a microSD Card, glued to the chassis with a piece of metal underneath. An identical metal block is also attached to the top lid to give it a false sense of heft, so it feels real at first glance. The user echoes that sentiment, saying how "everything about it looked and felt legit," up until the disassembly revealed what was really lying under the hood.

No further details were shared, such as where the drive was purchased, but we can see it's packaged as a 1TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim, a fairly common option on the market. The innards of this model reveal a 2.5-inch SATA hard drive inside the enclosure, with a SATA-to-USB adapter at the top. So, it's safe to say that seeing a sticky SD card hastily strapped together in there instead confirms you've been scammed.

Lots of commenters pointed out that this is easily avoidable: all you need to do is buy from reputable vendors or marketplaces with stringent consumer protection laws. The original poster never replied, possibly lending credence to the narrative that they perhaps got it from somewhere disreputable, with one commenter mocking, "Wdym the $29.90 24TB drive is a scam?" Since there are no conclusive details, we must reserve our judgment.

Stay vigilant out there, no matter where you're buying from. If a deal looks way too enticing, it's most likely a scam, and bad actors are often ten steps ahead of you to game the system out of issuing returns. However, even buying from reputable platforms can sometimes end badly. Just recently, someone received a literal brick in lieu of the RTX 5080 they ordered from Amazon, and that's just one story out of countless others. Check out our roundup of the best external drives to inform yourself of what's actually worth buying. We also regularly scour for deals so you can score a legit discount.

Secure data storage manufacturer iStorage has announced new versions of its encrypted desktop hard drives, the diskAshur DT3 and diskAshur DT2. Both drives offer PIN authentication and hardware-level encryption. They will now be available with up to 26TB capacity, making them suitable for users looking for high-capacity storage with enhanced security measures.

The diskAshur DT3 is notably the world's first encrypted hard drive currently undergoing certification for FIPS 140-3 Level 3, an updated U.S. standard for cryptographic security. For context, FIPS 140-2 certified drives (like the diskAshur DT2) are currently the standard for securing sensitive data across sectors like government, defense, finance, and healthcare.

However, FIPS 140-2 is expected to be phased out by September 2026 in favor of FIPS 140-3. The new standard is said to offer improved security features such as tamper resistance, enhanced encryption, better key management, and protection against side-channel attacks, at the same time aligning with global regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.

The diskAshur DT3 is also TAA compliant and features FIPS PUB 197-validated AES-XTS 256-bit hardware encryption and a Common Criteria EAL5+ certified secure microprocessor. On the other hand, the diskAshur DT2 is also quite secure, featuring a Common Criteria EAL5+ certified microprocessor and accreditations from NCSC CPA, FIPS 140-2 Level 3, NLNCSA BSPA, and NATO Restricted.

Buffalo Japan has launched a special limited edition USB hard disk to commemorate 50 years since the firm's founding. The new Buffalo HD-SKL 'skeleton hard disk' (machine translated) features a transparent panel, which is nicely visible when using the external drive's angled stand. Through the panel, owners can see the platters spinning and the read/write heads skating across the magnetic surface.

As a commemorative product, the attractions of this hardware lean heavily on its looks, rather than its functionality. Buffalo boasts of the "premium quality" machined and anodized aluminum construction of its anniversary 4TB HDD. The packaging is quite lavish for this kind of product, too.

For a real piece of executive desk toy action, users can load up some software from Buffalo called SeekWizard (Windows only). This application allows users to animate the HDD arm visible through the window in the following modes (remember this information is based on a machine translation, but these modes seem to make some sense):

• Random seek,
• Sequential seek,
• Metronome,
• Cascading,
• Second hand stepping,
• Wave,
• and Timer.

Perhaps Buffalo missed a trick by not illuminating the 'skeleton hard disk' window with some kind of lighting effects. But it is not following the latest trend of making products with RGB backlit windows showing inner workings – like the new Asus ROG Flow Z13, and the latest Alienware PCs. In fact, this product is a follow-up to one Buffalo previously launched back in 1978 – its first Skeleton HDD model.

Though they aren't entirely relevant to the appeal of this limited edition product, let's look a bit closer at the specs. We already mentioned that this is a 4TB HDD at heart. The drive sits in a nicely made angled metal bracket and the whole caboodle weighs about 1.5kg. If you want to use it as more than an inanimate ornament, you will need to plug it into your Mac or PC via its USB 3.2 (Gen 1) Micro-B interface. A 1m cable is in the box, as is an AC adapter. Remember, this drive's special SeekWizard software only works with Windows, for now.

Check out this great deal on one of the largest external HDDs on the market. Data backup enthusiasts rejoice — if you need a high-capacity storage option for your desktop, this large 28TB drive has plenty of space for you to store your pictures and videos, as well as a massive amount of any other data types. The Seagate Expansion drive is a large traditional hard disk drive contained in an external enclosure that requires its own power source. These external storage solutions are fantastic for storing data that doesn't require superfast transfer rates and are a convenient solution if you don't want to go down the NAS route. Some of these external HDD enclosures are good for shucking the drives out of, but do some research into what drives they contain, as shucking the drive will most certainly void the warranty.

You can save $60 on the list price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 28TB HDD, now only $329 at Best Buy. The massive 28TB capacity means more room for your files, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds will be fast enough for most storage and backup situations.

The 28TB Seagate Expansion HHD is housed in a rugged black plastic case that measures 7x2x5 inches with small feet on the bottom of the chassis. Power and USB cable connections are located at the rear of the drive, and this is where you will need to connect the external AC power adapter. Make sure you have ample power outlets available for connecting this device alongside your desktop PC or laptop.

The Seagate Expansion Desktop 28TB HDD comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable included in the box. Accompanying the purchase of the Seagate drive is the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups should the drive fail and you need to recover your precious data.

Don't forget to look at our Best Buy coupon codes for April 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Best Buy.

Ahead of celebrating World Backup Day at the end of the month, we've spotted this great deal on a large external HDD. Data backup enthusiasts who need high-capacity storage options to store their precious data can easily pick up this large 26TB drive and store a massive amount of data. Although unsuitable for hosting the file installations for running your computer games, these more traditional hard disk drives in these external storage solutions are fantastic for storing data that doesn't require superfast transfer rates. So, if you want something to accompany a NAS setup, a stand-alone solution, or even to shuck, this Seagate external HDD deal may interest you.

You can save $50 on the list price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 26TB HDD, now only $299 at Best Buy. The large 26TB capacity means more room for your files, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds are fast enough for most storage and backup situations.

The Seagate Expansion external HHD is housed in a rugged black plastic chassis measuring about 7x2x5 inches with small feet on the bottom and power and USB cable connections at the rear of the drive. This unit has an external AC power adapter, which will need a power outlet to run.

The Seagate Expansion Desktop 26TB HDD comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable included in the box. With a purchase of this Seagate external HDD, you also have the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups.

Don't forget to look at our Best Buy coupon codes for March 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Best Buy.

Today's deal is for those data backup enthusiasts who need high-capacity storage options to store their precious data. Not suitable for high-speed gaming, the traditional hard disk drives in these external storage solutions use long-lasting, reliable mechanical drives. So if you want something to accompany a NAS setup, a stand-alone solution, or even to shuck, this Seagate external HDD deal may be of interest to you.

Available from Best Buy, you can save $50 on the list price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 24TB HDD, now only $279. The large 24TB capacity means more room for your files, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds won't be horrendous.

The Seagate Expansion external HHD comes in a rugged black plastic chassis measuring about 7x2x5 inches with small feet on the bottom and a power and USB cable connection on the rear. This unit does need external power to run, and the AC power adapter is included in the packaging.

Included in the box with the Seagate Expansion Desktop 24TB HDD is an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable. With a purchase of this Seagate external HDD, you also have the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups.

Don't forget to look at our Best Buy coupon codes for February 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Best Buy.

Everything is digital now, and a need for more and more storage is commonplace, but having large, friendly storage options that are readily available at a moment's notice and won't cost you a kidney isn't as common. You can back up many things to the cloud, but that requires a good connection, available storage capacity, and the right devices. Plus, why complicate things when you can just grab your trusty portable HDD and connect via USB and backup or transport 5TB of data for the lowest price we've seen this portable HDD on sale for?

Head to Amazon to find this great deal. You can pick up Western Digital's WD Elements 5TB portable HDD for just $89,a reduction in price of $50 from the original $139 MSRP list price. The Camelizer price checking tool shows the average price of this drive is $115, with today's price drop equalling its all-time low price of $89. So if you're in the market for some portable extra storage then this could be the deal for you.

The WD Elements 5TB portable HDD is contained in a rugged plastic chassis for protection and can easily connect to your Windows PC, Mac, or laptop via USB. The device is plug-and-play for super easy use and has fast (up to 5Gbps) transfer speeds over the USB 3.2 Gen 1 bandwidth.

Use this drive to store your photos, videos, music, and any other important documents. Take files on the go, or just use them as redundancy for even more data security. The WD Elements portable HDD also comes with a limited 2-year manufacturer's warranty for peace of mind.

Don't forget to look at our Amazon coupon codes for February 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Amazon.

If you're looking for more storage, you've got to check out this deal on the Seagate Expansion Desktop 20TB HDD. It usually goes for around $279 but right now it's marked down to just $229 at Best Buy. This is a great option for anyone looking for more storage for something like a NAS, media center, or backups for game files. That said, if you want something dedicated to gaming you would be better off performance-wise looking for an SSD instead.

If you want to get an idea of how well this HDD compares against others on the market today, you should check out our list of best hard drives for 2025. We don't have this exact model on our list but we haven't had the opportunity to get our hands on it yet for a review. You will, however, find other Seagate drives on the list so we know for sure the brand is among the most reputable.

Today's offer applies only to the 20TB model but you will find other capacities ranging from as small as 4TB all the way up to 24TB. The Seagate Expansion Desktop 20TB HDD is USB 3.0 compatible. Because this is a desktop HDD, a power cable is required for it to operate in addition to the USB connection. It has a small form factor, measuring in at 7.04/1.65/4.92in and weighing just under 3lb at 2.59lb.

With this purchase, you receive the Seagate Expansion Desktop 20TB HDD, an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable, and the power cable. You also have the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups. The purchase includes a limited warranty from Seagate and is also supported by Best Buy's return policy.

Visit the Seagate Expansion Desktop 20TB HDD product page at BestBuy for more details and purchase options.

For today's Black Friday deal, you can grab a WD easystore 20TB external drive at an incredibly low price, knocking off $200 from its $449.99 retail price, allowing you to allow you grab one for a mere $249.99. This effectively brings its price down to around 1 cent per GB — $0.0125 if we're being precise. Despite being a mechanical drive, you're getting a large storage space for cheap, with a two-year warranty. No discount code is needed for this purchase.

That's a great deal for Black Friday, especially considering the drive is shuckable. That means you can pry the HDD out of the external casing and use it for your desktop PC. You should proceed at your own risk, though: Shucking the drive voids the normal two-year warranty, but you do get a capable drive for far cheaper than you normally would.

While there are options in different capacities, the easystore 20TB variant gives more space for the money you spend on it, as the 22TB version is only $100 off. Since this is a Black Friday deal, the pricing will also depend on how soon you can grab it, while stock lasts.

The drive needs additional power from an AC adapter bundled with the drive, which gives USB 3.0 speed with a Type-B to Type-A cable. These drives are brand new. WD confirms compatibility with both Windows and macOS. The easystore external drive bundles management and backup software should you be looking for a complete package as a backup unit for your PC.

Best Buy also offers the option to pay for this drive in four installments, bringing the price to $62.50 while keeping the total at $250, but we recommend just buying one outright. Once purchased, you can pick up the drive from your local Best Buy store or have it shipped, depending on your location.

To buy this WD easystore 20TB, click on this Best Buy link. We are working hard to find the best deals for you this Black Friday. If you're looking for other products, check out our Black Friday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages. 

If you want a lot of storage, for a reasonable amount of money, and it doesn't have to be lightning-fast, then there's still a place for older HDD backup drives in your inventory. With a USB 3.0 connection, you have access to the 5Gbps bus bandwidth of the USB 3.0 standard, not the speediest of backup options, but it is one of the most cost-effective.

Take advantage of the following deal at Newegg and save $30 off of the cost of the Seagate Expansion 14TB External HDD - at only $179. The price of this 14TB drive works out as only 1 cent per GB, which is a pretty good price for backing up some of your important files and data.

Setup of this external drive is pretty straightforward with everything you need included. Simply plug in the included power supply and USB cable, and you can connect to your computer device whether it's a Windows PC or Mac. The drive will be automatically recognized by the operating system, so there is no software to install and nothing to configure.

The drive comes with its own limited warranty from Seagate, ensuring you get a speedy replacement in the event of hardware failure, but also you have access to a Rescue Data Recovery Service to help recover any of your lost data should something happen to the drive.

Western Digital this week introduced a series of 6TB external hard drives based on 2.5-inch HDDs, which highlights the first new capacity point for this hard disk drive form factor in about seven years. There is a catch, though: the HDD is slow and will unlikely fit into any mobile PCs, so it looks like it will exclusively serve portable and specialized storage products.

Western Digital's 6TB 2.5-inch HDD is currently used for the latest versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external storage devices and is not available separately. All of these drives (excluding the already very thick G-Drive ArmorATD) are thicker than their 5 TB predecessors, which may suggest that in a bid to increase the HDD's capacity, the manufacturer simply installed another platter and made the whole drive thicker instead of developing new platters with a higher areal density.

While this is a legitimate way to expand the capacity of a hard drive, it is necessary to note that 5TB 2.5-inch HDDs already feature a 15-mm z-height, which is the highest standard z-height for 2.5-inch form-factor storage devices. As a result, these 6TB 2.5-inch drives will unlikely fit into any desktop PC.

When it comes to specifications of the latest My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external HDDs, Western Digital only discloses that they offer up to 130 MB/s read speed (just like their predecessors), feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (up to 5 GT/s) interface using either a modern USB Type-C or Micro USB Type-B connector and do not require an external power adapter.

Western Digital does not disclose whether its 6TB My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external HDDs rely on shingled magnetic recording (SMR), like predecessors, or conventional magnetic recording (CMR), but we suppose that we are dealing with SMR drives. Their read performance and increased thickness suggest that the manufacturer added another platter with a similar areal density as that on lower-capacity HDDs, which may be more evidence that we are dealing with SMR. That said, expect particularly low performance when re-writing the data on such drives.

Western Digital said that the new drives are now available for retail purchase. The WD My Passport Ultra and WD My Passport Ultra for Mac with USB-C are priced at $199.99 each, and the WD My Passport and WD My Passport for Mac are available for $179.99. 

The WD My Passport Works With USB-C is $184.99, while the gaming-oriented WD_Black P10 Game Drive is also $184.99. The SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD retails for $229.99. All of Western Digital's external storage drives come with a three-year limited warranty.

Sony is rolling out redesigned, smaller PlayStation 5 models in November, including a new optional Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disc Drive that can pair to a Digital Edition PS5 in order to let digital gamers move to discs later. But it appears that those who decide to add a Blu-ray drive later on will require an internet connection to pair the console and the drive together.

Call of Duty-focused site Charlie Intel posted images on X (formerly known as Twitter) of a Call of Duty Modern Warfare III bundle featuring the slim PS5, and readers noticed that the fine print on the box reads "Internet connection required to pair Disc Drive and PS5 console upon setup."

It's a fair bit of irony for a medium that gamers like because physical copies mean you can play games even if servers are shut down later on.

Some X users likened the move to putting DRM on the optional disc drive, with some worrying about issues when, many years down the line, Sony may shut down servers supporting the PlayStation 5 and the disc drive, preventing the preservation and play of these games.

Community Notes on X point to a Wired story from December 2020 that may, in part, answer why this is occurring. That article points out that both Sony and Microsoft "lock down the software they use to pair their disc readers with their consoles' motherboards." This may be an attempt to ensure compliance with Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is what makes it illegal to "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work." In that case, pairing the disc drive and the motherboards ensures that you're using a legitimate first-party accessory, and not one that can enable piracy.

Of course, pirates have rarely been stopped by firmware pairing, though third-party repairs sure can suffer. It's likely that you'll only need to connect to the internet one time, on first use, to pair the drive. It's unclear if Sony will ever remove the requirement, perhaps when the next generation of consoles comes out.

Sony did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. If we hear back, we'll update the story.

The new PlayStation 5, which some have taken to calling the PS5 Slim, is set to launch in November alongside the existing design. Once the original design is out of stock, the new one will be the default.

Sony is bumping the storage on the PS5 from an 825GB SSD to 1TB. The PS5 with a disc drive will run for $499.99, while the Digital Edition will be $449.99 (a $50 increase from the existing model). Those who want to add a disc drive to the Digital Edition later can pay $79.99 for the accessory.

How do you keep external spinning-platter hard drives relevant in a world where the price of much-speedier solid-state drives is cratering? You go big or go home – and Western Digital is clearly going big.

The company's latest additions to its "My Book" lineup pack up to two 22TB internal 3.5-inch hard drives. That gives you a cavernous 44TB unformatted capacity with the top-end My Book Duo, which the company's press release states will "help consumers preserve their ever-growing digital world."

At 22TB, WD says the single-drive My Book model is WD's highest-capacity consumer drive to date. But bare 3.5-inch 22TB hard drives have been available from the WD since the middle of last year. There's no doubt that sealed external hard drives serve a different market of USB plug-and-play consumers than people who buy internal drives for PCs or NAS boxes. There will certainly, though, be those interested in shucking these drives to get at the 3.5-inch drive (or drives) inside.

At launch, though, the My Book drives are primarily going to appeal to those who need lots of external storage for local backup and media. Because while internal 22TB hard drives from WD currently sell for around $500, the single-drive WD My Book 22TB model has an MSRP of $599 (£594 in the UK). And the dual-drive 44TB My Book Duo retails for an eye-watering $1,499 (£1,487 in the UK). At least the Duo drive has a pair of USB 3.0 ports on the back, letting it function as a basic connectivity hub. WD says both models are available from today, and of course, there are lesser-capacity My Book models available, all the way down to 3TB for less than $150.

As always, we advise extreme caution about storing vast amounts of irreplaceable data (like family memories and important paperwork) on roomy hard drives like this unless it's also backed up somewhere else. Because hard drives do die, often without any discernible warning. That goes double for the dual-drive 44TB My Book Duo. WD ships the drive in RAID0, which increases performance and lets operating systems see the two internal drives as a single volume. But because RAID0 deposits pieces of your precious data across both drives, if one drive fails, you won't likely be able to get any of your files back – at least without sending the device to an expensive data recovery service.

Seagate has a new partner to help advance its quest for domination of the data storage industry. The storage stalwart has teamed up with a DNA-based digital data storage startup called Catalog, which was founded by MIT alumni in 2016. The technical twosome today announced that they will be working on several initiatives together, but the most interesting potential advance could be the work on making DNA-based platforms up to 1,000 times smaller.

Tom’s Hardware has covered the melding of DNA and computer storage technology several times previously. From all those stories, what stands out is the potential for incredible data densities via this organically occurring medium, perfected by nature. In coverage of this topic last year we reported that DNA has the potential to store up to 455 exabytes per gram. This puts to shame a modern 20TB HDD, which is only capable of storing 0.027 terabytes per gram.

Seagate and Catalog aren’t working on any improbably tiny devices together though. They are starting from Catalog’s very sizable DNA-based platform dubbed ‘Shannon’ which is described as being “about the size of an average family kitchen.” Shrinking this DNA storage installation down is still highly worthwhile, and using Seagate’s ‘lab on a chip’ technology to reduce the volume of chemistry required for DNA-based storage and computation it is hoped to shrink this family kitchen setup down to 1000th its current size. By our rough calculations that would mean the new setup would fit within a 7 liter chassis.

Seagate’s ‘lab-on-a-chip’ doesn’t handle code. Instead, it features tiny reservoirs and channels to process miniscule amounts of DNA in liquid form. These reservoirs pump precise mixes of liquids into other reservoirs for controlled reactions and results. The miniaturized technology also facilities greater amounts of automation. With the smaller ‘lab’ it is expected that the next-gen platform will be compact enough to offer commercially viable DNA storage in settings as diverse as offices, ocean research vessels and space stations.

You may be thinking about the data storage capacity these collaborative DAN storage devices using Seagate’s chip can provide. Previous news releases from Catalog have boasted that while hard drive storage can pack in about 30 million gigabytes into a cubic meter of space, its DNA lab can store 600 billion gigabytes in the same volume. Thus a new seven liter version of ‘Shannon’ should store about 4 billion gigabytes, again according to our rough calculations.

Catalog says the first combined test of its DNA storage and Seagate’s technology will begin mid-September. Hopefully, that means we will hear more about the actual working 1000x smaller version of Shannon shortly.

Seagate is celebrating "May the 4th" with three Star Wars-branded external hard drives featuring Boba Fett, Grogu, and The Mandalorian. The HDDs, which are compatible with PCs and game consoles, are essentially rebadged versions of the company's FireCuda Gaming Hard Drives released last year. They're not fast, but they are reasonably priced for 2TB of storage space. 

Seagate's Special Edition FireCuda External Hard Drives are bus-powered external HDDs in special Boba Fett, Grogu, and The Mandalorian-themed enclosures with customizable RGB lighting. Like the other FireCuda Gaming Hard Drives, these new drives feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 GBps) Micro-B interface and come with an appropriate cable.

Just like other external storage solutions, Seagate Star Wars-themed external HDDs can be used to store games and various content. But there is a caveat with performance of these drives. First, virtually all of Seagate's 2.5-inch HDDs are 5400-RPM drives that are rated for up to 140 MB/s — and this is the absolute maximum speed they are capable of. 

Second, Seagate's 2.5-inch HDDs with a 5400 RPM spindle speed nowadays use drive-managed shingled magnetic recording technology — with all of its peculiarities, including very slow overwriting of shingled bands (all SMR drives have both shingled and non-shingled bands) and significantly reduced performance at times when the drive moves data from non-shingled (CMR) to shingled zones. But if you're a Star Wars fan looking for a cheap 2TB external hard drive, these drives might be good enough.

These Special Edition FireCuda HDDs come with a one-year limited warranty and three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services, so you can rest assured that your data will be safe even if something happens to your hardware. 

Seagate's Star Wars-branded Special Edition FireCuda External Hard Drives are available now on Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg for $109.

At Best Buy, WD's massive 14TB Easystore external hard drive just got a $130 price cut — taking it down to just $289.99.

Need a huge amount of storage for backups or archives? This is an ideal option at a bargain price.

• More: Best external hard drives and SSDs
• Best deals on SSDs and hard drives

A lot of WD’s external hard drives at this capacity and speed sell for over $400, which makes this saving extra special. All you have to do to use it is plug and play — just connect this to your computer via USB 3.0 and get up to 5Gbps of throughput.

Plus, you can make the most of your drive with a complete software package with transfer utilities and backup capabilities, which pairs with the two-year warranty for a great solution to any storage problems.

At Best Buy, WD’s Easystore 8TB external hard drive has been given a $40 price cut — taking it down to just $179.99.

If you’ve been on the lookout for a reliable external storage solution, this is one of the best deals you’ll find right now.

• More: Best external hard drives and SSDs
• Best deals on SSDs and hard drives

Most of WD’s external hard drives at this capacity and speed sell for upwards of $200, so you can be certain of a good deal here. It’s also as easy as plug and play — just connect this to your computer via USB 3.0 and get up to 5Gbps of throughput.

Plus, you can make the most of this drive with the included software package that has utilities and backup capabilities. The drive also has a two-year warranty, making it an overall powerful and low-risk solution for any of your storage problems.

An external hard drive is the ideal way to back up your system or boost your storage on the cheap, plus it comes without the effort of adding to your PC build and offers the convenience of being able to use it across multiple devices.

That’s why we’re big fans of this WD My Book deal, which takes a massive $150 off this 8TB desktop drive, bringing the price point down to just $149.

• More: Best SSD and Hard Drive Deals
• Best External Drives

While the 8TB My Book may not be as fast as an SSD, the high capacity storage here is more than capable of being a great back up or expansion drive. The included software works with Windows and Apple Time Machine, and a full suite of security tools.

Plus, it comes with that highly-regarded WD reliability and durability with shock tolerance, 256-bit AES hardware encryption and a three-year limited warranty.

It's almost time for Black Friday shopping, but until the big day begins, you can still find plenty of vendors dropping deals on some of our favorite hardware, including the best portable hard drives. To help make things easier, we're collecting all the best deals on tech we can find and highlighting at least one notable deal per day.

Today, Amazon has tons of SSDs and HDDs on sale, but we're especially impressed with this portable Toshiba drive for $56. 

This offer is for the 2TB model. It uses a USB 3.0 interface for optimal performance and has a 2.5" form factor. It has an NTFS file system.

Taking this drive with you should be no problem at all. It earns its title of portable, weighing in at just 5.3 ounces. There are other capacities available on sale including both 1TB and 4TB, however the 2TB model has the biggest discount. It comes in an aluminum casing with four colors: black, blue, red and white--all are available at a discount, as of writing.

Visit the Toshiba Canvio Advance 2TB HDD product page on Amazon for more spec details and checkout options.

Are you looking for cheap and deep HDD storage? WD's 12TB Elements external hard drive is now a mere $174.99 with free shipping for Prime members, which is a savings of $75 over the normal MSRP (not counting shipping).

That's a great deal for Prime Day, especially considering that this drive is shuckable - meaning you can pry it out of the external casing and use it in your desktop PC. Proceed at your own risk, though: Shucking the drive voids the normal two-year warranty, but you do get a capable drive for far cheaper than you normally would. For instance, drives with a similar capacity often retail around $375, so the practice is common among data hoarders.

If you're looking to go the traditional route and use the drive as an external device, you're still getting quite the bargain. The drive connects to the host PC via USB 3.0 and has a relatively sluggish 5,400 RPM drive inside, but that's fine for bulk secondary storage devices and delivers ~100 MBps of throughput via the USB cable. 

The drive also comes with a power adapter, but it's a fairly standard affair for this type of device. 

This drive is fine for bulk data storage, like videos, pictures, and backups, but heck out our Prime Day SSD deals page if you're in the market for much speedier devices for gaming and other high-performance workloads.  

The floor of PAX East 2020 is a great place to find awesome gaming products on display, and data storage developer Seagate made sure to show three of their top notch hard drive devices and accessories that have taken the gaming world by storm so far, and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. Here’s an overview of each of the devices we saw from Seagate at PAX East this weekend.

The Seagate FireCuda 510

The Seagate FireCuda 510 is the more affordable of the two PCIe NVMe SSDs that Seagate showed this weekend, but it is in no way a slouch. In fact, its 3,450 MB/s read and 3,200 MB/s write speeds are excellent. With speeds like this, gamers will notice their games loading significantly faster than they would with traditional hard drives. In addition to this, rigs equipped with this SSD will be able to load in new areas quicker in large, open world games too, eliminating freezing entirely. Another way the blazingly-fast speeds of the FireCuda 510 will help gamers is with its ability to process multiple 4K video streams and/or programs at any given time, which is essential for both content creators and regular players alike that want to record and stream their gameplay with others. The FireCuda 510 is also designed to take up as little space as possible thanks to its M.2 2280 design, which means that you’ll be able to put it in any size device out there, ranging from a laptop to a full-blown desktop battlestation. It’s also important to note that the SSD is available in sizes of 500GB, 1TB, or 2TB. This ensures that no matter how much space you need to store your games and game-related content, you’ll be able to get it with the FireCuda 510. Finally, it comes with a 5-year limited warranty, so you don’t have to worry about being stuck with a faulty SSD if the one you get initially has any problems.

The Seagate FireCuda 520

The Seagate FireCuda 520 is Seagate’s latest and most powerful M.2 2280 SSD yet, giving gamers the ultimate edge. Unlike the PCIe Gen 3 FireCuda 510, the FireCuda 520 is compatible with cutting-edge PCIe Gen 4 motherboards; this means that on average, the FireCuda 520 is a whopping 45 percent faster than SSDs of the previous generation. This can clearly be seen with the FireCuda 520’s speeds of 5,000 MB/s read and 4,400 MB/s write, which blow the already awesome speeds of the FireCuda 510 out of the water. With this SSD, you’ll get all the same amazing benefits you would with the FireCuda 510, but with even faster, better results. It should also be noted that this SSD is fully compatible with AMD’s X570 chipset and its third-generation Ryzen desktop CPUs — both of which are widely considered to be some of the best pieces of hardware in the PC gaming space. Like the FireCuda 510, the FireCuda 520 comes with a five-year warranty and is available in sizes of 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB.

The Seagate FireCuda Gaming Dock

The final product Seagate showed this weekend is the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Dock, which is designed to connect to gaming laptops with Thunderbolt 3 and to be used as an all-in-one hub. Featuring 4TB of HDD storage, this dock has all the space a laptop gamer could possibly want for their games. On top of that, the dock also comes with an M.2 NVMe SSD slot that’s compatible with SSDs like the FireCuda 510, allowing you to take advantage of the unbeatable speed of SSD storage if you want to. Aside from the Thunderbolt 3 port used to connect to your laptop, this dock also comes with a myriad of ports for peripherals, including a Thunderbolt 3 accessory slot, DisplayPort 1.4, RJ45 ethernet, 3.5mm audio (one in, one out), four USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, and a single USB 3.1 Gen 2 port designed to be used for charging something. As icing on the cake, the FireCuda Gaming Dock comes with Seagate’s Toolkit software as well as RGB lighting, allowing you to give your hub some stylish, customized flavor. Overall, the FireCuda Gaming Dock is a fantastic storage hub that any laptop gamer will love.

In today's data-centric world it often feels you can't have enough storage. Whether you need more space than what your PC offers or are looking for a way to back up your important files, an external hard drive is a good investment. Best Buy is currently having one of the best tech deals on external storage, offering a $90 discount on a whopping 10TB of storage. The WD Easystore 10TB external drive is currently selling for only $160, making storage an absolute bargain at just 1.6 cents per GB.

This drive features simple black casing, a power light and USB 3.0 interface. It has data transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps, and there's also the option to use its corresponding software to automatically backup your files. Fit for both Windows PCs and Mac, it also comes with your choice of a $25 credit at Shutterfly or the ability to print an 8x8 photo book. 

If you'd rather a speedier external SSD, you'll likely have to pay more, but you can find those, as well as external HDD options, on our Best External Hard Drives and Portable SSDs breakdown. 

The WD 12TB Easystore enclosure comes with a beefy 7200-RPM 12TB drive, but only retails for a mere $179.99 during Best Buy's Black Friday sale. 

It's a time-honored tradition among enthusiasts: Buy a cheap external drive with an enclosure at a great price, then "shuck" the drive by prying it out of the enclosure. That leaves you with a speedy and capacious drive at a fraction of the price you would normally pay. 

However, with most external drive enclsures you can find out which drive the vendor uses, but WD uses white-label drives of varying types for this enclosure, so there's no real telling what lies beneath the sleek black enclosure. 

In either case, most of WD's 12TB drives of this class retail for $250 or more, so its a safe bet that you're getting a good deal on the capacity inside the Easystore enclosure. If you use it as intended, you merely connect the enclosure to your computer via a standard USB 3.0 connection and enjoy up to 5Gbps of throughput. 

WD backs the drive with a two-year warranty and it comes with WD drive utilities and backup software. 

However, if you're looking for something speedier, SSDs are selling at amazing pricing this Black Friday. Not sure which SSD is right for you? Check out our list of the best SSDs and our advice on how to get the best SSD deal for reviews, recommendations and insights. Also, be sure to stay caught up on the best Black Friday SSD deals page. 

Features and Specifications

If you are in the market for a backup drive, Seagate’s Backup Plus series of external HDDs may already be on your shortlist. But with so many options, it can be hard to navigate which one is best for you. Seagate's Backup Plus series alone is split into 3 product groups, sorted by capacity and feature options, which can be a bit confusing if you’re a storage newbie. And even if you know what features you need, you could miss out on something a feature worth considering and not know it too. So, let's break things down a bit for you.

The Backup Plus Slim, which is under a half-inch thick, comes in capacities of 1TB and 2TB and is available in four colors.The higher-capacity 4TB and 5TB models are about twice as thick and come in under the Portable naming scheme and feature just 3 color options. These are your average run-of-the-mill 2.5-inch 5400RPM external HDDs. Their performance is rather normal for an external 2.5-inch HDD and with USB 3.0 connectivity, they cover most people’s needs.

But, alongside the Slim models, Seagate has released the Ultra Touch. One of the best external hard drives you can get, the Ultra Touch has two distinct features -- three if you want to include the textured finish, but we don’t warrant that as much of a buying factor to consider, as much as Seagate may want us to.

Specifications

What we consider more important is the fact that that the Touch drives come with USB-C compatibility. But rather than feature a USB-C port on the device itself or a full-blown USB-C cable like LaCie products have, Seagate simply includes a small USB-A to USB-C adapter in the box to check off that compatibility checkbox. This is a rather boring feature, but important to consider, as laptop manufacturers are moving more and more to the new smaller connector.

The most important differentiator between the Ultra Touch and its competitors is a bit more intriguing. It features AES 256-bit encryption to keep your precious data secure. You wouldn’t want to leave your backup drive somewhere by mistake and give some stranger access to all your personal files, photos, videos, etc., would you? The Ultra Touch aims to prevent that with this handy feature. Some competing drives offer this as well, so keep a lookout for it if you're shopping for a portable storage drive.

Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Touch comes in capacities of 1TB and 2TB at this time and is available in both black and white. Performance stats aren’t listed in their marketing documents. But in our testing, they can at least hit 140MBps. And warranty coverage comes in at 2-years.

Software and Accessories

Included with the drive is one 18-inch USB micro-B to USB Type-A cable for broad compatibility and the USB-C adapter. This means it should also work with most Thunderbolt 3 ports, which can switch into a USB compatible mode.

From the factory, the Ultra Touch comes pre-formatted as exFAT so that it is both PC and Mac compatible. Pre-loaded on the drive are a warranty document and a quick start application, which helps you get started on the company's value-add software.

Toolkit is the backup and utility software. It will help you enable the encryption feature as well as automate file backups. As value adds, Seagate offers a year subscription Mylio, which lets you to protect, edit, share, and sync your photos across multiple devices, and a two-month complimentary membership to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Plan.

Closer Look

As we mentioned earlier, the Ultra Touch has a somewhat different look to it than other externals: It features a textured finish that reminded us of luxurious upholstery. On our white review sample has a top section with a grey textured finish. Physically, the drive measures 11.7 x 78 x 114.8 mm and weighs 151 grams (a third of a pound).

Additionally, the USB 3.0 connectivity on the drive end is provided by a SuperSpeed Micro-B port rather than an integrated USB-C port. This is a bit of a bummer, but unfortunately common in the category. If you need to connect to a USB-C port, you'll need an adapter cable like the one that comes bundled. 

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

MORE: Best External Hard Drives and SSDs

Comparison Products

In our testing, we're pitting the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch against a variety of external SSDs and HDDs that use Thunderbolt 3 and various USB interfaces. Closest to the Seagate is the LaCie Mobile Drive (LaCie is a brand owned by Seagate), which is a pricey metal-clad 5400RPM external HDD and also included are results against the LaCie 4TB Rugged RAID Pro, which utilizes two 2.5” HDDs in RAID 0. Next, we’ve taken out the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and 480GB Kingston HyperX Savage EXO, both much pricier SATA-based solid-state drives. As well, we included a 1TB G-Technology G-Drive Mobile Pro for some Thunderbolt 3-based competition to stir things up a bit. There's no way the trio of hard drives is going to compete with the collection of SSDs, but it's always good to have comparison numbers to show why people opt for solid-state storage, aside from the increased ruggedness that comes from a lack of any moving parts.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos from a Canon 6D), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

Alongside the LaCie Mobile Drive, the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch lands at the bottom when transferring files. During the Photo and Documents transfers, the Seagate drive hit ~100MBps and peaked at 122MBps during the Movie transfer. Read performance also ranks it last or second-to-last. With an average read speed of 120MB/s, its rather sluggish compared to our flash-based competitors.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Touch achieved an overall score of 2178 points and averaged a bandwidth rate of 8MBps here. This score ranks it second-to-last on our charts and goes to show just how much of a practical and sizable difference there is in application performance between a spinning disk and something of the solid-state flavor.

Synthetics - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

In ATTO, the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch lands in last place, with transfer speeds of up to 144MBps read and 148MBps write.

Synthetics - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

On average, Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Touch ranks last overall. During sequential transfers, performance peaked out at 132MBps read/write. Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Touch boasts random read latency that comes in at ~8.8ms read and 3.5ms write. This results in an IOPS throughput of 113 IOPS read and 286 IOPS write, which is just a fraction of what something like the SanDisk Extreme or other SSDs are capable of. And, scaling out to a QD of 4 or even 128 doesn’t improve performance much, but rather just exaggerates latency.

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We tossed in this one last test to measure the performance of the drive over a 15-minute window. When possible, we also log the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. For SSDs, this test also reveals if the drive has a pseudo-SLC cache, which is a small portion of faster-programmed flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. Keep in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Under a straight 14 minutes of write time, Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Touch managed to write just over 109GB of data. Surprisingly, this outshines the LaCie Mobile drive significantly, by nearly 30GB. Still, it pales in comparison to its flash-based solid-state competitors.

Over the course of writing the data, we logged the highest temperature of 37C, which is rather low.

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Conclusion

Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Touch is a new external HDD from the brand that merges multiple concepts into one to try to sell old tech. Not that hard drives are bad per se. SSDs are just in a whole different world when it comes to performance.

The Backup Plus Ultra Touch's performance is average for a 2.5-inch external HDD, and there generally isn't a whole lot of variation between competing hard drives. The Seagate drive delivers sequential speeds upwards of 140MBps read/write, and Response times are nowhere near the realm of flash-based competitors.

But all that is to be expected, and is why it works great as a backup device. Considering a typical backup routine only carries out and updates a few times a month, performance isn’t much of an issue for the average consumer, especially considering the price. At $69.99, you’re paying $35 a terabyte for the 2TB model we tested today. That's about $10 more than some lower-end WD and Seagate drives,  but the Ultra Touch has features that add a lot of value.

Sure, there’s a new textured finish that looks pretty good. It also helps you grip the external when searching for it in your bag. But unfortunately, there are no rubber on the bottom of the enclosure to prevent slipping on the surface you place it on. And, the included USB-C adapter is not the classiest solution, although it is effective.

The Backup Plus Ultra Touch comes with some software trials to help you manage your photo library. The yearlong membership of Mylio included may be useful to some (a $50 value), but as an avid Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom user, the two months of included Creative Cloud Photography Plan ($20 value) appeals to me, and probably a lot of amateur photographers, too. Adding these two software values together chops off quite a bit of the price if you are going to utilize both.

What we really like about this drive, though, is just how easy the encryption works. Install the Toolkit software, click enable, add your password and you’re off. Once enabled, no one can see your data except for you -- unless you give someone else your encryption key. If you are into data security, the Backup Plus Ultra Touch is a great secure storage/backup option that is well worth those extra few dollars it commands over the competition.

Photo Credits: Tom's Hardware

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If you’re in need of an external hard drive, now's the time to get searching as we near the best Black Friday tech deals.  The latest price we’ve spotted that shocked us is $42.99 for a 1TB WD Elements USB 3.0 drive – absolute peanuts compared to what they used to cost a couple years ago. Nowadays, 1TB external drives typically go for about $50 - $55.

The drive comes in a 2.5-inch form factor and measures 0.59 x 3.23 x 4.35 inches. It’s also quite light at 0.29 lbs. Performance over USB 3.0 should be more than adequate for your expectations of this kind of a drive.

According to PCPartPicker, this is the lowest price this HDD has sold for yet. With deals like these, we start to wonder what Black Friday can still bring us.

For more external storage recommendations, check out our Best External Hard Drives and SSDs picks. We'll also be keeping an eye on the top storage discounts available over the coming weeks on our Best Black Friday SSD and Storage Deals page. 

It’s not easy to make portable drives exciting, but Western Digital is doing its best today. WD has launched a refreshed My Passport line of drives that tops out with a 5 terabyte option that’s just 0.75 inch thick. By comparison, the company’s previous 4TB portable drive is 0.8 inch thick. So while trimming off 0.05 inches isn’t exactly substantial, you do get 25% more storage in your pocketable portable hard drive.

As usual, WD will ship a My Passport for Mac model (in midnight blue, rather than tired silver), which comes with a removable USB-C cable. The black, light blue and red models (designed for Windows and other operating systems) will sport USB-A cables. All of the drives are USB 3.0, which is more than adequate to handle hard drive speeds. 

The new My Passport drives include access to software for password protection and 256-bit encryption, social media backup and cloud storage (Google Drive, Facebook and Dropbox) and other utilities. WD says the drives are available now, with a starting MSRP of $79.99 for the 1TB model. That’s pretty high compared to similar drives on the market. But given that the company’s existing My Passport drives currently start at $50 for the 1TB model on Amazon, we expect street pricing of the new models to be similar.

Lavish and Spacious

LaCie's simply named Mobile Drive is a sleek-looking portable HDD, for those looking for some style in their external storage lives. But that’s really all it has going for it compared to most other comparable external drives. In testing, it hit speeds of up to 140MBps, which isn’t too bad for a 2.5-inch HDD-based external, but is in the stone age compared to SSD-based alternatives. And, although it does come in at lower cost than flash, be prepared to pay the LaCie tax for its aesthetics. LaCie demands a significant premium, at $25-50 per capacity, over similarly performing external HDD options on the market.

LaCie’s latest generation of external HDDs focuses on lavish design. And we can't blame the company, given that single-drive portable disk-based storage tends to be pretty similar (and stagnant) when it comes to performance, making it tough to differentiate. This portable external HDD feels as solid as it looks. The diamond-cut aluminum finish makes this drive one of the classiest-looking devices we have used this year. But, looks aren’t all it has going on.

LaCie’s Mobile drive comes in spacious capacities to store all your data. LaCie states that their largest capacity can store up to 165 hours of 4K video or up to 500,000 photos. It utilizes the new USB-C interface, but, because it’s still an HDD inside, can’t begin to saturate the interface.

Specifications

LaCie lists the availability of the Mobile Drive in four capacities: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 5TB. All don’t have an official rating on LaCie’s website, but in testing, they can hit speeds of up to  about 140 MB/s. Unlike their SSD counterparts, the Mobile Drive features a shorter 2-year warranty.

Software and Accessories

Included with the drive are two USB cables, one a USB Type-C to Type-C cable and the other a USB Type-C to USB Type-A cable for broad compatibility. This means the drive will work with Thunderbolt 3- and USB 3-compatible devices.

From the factory, LaCie’s Mobile Drive comes pre-formatted as exFAT so that it is both PC and Mac compatible. Pre-loaded on the drive are a warranty document and a quick-start application to help you set up your Adobe membership and download LaCie’s Toolkit, which can be used to back up your data.

Like the LaCie Rugged RAID Pro we reviewed a few months ago, LaCie's Mobile Drive also features a 1-month membership to Adobe's Creative Cloud All Apps plan ($53 if purchased separately). Unfortunately, there is no encryption feature or software included.

Closer Look

LaCie's Mobile Drive features an all-aluminum sandblasted finish and diamond-cut design in moon silver color. In addition to moon silver, there is also a space gray model to fully match your Mac, but it is only sold by Apple at this time.

Our 2TB review sample measures in at 10 x 87.8 x 121.6 mm and weighs about 74g. The 4TB and 5TB models are double the thickness and slightly larger overall. These also weigh about double what the 1TB and 2TB models weigh, due to additional storage platters on the internal drives.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

To gauge the performance of the LaCie Mobile Drive, we’ve opted to pit it against a few other external SSDs and HDDs that use Thunderbolt 3 and various USB interfaces. Included are results for the 4TB Rugged RAID Pro, which utilizes two 2.5” HDDs in RAID 0. Next, we’ve taken out the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and 480GB Kingston HyperX Savage EXO, both SATA, SSD-based competitors. As well,, we included some Thunderbolt 3-based competition to stir things up a bit, just to show how fast these SSDs really are over HDD competition. These included a 1TB G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro and 1TB Samsung X5.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos from a Canon 6D), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

When it comes to moving real files, LaCie’s Mobile Drive did pretty well considering its slow 2.5-inch HDD within. It came in the last place across the board in both writing in reading. It wrote our photos folder at 105 MBps, the movies folder at 132 MBps, and our docs folder at 91 MBps. Reading back large files resulted in an average speed of about 120 MBps.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

In PCMark 8, LaCie’s Mobile drive scored 1,585 points in total and averaged just 5 MBps, plopping it into last place. If you are for a drive in your professional workflow for anything other than backup, we suggest looking elsewhere to flash-based SSD alternatives.

Synthetics - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Just as in PCMark 8, the LaCie Mobile Drive ranks last on our ATTO charts. Sequential speeds hit nearly 140 MBps in both read and write.

Synthetics - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices

LaCie’s Mobile Drive falls into the last place on our charts once gain. It maxes out at  roughly 140 MBps read/write. Random read latency comes in at 8ms at best, while write latency is much lower at just 3ms. While these numbers are decent for a hard drive, they pale in comparison to something like the HyperX Savage EXO and SanDisk Extreme SSDs.

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We threw in this one last test to measure the performance of the drive over a 15-minute window. When possible, we also log the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Sequentially writing to the drive results in the slowest rate out of the test group, taking 15 minutes to write just 84GB. Over the course of writing the data, we logged the highest temperature of 38C, which isn’t too hot at all.

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Conclusion

LaCie’s Mobile Drive is more aesthetically pleasing than your average portable HDD. Its diamond-cut edging and sandblasted aluminum finish rank it up there as one of the best-looking and -feeling external HDDs we have come across to date. It's definitely a top pick if you want to match your external drive to your Mac or other aluminum-finished devices.

But flash-based storage is still light years ahead in terms of speed, and prices of SSDs have been steadily and dramatically falling over the last few years. So if you care about performance, you should probably opt for an external SSD. Performance of the Mobile Drive is average for an HDD of this caliber. In testing, we hit speeds of up to 140 MBps read and write and averaged transferring data around at about 120MBps. If you plan on doing anything other than backing up, your experience may be a bit laggy. Flash-based portable drives are much better for any more-demanding tasks, as demonstrated by our PCMark 8 results.

We appreciate that LaCie included USB-C to USB-A and USB-C to USB-C cables for broad market compatibility. Not everyone has the latest and greatest devices with USB-C or Thunderbolt 3 support. And, LaCie’s Toolkit is a great software tool for end-users to utilize for their backup routine. It's quite simple to use and gets the job done without much effort. It takes the guesswork out of backing up.

One thing that we think LaCie could improve is adding a rubber texture to the bottom of the drive to prevent slipping on desks and other surfaces. Other than that, the drive is a pretty solid build. The only other qualm we have is the premium price being so much higher than competing portable hard drives, to the point that you can get double the storage capacity, plus similar performance and warranty for roughly the same price or just a little more. If you are in search of a new portable HDD, LaCie’s Mobile Drive wouldn’t be our first recommendation, especially if you care about value. But if looks matter to you, externals don’t get much prettier than LaCie’s Mobile Drive.

Image Credits: Tom's Hardware

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Professional RAID Made Easy

With spacious capacities and a 10Gb/s USB 3.1 Type-C interface, LaCie’s got a new professional desktop RAID device that is ideal for the creative pro looking to up their storage game. LaCie’s 2big RAID, armed with two enterprise-class 7200RPM Seagate IronWolf Pro HDDs, is capable of delivering speeds of up to 440MB/s read/write.

But, while it is ~$150 cheaper than the 2big Dock and some of its competition, the 16TB 2big RAID is still quite pricey with a street price of about $700 bucks. With a price like that, it does have some perks, although it is missing some, too.

Recently, we took a look at a mobile RAID solution from LaCie, the Rugged RAID Pro. In essence, the device takes two HDDs and enables the end user to configure either RAID 0, 1, or simply set the two HDDs accessible in JBOD mode. It delivered decent performance and flexibility, but for those seeking larger capacity and higher performance, this little device won’t cut it.

For those of you in need of more space for your ever-growing media collection or those who want a faster scratch space for your workflow and are not yet ready to plunge into the expensive flash abyss, LaCie’s 2big RAID might be just for you.

Specifications

The 2big RAID comes in capacities of 4TB, 8TB, and 16TB. Prices start at $399.00 for the 4TB model, making it the least bang for your buck. The 8TB model is just $100 more for twice the capacity, but it doesn’t touch the value of the 16TB model if you need big capacity. While coming in at a hefty $700, it comes with the best price-per-GB of the family.

Pros demand and expect higher reliability out of their tools, and LaCie aims to give them exactly what they want. The 2big is similar to the Rugged RAID Pro, in that LaCie packs two HDDs into it and lets you configure them in RAID 0, 1, or JBOD mode. But the unit doesn't have ordinary HDDs inside.

Instead, the unit come with two of Seagate’s enterprise-class 7200RPM IronWolf Pro NAS HDDs, optimized for RAID and tuned to run 24/7. LaCie’s 2big RAID comes pre-configured in RAID 0 and is pre-formatted with the exFAT file system for the fastest speed and broadest compatibility. The company rates the unit for speeds of up to 440MB/s of sequential read/write throughput.

LaCie has even turned to world-renowned computer fan designer and manufacturer, Noctua, to help keep these drives cool through any workload. A 60mm Noctua A6x25 FLX fan that is whisper quiet from just two feet away resides at the rear of the all-black aluminum enclosure.

The 2big is compatible with both macOS 10.12+ and Windows 10+ computers with Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports. It even features hot-swapping capability so that you can easily remove and replace drives even while the unit is in operation.

Software and Accessories

LaCie’s 2big RAID comes with a 39.5” USB-C to USB-C cable, 39.5” USB-C to USB-A cable, a 36W (12V-3A) power supply with various adapters, and a quick install guide.

LaCie’s Toolkit and RAID Manager software makes configuring the unit a snap. Changing RAID modes requires you to press the power button on the rear of the device for confirmation. This helps to prevent accidental data loss from changing modes accidentally. LaCie RAID Manager can also send you email notifications about drive and system health. Furthermore, you can use Toolkit to manage backup plans (Windows only), create mirror folders, and automate memory card imports directly to the device.

Additionally, LaCie includes a month of membership to Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps plan, which enables you to use all of Adobe's Creative Cloud applications for free, a $79.49 value. And, to top things off, it comes backed by  five years of Rescue Data Recovery Services in case disaster strikes. That's a big plus.

Closer Look

The 2big chassis is a blacked-out an all-aluminum unibody design that measures in at 8.5 x 4.7 x 3.7" and weighs in at 6.2lbs. There is an indicator light on each of the metal disk trays, and the faceplates are plastic. The top one also features the classic blue dome light as a status indicator; however, the light is a bit intense.

Four rubber feet do an excellent job at keeping the unit stable and the desk vibration free. The unit also has vents on the chassis back and underside to aid with airflow. There's also a power button, power input, a Kensington lock port, USB 3.1 Gen 2 type C port, and a firmware update button on the rear of the unit.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

We configured and tested the 2big RAID in all operating modes and threw it against a few devices we have reviewed in the past. We included a few external SSDs for comparison. Our first two competitors are the 1TB G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD and 1TB Samsung X5, both are Thunderbolt 3 based SSDs. We threw in SanDisk’s 1TB Extreme Portable SSD, 480GB Kingston’s HyperX Savage EXO, and LaCie’s 1TB Rugged RAID Pro. These all come with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface.

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

When configured in a RAID 0 array, the 2big RAID hit its rated speeds of 440MB/s of sequential read/write throughput. As expected, it lags behind its flash-based competition but delivers a whole lot more usable space. When configured as RAID 1 or JBOD, performance halves and matches that of the LaCie Rugged RAID Pro, hitting ~230MB/s read/write. Performance is slightly better when in JBOD mode.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use storage benchmarking tool.

Like we saw in our review of the Rugged RAID Pro, CDM’s default sequential setting at a queue depth of 32 presented a slight “problem.” At QD32, the performance was over the rated 440MB/s read, but write speeds fell to 283MB/s. This improved to 384MB/s once we scaled back the queue depth to a more realistic value of 1. Again, both RAID 1 and JBOD results prove similar to one another at half the speed of RAID 0. This carries over to 4K random performance where we can see that compared to flash-based SSDs, this metric isn’t an HDD’s strong suit. 4K read/write performance comes in at up to 1/9 MB/s.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpg and 15GB of RAW photos from a Canon 6D), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

The 2big RAID delivered respectable performance that crushes the Rugged RAID Pro. Transferring photos and our documents folder resulted in speeds of 236-245MB/s, while transferring 50GB of movies resulted in a transfer rate of 433MB/s, just beating the SanDisk Extreme 1TB. Read performance comes in at ~290MB/s for both our 3.7GB and 15GB file read tests. We can see that in RAID 0 the transfers are not quite as fast as some of the fastest SSDs, but performance is much better than that of an ordinary mobile external device.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

Total scores range from 2,966 to 3,135 points and average bandwidth comes in at 14-16MB/s. These are high scores for a hard drive, but these “high” scores have nothing on flash. In PCMark 8, the rapid access times and fast small file transfer performance of flash enables the external SSDs to easily outperform the LaCie 2big RAID.

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Conclusion

LaCie’s 2big RAID is an excellent external storage device that is mostly a great buy for those looking to up their storage space. Being the size of a big brick, it’s not portable, but the sleek design will nicely accent the rest of your high-end tech on your desk. That is if you can stand the obnoxiously bright blue LED dome light on the front of the unit. In order to dim the light, I had to place a piece of tape over the clear plastic that shinny bright light shines through to the front blue dome. Only then was that “issue” remedied.

The inclusion of Seagate’s IronWolf Pro’s helps to add to the unit’s reliability and durability. Designed for 24/7 use with firmware optimized for RAID, it’s a perfect match for the working professional. The five years of data recovery services over the course of its warranty gives you a sense of confidence in the product, too. And, with speeds hitting upwards of 240MB/s each or 460MB/s in RAID 0, the drives are fast. But that speed does come at a slight cost.

While on, the fan is whisper quiet from two feet away and kept the HDDs operating around 40-48C during testing. While the fan is quiet, the HDDs can be quite the opposite. While performing a system backup, the device hummed and made all kinds of clinks and clanks when it hit small files that disturbed the peace of my rather quiet home. Nothing beats flash when it comes to silent pleasure. But let’s not forget that flash just isn’t at price parity with mechanical storage quite yet.

We like the fact that you can configure the device in RAID and JBOD mode. Not everyone needs the speed that RAID 0 has to offer, or they don’t want to leave their data at risk. For these people RAID 1 is a great way to add in some redundancy in case one of the drives fail, although it is not an excuse to go without a backup. And then there are people like me, who want the full capacity but prefer separate volumes for manually managed storage. Setting things up with LaCie’s RAID manager was quick and easy. The device’s flexibility is a perfect match for most in this regard.

While it lacks the Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, the SD card readers, and USB port of the 2big Dock, the 2big RAID’s simplicity makes it a lot cheaper. Over $150 cheaper in fact. As well, it is cheaper than G-Technology’s 16TB G-RAID and other professional storage solutions. The only thing close to it is the WD My Book Duo at ~$570, but that can’t touch the performance of this unit with its 5400-RPM RED drives. If you can do with a bit less performance and are tight on cash, it may be a worthwhile alternative. In terms of value, the 2big RAID has a lot going for it.

Image Credits: Tom's Hardware

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If you still have an empty M.2 slot inside your PC or laptop, now might be a good time to populate it with a top-tier M.2 NVMe SSD. The Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB, which normally costs $130, has gone on sale at Amazon for just $67.50 after applying the 10 percent coupon at checkout.

• Get the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB for $67.50.

The Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB is an M.2 2280 SSD with winning ingredients, which combines Silicon Motion's high-performance SM2262EN SSD controller with Micron's 64-Layer TLC (triple-level cell) 3D NAND flash. It adheres to the NVMe 1.3 protocol and performs best when installed in a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. The SSD comes with a list of features that include E2E Data Protection, RAID engine and support for LDPC (Low-Density Parity-Check) error correcting code and SLC caching technologies.

The Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB offers sequential write and read speeds up to 3,500 MB/s and 2,300 MB/s, respectively. The drive's random performance is rated for 390,000 IOPS reads and 380,000 IOPS writes. The SSD has an endurance rating of 640 TBW (terabytes written), and it's backed with a limited five-year warranty.

Adata includes a free copy of the Acronis True Image HD software so you can clone your existing hard drive or SSD over to the XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB without much hassle. The Adata SSD ToolBox utility is also included for SSD monitoring, diagnostics, and optimization. 

Should You Buy This SSD?

We highly recommend you check out our in-depth XPG SX8200 Pro review before opening your wallet.

For help understanding what to focus on when buying an SSD, see our SSD Buying Guide. We've curated a list of our favorite SSDs, based on our own testing, on our Best SSDs page. And those looking for external storage can also check out our Best External Hard Drives and SSDs page.

Are you always looking for new ways to free up space on your SSD? Or are you running out of pendrives and external hard drives to save your precious data? Then you'll be interested to know that Western Digital's Easystore 10TB external hard drive can be yours today for $159.99, which is $90 of its normal $249.99 retail price.

• Get the Western Digital Easystore 10TB for $159.99.

The Western Digital Easystore 10TB is probably the last external hard drive you'll ever need. The device measures 139.3 x 49 x 170.6mm (5.5 x 1.9 x 6.7 inches) and weighs just 950 grams (2.1 pounds), so it shouldn't interfere with your desk space. The Easystore 10TB communicates with your PC through a standard high-speed USB 3.0 Type-A port, but it's also backward compatible with USB 2.0 ports.

The Easystore 10TB drive comes with WD Discovery software with WD Backup that offers a quick and easy way to backup your data. The drive also has NTFS formatting and works with Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 out of the box. In addition, the Easystore 10TB is compatible with Apple's Time Machine software with the right file system.

From a cost and benefit perspective, you're essentially paying 2 cents per gigabyte of storage, making the Western Digital Easystore 10TB a ridiculous deal. To put things into perspective, the cheapest 10TB hard drive on the market right now is roughly going for $260. Additionally, the Western Digital Easystore 10TB is shuckable, which basically means you can extract the hard drive from Western Digital's enclosure and connect it to your system as normal hard drive. However, you may want to make sure that doesn't invalidate the two-year warranty before doing so.

For more external hard drive, as well as portable SSD recommendations, check out our Best External Hard Drives and SSDs page. 

Portable RAID Goodness

LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro is a fast external HDD designed for the mobile pro. The two internal 2.5” HDDs can reach speeds of 250MB/s of read/write performance in RAID 0, but the drive is also designed to take a beating and handle the weather almost anywhere you go. While it is on the pricey side, this LaCie product buys you peace of mind because the Rugged RAID Pro also includes a free data recovery service during its three-year warranty. In all, it’s a pretty unique drive with rugged protection for demanding environments.

Life as a video producer or photographer can quickly turn into the life of a data storage nut. At least that’s how I started. What once started as a simple hobby of trying to capture the moments and memories around me quickly turned into mental torture when it came to managing my data and backing up my thousands of RAW images and rather large video files. For a while, I didn’t even have a backup at all, eventually losing over 700GB of video forever due to a drive failure. If I had stored it on the LaCie Rugged RAID Pro, that story could have ended on a more positive note.

At $289.98, LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro is quite expensive, but it is a nice external storage device for the creative professional. It’s built to take a drop up to 4ft/1.2m while in non-operating mode and can handle the elements fairly well given its IP54 rating. But what really stands out is that this bright orange and silver external USB-C HDD features two internal HDDs and an onboard RAID controller for added speed as well as an integrated SD card slot.

Specifications

The device ships configured in RAID 0 and is preformatted with the exFAT filesystem with 3,726GB of user addressable space, so it is compatible with both MacOS and Windows out of the box. While it isn’t as fast as SSD storage, the RAID 0 implementation stripes the data to each drive and delivers upwards of 250MB/s of sequential read/write throughput, which is good enough for 4K video editing.

If speed isn’t as much a concern as data security, you can also configure the device to operate in RAID 1 mode instead. Basically, this setting duplicates the stored data onto both internal HDDs. This results in slower performance and just 2TB of capacity (1,863GB usable), but redundancy can be more important than speed. However, you shouldn’t use RAID 1 in place of a proper backup routine, for which you should use an entirely separate device.

Finally, you can also use both drives independently of one another by configuring the device as a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks), and thus both internal HDDs will appear as separate volumes to the host system.

Accessories

In the box, you get LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro, a USB-C to USB-C cable, USB-C to USB-A cable, two removable port covers, a power supply with adapters, and quick install guide.

Changing RAID modes is rather simple on the Rugged RAID Pro. After you’ve installed the LaCie Toolkit (included on the drive from the factory) and installed the RAID Manager (a download) and launched it, just change the device into the RAID mode you would like. You will have to confirm the change by using a paperclip (or similar) to press a small button on the device. That helps to prevent data loss from accidental mode changes.

You can use the Toolkit to format the device, too, letting it optimize the disk format for the specific operating system you are using (it defaults to NTFS for Windows or HFS+ for MacOS). Additionally, Toolkit can be used to manage backup plans (Windows only), create mirror folders, and automate memory card imports directly to the device.

LaCie also includes a month of membership to the Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps plan, which enables you to use all of Adobe's Creative Cloud applications for free, a $79.49 value.

And as a final value add, the most valuable one of all I might add, is a free subscription to Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Services throughout the drives' three-year warranty. If a product could potentially save a customer thousands of dollars on data recovery, what could be better? Nothing says confidence in a product like that, especially to a creative pro where their data is their income.

Closer Look

The LaCie Rugged RAID Pro measures 140 x 91 x 30 mm and weighs at 0.446kg (0.981lbs.). For added drop protection and resistance to the elements, it features LaCie’s signature rugged drive orange rubber sleeve around it, which is removable. Within the sleeve is an aluminum housing with plastic end caps.

All ports and status lights are located on the same face under the removable rubber cover. There is also a built-in UHS-II SD card slot, which is a nice bonus and allows you to back up SD cards directly to the device. It works as a normal card reader as well.

The drive has two indicator lights. A large one indicates the drive is working, and a small one that, if blinking, indicates if the device needs power from the external power brick. From testing, it seems all my USB 3.1 Gen1 ports couldn’t supply enough juice to the device, but the USB 3.1 Gen 2 (specifically the Type C port, but not the Type A port) and Thunderbolt 3 ports were able to power it up without having to use the external power brick.

You can disassemble the drive with a screwdriver, but it will obviously invalidate the warranty if you break any warranty seals. After disassembly, we can see that the Rugged RAID Pro is comprised of five main pieces within the aluminum case: an internal chassis, a USB/RAID controller board, a small daughter board with three SATA data/power connectors, and two 2TB Seagate Mobile HDDs. The device uses normal SATA connectors, so there is a possibility that you could swap out the HDDs for something in the SSD flavor later on.

The device uses two ASMedia bridge chips for IO management. The ASM1156R is used for the RAID/JBOD configuration while the ASM1074 bridges the SATA drives into the USB 3.1 Gen 1 connection.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

We configured and tested the Rugged RAID Pro in all operating modes and threw it against a few devices we have reviewed in the past. We also included a few external SSDs for comparison. Powered by Thunderbolt 3, our first three competitors are the 1TB G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD, 1TB Patriot Evlvr, and 1TB Samsung X5. We also included devices with the USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface, like SanDisk’s 1TB Extreme Portable SSD and two DIY external drives that use a WD Blue SSD and HDD.

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Configured in RAID 0, LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro hit 250MB/s of sequential read/write throughput with ease. Configured in RAID 1, the drive hit 125MB/s. A single drive pushed out 140MB/s in JBOD mode.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use storage benchmarking tool.

By default, CDM tests sequential performance at a queue depth (QD) of 32. This presented a “problem” for the Rugged RAID Pro. It hit roughly 200MB/s in RAID 0, which is much lower than the rated 250MB/s. Once we switched over to a QD of 1, however, we saw performance reach near the rated performance once again. The JBOD mode also showed more performance than RAID 1 once more, averaging 10-15MB/s of faster sequential throughput.

We are not surprised at how low the 4K random scores are compared to flash-based SSDs–this metric isn’t an HDD’s strong suit. Even in RAID 0, 4K random performance scales up to just over 1MB/s read and 3MB/s write, which will hurt it in our following tests against SSDs.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos from a Canon 6D), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

Transferring data to the Rugged RAID Pro proved rather dull compared to our SSDs, although in RAID 0 it did outpace the Kingston HyperX Savage EXO SSD by a few MB/s. Read performance also came in at similar performance levels as the write tests: 115-120MB/s for the RAID 1 and JBOD config and upwards of 200MB/s in RAID 0.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

With total scores ranging from 2,187 to 2,294 points and average throughput of 8MB/s, LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro outperforms our HDD comparison drive but falls far behind the flash drives. Whether in RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD, application performance is still rather limited by the underlying rotating media. Flash shows its advantage with sub-millisecond access times and much faster 4K random performance.

Full LBA Read/Write and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We threw in one last test to measure the performance of the drive in HDTune Pro, writing to the full span of the drive. We logged the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

As a hard disk-based drive, the LaCie drive doesn’t have any SLC NAND cache to worry about, but performance does degrade as the drive fills. You can achieve upwards of 250MB/s of sequential read/write performance on the outer tracks, but after filling the drive, performance can be as low as 107MB/s in RAID 0. In RAID 1 and JBOD, performance lands around 140MB/s read/write at best, and dips to 60MB/s at worst.

Additionally, the test environment was a cool 25C. The Rugged RAID Pro’s temperature didn’t exceed 48C while testing. This was hot to the touch but within operating spec.

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Conclusion

Are you a photographer or videographer who is constantly on the go, traveling to get your next great shot? Do you need a somewhat fast, high capacity portable storage device for your work, or are you the type that prioritizes data safety over speed? Either way, LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro could be just what you are looking for.

Built to resist the elements and the occasional accident or two, the Rugged RAID Pro is an external HDD that combines LaCie’s Rugged durability with RAID functionality. Configured in RAID 0, the Rugged RAID Pro allows video editors to edit 4K video and transfer those large video files faster than any typical external HDD. In this configuration, it achieved its rated 250MB/s read/write specs and even outpaced the Kingston HyperX Savage EXO SSD during some of our file transfer testing.

Migrating to RAID 1 enables redundancy for those who want to lean more on the safe side. This, however, comes at the cost of performance and usable capacity. Read/write speeds will be limited to ~125MB/s (at best) and you will only have half the usable space of RAID 0.

Using the drive in JBOD mode does provide a bit more performance than RAID 1, but only slightly. And then you lose out on data redundancy and are probably just better off grabbing two external 2TB (or even 4TB HDDs) instead for a fraction of the cost. But that defeats the purpose of this type of device in the first place, which is to have two drives in a single, compact and portable enclosure.

The Rugged RAID Pro is very versatile with so many configuration options and connectivity that will work with any USB-compatible system and those with the latest Thunderbolt 3 support. We just wish our non-USB-C ports could power it without the need for the external power brick, but that won’t be an issue for most users. Most newer laptops feature USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity with enough juice to power the drive, but they don’t all feature SD card slots. That makes the integrated UHS-II SD card slot especially useful and simplifies backing up content in the field.

While it is on the pricey side, LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro isn’t too overpriced considering its market placement and the peace of mind of data redundancy. LaCie includes one month of all Adobe apps for free, a $79.49 value. More importantly, the drive comes with three years of free data recovery protection. That service can (at times) cost thousands of dollars.

If you are a creative professional in the market for an external HDD, be sure to check this drive out. There aren't many competitors: Most other HDD solutions are much larger, and flash-based SSDs don’t yet offer similarly-priced capacity, nor the same value-adds. The LaCie Rugged RAID Pro 4TB has a unique blend of features and accessories that make it easy to use and quite the versatile travel companion.

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It’s been years since I was willing to work on any PC that boots from a mechanical hard drive. Once you get used to the snappy response times and speedier gameload times of an SSD, going back to a hard drive feels like computing through a thick layer of molasses.

And with the release today of the fast and surprisingly affordable Intel 660p, the first quad-layer-cell (QLC) SSD, we may be near a point where hard drives don’t make a whole lot of sense for the majority of PC users—even budget buyers. At the very least, I don’t think I’ll ever buy another hard drive, and that’s not just because of cutting-edge SSD tech.

To be fair, I own an 8TB Seagate hard drive that’s served me well for a couple of years. And I just carried it over to a new Ryzen 5 2600X-based build which serves as my main home productivity/gaming PC. That drive has a few terabytes of files on it, including thousands of irreplaceable photos and videos that I use as part of my travel writing and Scotland-focused Facebook page.

Office 365 Is All the Backup I Need

If that drive suddenly died in the coming days or months, I might be tempted to replace it, given that 6TB hard drives look to be headed toward the $100 price point at some point this year (external 6TB drives currently hover around $120). But the truth is, even at $100 or less, I don’t really need that much space.

All my can’t-lose files are backed up on the 5TB of OneDrive space (technically 1TB per user, though you can share folders between users) that I get from my $80-per-year Microsoft Office 365 subscription. With that also comes the benefit of having all my work files and photos available from any connected PC that I care to sign in to with my Microsoft account. Oh, plus the ability to install Microsoft Office on up to five PCs.

That said, even if I didn’t have an online backup option, I wouldn’t trust a hard drive with my can’t-lose data, because I’ve had several mechanical drives die unexpectedly on me over the years. And after nearly a decade using SSDs, I’ve experienced exactly one solid-state death.

Plus, my hard drive really isn’t speedy enough for my data storage needs anyway. I’m not great at properly sorting my photos, and so when I open a folder of thousands of files on my hard drive, it can take several seconds for the drive to spin up and thumbnails to show up, or for files to re-sort by date or size. Yes, I know I should be more organized and use something like Lightroom for image handling, but I’m not there yet and I honestly don’t know if I ever will be. You can pry Windows Explorer and a basic folder structure from my cold, dead mousing hand.

Bulk SSD Storage Is Already Surprisingly Affordable and Prices Will Fall Soon

If I had to buy a new drive for bulk storage today, I’d probably opt for an SSD. Micron’s 1100 drive, for instance, is arguably a steal at its current selling price of just under $300 for the 2TB model.

It’s based on fairly recent 3D TLC flash, and it sells for $100 less than most competing SSDs of the same capacity. Sure, 2TB can’t compete with 12TB hard drives. But given that I’m using a 512GB Samsung NVMe SSD as my boot drive, I could probably live with “just” 2TB of bulk storage, especially given it would be much faster than my comparatively pokey hard drive.

Micron’s 2TB drive is a bit of a fluke right now, and once QLC drives become increasingly common and the cheap China-made NAND we saw at Computex starts flooding the market, SSD prices will drop precipitously once again. Barring any major natural disasters affecting production (always an unfortunate possibility) or other major market disruptions, by the time my existing 8TB hard drive starts to give up its mechanical ghost (hopefully a few years down the line) I should be able to pick up an affordable 4TB-or larger SSD. Heck, an 8TB SSD might even be an option for a few hundred bucks by then.

Sure, mechanical drives will likely be cheaper and vastly more spacious for several years to come. And for those who truly need several terabytes of cheap storage—particularly for server and bulk backup setups where capacity and price matter much more than speed—hard drives will remain staple products.

What About External Backup Drives?

There’s no denying that external drives are enticing for those who need cheap portable storage and backup for their files. But I’d argue even harder these days against using an external drive for backup. Sure, they’re cheap, but an external hard drive powered solely by the USB port is, if anything, going to be even slower than an internal drive. And much worse, it’s all-too-easy to knock over an external hard drive, or drop it. If you do this while the drive is powered up, there’s a very good chance you’ll lose your data on the spot as the drive head crashes into the platters or the platters crash together.

If I needed an external drive today for a laptop or desktop that doesn’t have the space for an additional internal drive, I’d buy the above-mentioned Micron SSD and slap it in a cheap 2.5-inch hard drive enclosure, like this $9 Sabrent model that claims to be optimized for SSDs. I’ve had two portable drives die on me in the last decade or so, one after a just few months without ever dropping it. I don’t trust hard drives with important data in general, but I trust portable hard drives even less.

Hard Drives Are Starting to Feel Like a Niche Product

For the first time today—at least for me personally—SSDs have gone completely mainstream, and hard drives, once unquestionably dominant, have started to feel like niche products.

I wouldn’t recommend a hard-drive-based PC to anyone at this point, even budget buyers. The savings just isn’t worth the very real performance you’ll gain from running an SSD boot drive. Even for backup and bulk storage, so long as your file libraries don’t stray into the several-terabyte range, I’d recommend paying for an online solution (perhaps one that lets you encrypt your files and offers two-factor authentication if you’re worried about security) for a year or two.

By that time, you’ll likely have gotten accustomed to the conveniences of available-anywhere online storage and you may want to stick with your service of choice (I’m personally very happy with OneDrive and Office 365).

Even if you decide you want to go back to having all your files backed up locally, by that time a cheap, roomy SSD may be a real option. There will always be people with huge media libraries who won’t want to part with their massive hard drives. But for me, I think my current 8TB Seagate Barracuda drive will be the last mechanical drive I’ll ever own. And I doubt I’m alone.

If you're a RGB addict who loves collecting exotic hardware, Asus's new 2.5-inch FX external hard drive with RGB lighting certainly deserves a spot in your collection.

With the whole RGB lighting trend stronger than ever, it was just a matter of time before we saw an external hard drive with RGB lighting. Well, Asus has made that dream a reality. The Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer's newest creation measures 128 x 80 x 16.3 millimeters and weighs a mere 145 grams. It features a sleek, futuristic body that flaunts a hairline finish and a skidproof mat to prevent the device from sliding around your desk.

Asus claims that 5-axis engraving and double injection molding technologies were utilized in the FX external hard drive's fabrication to produce an elegant and durable surface and provide an improved grip and repel fingerprint smudges. However, the incorporated Aura Sync RGB lighting is the device's strongest selling point. Owners can personalize its lighting and synchronize it with other Aura Sync compatible devices through Asus' Aura Sync software.

The Asus FX external hard drive features a high-speed USB 3.1 Gen 1 port to offer speeds up to 5GBps. In order to manage and maximize this level of fast performance, Asus employed ASMedia's ASM1153E1 controller, which features its own 8-bit micro-processor complemented with embedded program RAM and ROM. The FX external hard drive is shipped with a complete software backup package that facilitates the boring task of backing up user data. Users can schedule automatic backups of their systems, social media, cloud storage and wireless mobile data. There's also an option to add a 256-bit AES encryption feature to protect files with a user password. The device is compatible with the Windows 7, 8 and 10 operating systems from Microsoft and the Mac OS X 10.8 or higher from Apple.

Asus offers the FX external hard drive in the 1TB (EHD-A1T) and 2TB (EHD-A2T) capacities. The company hasn't officially disclosed the product's price and availability.

Introduction, Pricing & Warranty

Western Digital just revamped most of its consumer product line with new models that bring increased storage capacity and a bold look. Today, we look at the first shoe to drop for the My series: The My Passport Ultra Portable HDD.

Western Digital took its shot at bringing some excitement to the portable HDD segment. Flash is closing in on one side, and there is a decade's worth of existing products in the hands of technology holdouts on the other, so it's a rough market.

There are three keys to making these products more attractive: design, technology, and software. Like the new My Book and My Cloud, the My Passport (and My Passport SSD) take a new shape and get a full color makeover with six options. The My Passport Ultra takes the portable series a step further and establishes a two-tone theme. The drive has a metallic finish underneath either a matte black or white plastic section.

Colors aside, you can choose between four capacities. The most expensive option retails for less than $130. Western Digital brought this series to market in 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB capacities. It may not sound like much of a breakthrough since we've tested a 4TB LaCie portable HDD in the past, but the LaCie Rugged RAID Portable HDD still sells for just over $400. The drive is expensive because LaCie had to pair two 2TB HDDs together behind a RAID controller. Those extra parts increase complexity and cost. Western Digital managed to pack the same capacity into the My Passport Ultra using a single drive that requires less logic in the data path.

The third leg the My Passport Ultra stands on is the most unique. Western Digital took notice when companies began selling external drive enclosures as bare metal products. The rush to flash left millions of 2.5" HDDs sitting on shelves, and for as low as $15 you could put the drives to use in an enclosure. To compete with virtually free products, Western Digital improved the one thing bare metal can't offer--software.

As a hardware guy, it's difficult to look at software as the deciding factor. Western Digital doesn't even list performance specifications with most of its new portable storage products. The software is the highlight on the specification sheet, and with that kind of exposure, it has to be good.

We were impressed with Western Digital's software last year when we tested a handful of its external products. Since then, the company has expanded the software package to include even more useful features. Western Digital now has the most complete external storage software package we've come across.

Specifications

The 1TB drives come in a 13.5mm Z-height (thickness) housing that's made possible by using a 7mm or 9.5mm drive. The larger 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB models feature a 15mm thick HDD, so the enclosures have an increased Z-height of 21.5mm. We're testing the 4TB drive, and we didn't find the thickness to be a distraction when we had the drive in our backpack.

Western Digital doesn't publish any performance specifications for the Passport or Passport Ultra products, but that isn't an oversight. These products are moving to commodity status so the internal components may change over time. That results in different performance.

Pricing And Warranty

The My Passport products ship with six solid colors and most models cost a little less than the two-tone My Passport Ultra models. The My Passport Ultra starts out at just $56.99 for the 1TB model. That increases to $76.99 for the 2TB, $119 for the 3TB, and finally $128.99 for the 4TB we're testing. The series comes with a three-year limited warranty.

Software

The My Passport Ultra ships with the software package on the drive. You can also download the software direct from WD's website. After you install the software, a menu allows you to control the digital accessories. It also gives you access to more options. There are several utilities included, so we made a list of the options:

• WD Drive Utilities
• WD Security
• Plex
• Upthere Home (4 Months Free)
• Acronis True Image
• Drivesecurity By ESET
• Blancco Data Eraser Solution
• Digi.me
• Magisto
• Feel Safer
• WD Backup

Accessories

The USB 3.0 Type-A to USB 3.0 Micro-B cable (pictured below) is the only physical accessory that ships with the My Passport Ultra.

Packaging

The drive ships in a retail-friendly package that lists the features. The Ultra versions only come in black or white (over a metallic finish). WD has a dedicated box for each color so you can see what is inside.

A Closer Look

Western Digital's new design theme spans several product groups. It is attractive and a step up from the previous generation design that hasn't aged well. Our only problem is that fingerprints linger on the metallic finish. You'll need to use a window cleaner, or some other light cleaner, to remove fingerprints. Otherwise, the prints smudge and make the finish look worn.

There is a white LED next to the USB 3.0 Micro-B cable connector on the bottom side of the enclosure.

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Performance Testing & Conclusion

Comparison Products

We tested the new Western Digital My Passport Ultra 4TB against a diverse group of portable HDD products including an older My Passport, which was one of the first USB 3.0 products to come to market.

We have two LaCie (now part of Seagate) 4TB products in this review. The Porsche Design Mobile Drive 4TB currently sells for $229.99 at Amazon. It's followed by the LaCie Rugged RAID Thunderbolt 4TB that currently sells for $379. The Rugged RAID uses a dual interface design that allows you to connect the drive to Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 via a Micro-B connector. This drive uses two internal drives in RAID 0 but it is one of the most expensive products in the group.

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim only scales to 2TB, but it features a full-length metallic finish. The 2TB model currently sells for $129.99. That's very close to our My Passport Ultra 4TB we're testing, but it only comes with half the capacity.

The ioSafe Rugged Portable is the portable HDD you take into a war zone. The 1TB model from ioSafe.com costs nearly $1,200 thanks to its solid aluminum enclosure and IP68 rating. We have the first generation 750GB drive that is no longer in production. If you ask nicely and can pay the enormous cost, you can even get it in milled titanium.

Block Size Testing

The three modern drives (My Passport Ultra, LaCie Porsche Design, and Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim) deliver nearly identical performance as we increase the size of the data transfers. The newer drives provide a significant performance improvement over the two older products. The LaCie Rugged RAID uses a cost-increasing RAID 0 with two drives, but aside from that model, there isn't a clear performance leader.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that the newer products with higher platter densities and refined cache algorithms are faster than the older products. We often see people using older portable storage products. People often feel that the new models don't provide enough of a performance gain to justify a new purchase. In reality, newer products can deliver almost twice the performance of the drives sold just a few years ago.

Full LBA Span Performance

Like many newer HDDs, the Western Digital My Passport Ultra has an advanced cache system. WD originally developed the technology for enterprise use and migrated it downstream to consumer products. You can see the impact in our sequential read test across the entire usable LBA range.

The write test shows how performance drops off as we move from the fastest to the slowest points of the platter. HDD vendors have learned to use the fastest area of the platter as a cache to back up the small DRAM buffer. The area is slower than DRAM, but it increases the overall performance. In some cases, drives keep frequently-accessed data in this reserved area for quicker access.

File Transfers

We don't run many application tests on external or portable storage products because the typical workload is sequential in nature. Even though it is possible, you shouldn't run an operating system on these drives. The typical use case is very basic. Most of us simply read and write large pieces of data for archiving or transferring data from one location to another.

We often see performance measured in throughput, but time-based results are easier to interpret because the sense of time is universal. We tested transfer performance with a Blu-ray ISO. For the Game test, we transferred data from a game directory to the portable drives. The Directory Test is a 15.2GB block of data that contains a mix of images, software installations, ISO files, and multimedia that yields a nice real-world workload.

The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 4TB trails the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB and LaCie Porsche Design 4TB in the Blu-Ray ISO transfer test by 54 and 40 seconds, respectively.

The My Passport Ultra 4TB's advanced cache system helps it to outperform those two products when we add the smaller blocks in the game directory and backup directory tests. Typically, you can hear the drive working hard when you read or write small blocks of data to an HDD. Over the years the sound has been called many things, but "rock grinder" may be the best description. The My Passport Ultra, even during a 100% random write workload, doesn't make the sound or even vibrate much at all. This tells us the DRAM buffer and cache are collecting the incoming random data and then passing it to the platters as sequential data. That allows it to write at a much higher rate of speed.

The game directory test uses mostly small blocks, and the My Passport Ultra has a 10 second lead over its nearest competitor and a 20-second advantage over the LaCie Porsche Design 4TB. That's a 50% decrease in the amount of time it takes to write the data.

The backup directory test uses a mix of small, medium, and large files and is the equivalent of transferring your My Documents folder in Windows. The My Passport Ultra also performs extremely well in this test. This product is the fastest non-RAID palm-sized portable HDD available.

Conclusion

Some users will simply ignore the software features and others will embrace them. How much value you get from these "value add-ons" really depends on what type of user you are. For instance, a portable drive that you mainly keep in a travel or work bag won't do you much good as an automated backup destination for your home PC. On the other end of the usefulness scale, the password protected hardware 256-bit AES encryption is great if you travel with the drive. You can even add a "return-if-found" message that someone would see if they plug the drive into a system that doesn't have the encryption software installed.

Western Digital simply skipped over the write performance, which is clearly the unsung hero, on the specification sheet. The drive can write data very quickly and pulls away from competing products when you need to transfer small blocks of data. The My Passport Ultra is the fastest palm-sized, single drive, portable HDD we've tested with mixed workloads. You can spend a lot more and get faster performance, but you will have the typical RAID 0 overhead, decreased reliability, and increased expense and complexity. Most of us don't want to worry about those, or any other, issues when we are shopping for a simple device to tackle a simple task.

I still feel that the number one issue for these commodity products is simply pricing. Western Digital did a very good job positioning the My Passport Ultra, but the lower cost My Passport presents an interesting challenge. The Ultra 4TB model currently sells for $128.99 at Amazon, but we found the non-Ultra 4TB My Passport for $119. The Ultra ships with WD's Discovery software that you can download your social media and cloud storage data (Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, and Google Drive), but the regular My Passport doesn't list this software on the official product page. It does show up on the My Passport downloads page, so it could just be an oversight.

Western Digital recently added another My Passport product to the family. The new version is tuned for Apple MAC users and features the same 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB ($119) capacities as the rest of the family. The biggest change is that the Time Machine software and the other included packages work on the Apple operating system, but Western Digital also provides the MAC software to My Passport Ultra users via a quick download.

What we end up with are several options that all equal the same great experience. Western Digital provides the best balance of performance, software capabilities and pricing of any other product in this category with the My Passport series. You can pay a little more to get the two-tone color scheme or save a little by choosing the single color non-Ultra models.

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Features & Specifications

Intel's Optane Memory is finally shipping, but many can't get past the idea of cache in a high-performance computer, or the steep system requirements. Optane Memory delivers SSD-like performance when you pair it with a hard disk drive, and for some tasks, it offers better performance than a low-cost SSD. Still, some users just want the fastest possible storage system, and caching isn't the best option. Today we examine one option that combines three Optane Memory SSDs together in a RAID 0 array to create a large volume for installing an operating system and a few programs.

After our initial article, I've read many reader comments about Optane Memory. It's obvious the name alone causes confusion. Optane "Memory" is actually a storage device. It gets confusing when you add in the fact that the Optane product family has two consumer cache devices and an enterprise-focused add-in card SSD, and then the terminology associated with building an Optane Memory (cache) array on your 200-series chipset. I'm confused, and I wrote it.

For this article, we're not worried about creating the caching array that preloads the high-speed device with frequently-accessed data. We are simply using three Optane devices together, forgoing the special software, and just muscling through the workloads with brute force.

Optane's 3D XPoint (the physical chips) are all muscle. We can summarize the comments in our first Optane article by simply saying the caching product is only slightly faster than a high-performance SSD. That's kind of true, but it's a sandbagged product. The Optane Memory SSD with 32GB and 16GB of capacity uses either one or two channels. I suspect it's a single-channel device, but Intel will neither confirm nor deny the controller specifications. If we go with my theory, this Intel single-channel controller beats your 8-channel NAND-based SSDs easily. Over time, we'll see more of Optane's capabilities, but for now, we should think of it as a whole new class of memory.

You may not see it now, but Intel will soon have an advantage in the SSD game. For the last several years, all the SSD companies have played catch up with Samsung. Samsung currently has the most advanced NAND flash, and the advantage is so great that its TLC NAND often outperforms competing MLC NAND. Samsung's 3D NAND is like a college football team playing a high school football team. If that's the analogy, then Intel's Optane Technology is NFL caliber.

I think Optane is off to a great start. We should all remember that the early SLC-based prosumer SSDs were slower than a modern SD card when they first came to market. Over time Optane will get faster, larger, and cheaper. What we want is for Intel to mass produce it, make it cheap, and then give us the highest performing devices at an affordable price. If you think that's going to happen soon, then you don't know Intel. Don't look for low-cost consumer Optane-based SSDs anytime soon, but RAID allows you to game the system if you take on a little risk.

Modern SSDs use a form of internal RAID to increase performance. A single NAND die is fast, but it takes many working together to reach the high levels of performance we associate with SSDs. Larger capacities increase the likelihood of more parallel transactions (to a limit). This has both positive and negative side effects. Over time, the capacity of the NAND die increased, and the number of physical chips in the SSDs decreased. That's why many modern SSDs are slower than older models with the same capacity. Optane changes the game entirely. Intel hasn't given us an affordable prosumer Optane SSD, yet, so we're going to make one using a combination of hardware and software you may already have.

Specifications

Not every Intel chipset supports RAID. PCIe RAID falls to an even more exclusive tier because you need the ability to divert the PCIe lanes directly to the PCH chipset. To enable that feature, you need a 100 or 200 series chipset that supports Rapid Storage Technology (RST). The restrictions are not as severe as enabling Optane Memory caching (7th Series Core processor and 200-Series Chipset), but the bar is still very high.

We used an Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ motherboard for our three-drive RAID 0 array. The board features three M.2 slots with PCIe 3.0 x4 connectivity and all the slots route through the PCH for Rapid Storage Technology. There are only a few motherboards with three M.2 sockets, and there are several with two M.2 sockets and a PCIe slot that has a PCH route option.

You can't boot to a true software RAID built with Microsoft Storage Spaces, but you can boot from a RAID 0 array using Rapid Storage Technology. The array gives us approximately 82GB of usable capacity, or around twice the requirement for a Windows 10 Pro installation with all the updates along with the Office software suite. It's not a lot of space, but in this situation, we're looking for quality over quantity.

The Optane Memory NVMe SSDs achieve less peak bandwidth than some SSDs, but it's all about where it provides higher performance. Optane memory is faster than NAND at low queue depths. Some have been hung up on Intel's initial claims that the media offers 100x the performance of NAND, but the device-level performance is closer to 10x. We didn't even hit that mark with Optane Memory (the official cache system). If you've ever read an SSD review before, then you understand that we've examined products with a 10% to 20% difference between the best and average products. The Optane memory advantage in your desktop may not be a full 10x improvement, but it’s a lot faster than what we've ever tested before (without losing all the data on a reboot).

Pricing, Warranty & Endurance

Intel's Optane Memory pricing hasn't changed since our first review. The 16GB drives still retail for between $45 and $50, and stacking up the smaller drives doesn't give you a lot of storage capacity. If you go the Optane RAID route, we suggest using the 32GB drives. Pricing fluctuates between $75 and $80 for each 32GB device, depending on the seller.

The 32GB Optane drives took longer to come to market than the smaller model. Newegg and Amazon both carry the 32GB now, and Intel hasn't said anything about an Optane shortage. Newegg limits the number of drives you can order at one time, so you have to place separate orders to buy three of them. Amazon doesn't have the same limit, but it keeps selling out.

Intel backs the Optane Memory SSDs with a 5-year limited warranty that covers up to 182.5 TB of write endurance.

A Closer Look

The Optane Memory module comes in an industry-standard single-sided M.2 2280 form factor. 3D XPoint memory is fast enough to achieve high performance rates while reading and writing to a single die (and remember, that's without requiring a DRAM buffer). The mysterious controller is smaller than most NAND-based SSD controllers, and it appears to be purpose-built for Optane Memory.

We armed our Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ motherboard with three Optane Memory 32GB M.2 modules in RAID 0 for this test.

Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID

We tested the Optane Memory RAID array as a secondary volume. This allows us to measure performance without any additional IO coming from the operating system or the measurement software. With the operating system already installed, we used Intel's Rapid Storage Technology interface to build the three-drive array using RAID 0. After our first round of tests, we cleared the data and installed Windows 10 Pro on the array to run BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 SE.

It's tempting to adjust the cache mode policy, but we advise against it. The write-back and write-through settings caused the system to lock up during heavy workloads. We didn't try the read-only setting. Of the three settings we used, "off" provided the best results and system stability.

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Performance Testing

Comparison Products

We used a handful of the fastest consumer and prosumer NVMe SSDs available to compare to the Optane RAID 0 array. Sadly, we don't have any pairs of NVMe SSDs to test their RAID performance. These products would provide increased sequential bandwidth in RAID, but we're really looking for increased low queue depth (QD) random performance because it relates directly to a better user experience. SSDs in RAID 0 on the Intel PCH don't improve random performance at low queue depths very much. We are running RAID 0 for increased capacity instead of using it to boost performance.

The Intel PCH has a hard bandwidth limit to the CPU. The PCH chip links to the CPU via PCI Express, but several devices share the total available bandwidth. We've recorded up to 3500 MB/s from three M.2 devices, and that seems to be the usable limit without other devices connected to the PCH, such as USB, SATA, and so on, consuming a lot of bandwidth.

Sequential Read Performance

To read about our storage tests in-depth, please check out How We Test HDDs And SSDs. We cover four-corner testing on page six of our How We Test guide.

The Optane RAID 0 array pegs the PCH bus's available bandwidth right from the get-go. The array delivers a staggering 3,500 MB/s of sequential read performance from QD1 to 128!

Sequential Write Performance

Intel limited Optane Memory's sequential write performance to just 290 MB/s. Intel designed the drives to accelerate random performance, and with limited sequential write speeds, it takes users longer to reach the endurance limits. We recently pushed an Intel 600p to its endurance limits, and the drive transitioned into a read-only state before it would lose or corrupt data. We suspect the Optane Memory SSD would do the same at, or near, its 182.5TB write endurance cap.

Random Read Performance

We're all here to see random read performance at low queue depths and mixed random performance. Those are the two areas that directly relate to application and multitasking performance. At QD1 and QD2, the Optane RAID 0 array provides roughly a 3x improvement over the NAND-based NVMe SSDs. This is in line with the performance you would see with a single Optane SSD in a cache configuration when the algorithms place all the data on the Optane device. Unfortunately, caching techniques only keep a portion of the data on the device. With this array, all the data is guaranteed to come directly from the Optane Memory SSDs.

Random Write Performance

Intel neutered Optane Memory's random write performance, and that hurts RAID 0 performance. The best we could muster at QD1 was around 30,000 IOPS. That's the equivalent of a good consumer SATA MLC SSD. The real question is if performance is sufficient enough to maintain a high level of performance. Random data writes come to the disk system in bursts, so we would like to see lower latency. However, the score is somewhat misleading--30,000 IOPS at QD1 is still very fast.

80 Percent Mixed Sequential Workload

We describe our mixed workload testing in detail here and describe our steady state tests here.

Optane dominates the mixed workload tests at low queue depths just like SLC NAND did several years ago. The Optane array nearly doubles the performance of the next closest NVMe SSD at QD2.

80 Percent Mixed Random Workload

We see the same results during the mixed random workload test. Optane Memory is simply on a different level. The NAND devices can deliver higher peak performance than Optane in this, and many other, tests. But they require higher queue depths. Most users simply will never see that type of workload because the drives are too fast to allow it. You can't stack commands that high in the real-world because the SSD fulfills data requests very quickly. You can't double click applications fast enough to place a heavy enough load on the device to reach high queue depths.

Sequential Steady-State

3D XPoint Memory doesn't suffer from the same limitations as NAND, so the write performance doesn't fall off due to the background tasks created by dirty cells.

Random Steady-State

What steady-state conditions, Optane asks? It's as if Optane taunts NAND with its performance, and consistency is also impressive. Optane is a natural for RAID.

PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance

For details on our real-world software performance testing, please click here.

The Optane Memory array runs over the other products in every test that doesn't incur heavy write traffic, but the difference in performance difference doesn't look like much. Microsoft could help the technology along by giving us a flash-friendly file system.

Application Storage Bandwidth

A little goes a long way at these speeds. The Optane Memory array achieves nearly 300 MB/s over the nearest SSD when we average the results into a simple throughput score.

PCMark 8 Advanced Workload Performance

To learn how we test advanced workload performance, please click here.

Optane Memory provides untouchable application bandwidth, and regular NAND-based SSDs can't keep pace. Before Optane, we would examine slivers of performance differences between the NAND-based SSDs. This set of charts really shows what we've said about 3D XPoint--it puts all NAND in the same category.

Total Access Time

Optane has some competition in the service/access time tests. The Intel SSD 750 Series still delivers amazing performance during this test, but when it comes to consistency, Optane remains the clear winner.

Disk Busy Time

Consumer workloads barely even stress the RAID 0 array. I don't think power consumption is a real worry for the desktop with a trio of Optane Memory SSDs. The drives are still able to complete the task and return to a low power state very quickly.

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Conclusion

I don't expect many people to run out and buy two or three Optane Memory SSDs to build a RAID array. For many of us, it's just a waiting game. In time Intel will bring a high-performance Optane-based SSD to market that doesn't cost $1,500. Several sites have reported that product may be called the 900P. A 900-series SSD product would fall in line with the return of the Core i9 processor series, and it would possibly use a configuration like the DC P4800X. The Intel SSD 750 series used the same hardware as the DC P3x00 series, so Intel wouldn't be breaking any new ground in bringing enterprise/datacenter hardware to the prosumer market. If the reports are true, the upcoming Optane 900P consumer SSD will ship in a wider range of capacities than the SSD 750. That will give more users access to affordable 3D XPoint technology.

If you are not willing to wait for an unconfirmed product with an unknown release date, then following me down the RAID 0 array path is a viable option if you already have a motherboard with the right features. Our Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ with three M.2 slots allowed us to utilize the Optane Memory SSDs in RAID. Most motherboards only support two M.2 devices in native slots, but many also support a third drive in the bottom PCIe slot that can route the signal to the PCH for use with Rapid Storage Technology. You will need to check your motherboard specifications and BIOS configuration to verify your options. 

Our Optane Memory array is very fast. With an operating system installed it's difficult to even put into words the difference between an NVMe SSD and the array. It wasn't quite the performance leap going from a hard disk drive to an SSD, though, but the system was more responsive than a high-performance NVMe SSD with the latest NAND technology. Unlike the move from disks to SSDs, I can still live with regular SSDs after experiencing Optane as a boot device. There is clearly a difference, but not enough to where we would loathe going back to a traditional SSD. If you ever spend time on a hard disk drive system after using an SSD for more than a few weeks, you understand what I mean. Disks increase your level of anxiety almost instantly.

If anything, our tests give us a clearer picture of what Optane can do for end users. Cache SSDs carry a stigma that dates back to several years of failed product releases. Our readers made that very clear in the Optane Memory Review comments thread. The failed devices of the past will hurt Optane Memory even though it’s a very good product and the best caching approach to date. The argument about Intel's high system requirements is valid, though. We really wish Optane Memory would work with 6th generation processors and 100 series chipsets. I wouldn't buy a new motherboard and processor to use Optane Memory with a hard drive when I already have enough performance and features on an older platform paired with an SSD.

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Encryption is easy. Making sure encrypted devices spill their secrets only to the right people, on the other hand, can be like juggling a bunch of eggs. That's why Seagate partnered with the Fornetix security company--to help government agencies keep their eggs in the air instead of on their faces.

Government organizations are obligated to secure their data. This requires them to use storage devices, for example, that meet certain standards. Seagate offers drives that meet those Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 140-2 regulations (FIPS PUB140-2) via its Seagate Government Solutions business. Now the company has teamed up with Fornetix, which makes encryption key management tools, to make those drives easier to use.

Fornetix's tools allow companies to change an encryption key, make sure employees only have access to the right information, and more. (It's kind of like swapping out a thin-shelled egg or making sure nobody's able to crack open an egg they aren't supposed to.) Seagate Government Solutions drives will now have those tools built in, which should reduce the stress of having to manage countless drives used by many different people.

Here's how Seagate and Fornetix bottom-lined it in their announcement:

The integrated Seagate and Fornetix products are also part of the Multilevel Security (MLS) Ecosystem, a joint effort in collaboration with multiple organizations to address data security requirements for the federal government. The products comply with the MLS Ecosystem’s framework of integrated, automated technology that enables secure workflow for government customers, eliminating costly data stovepipes while accommodating various levels of security clearance from a single storage platform.

The move is part of Seagate's continued efforts to capitalize on the business and government markets instead of relying on consumers. Nobody wants to manage a bunch of encryption keys or keep track of who's able to view the contents of a specific drive. Removing some of the hassle from doing so could help Seagate Government Solutions drives compete with products that don't have Fornetix's encryption key management tools built in.

Seagate and Fornetix are showing off their work together at the RSA Conference, which runs February 13-17, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. (They're at Fornetix booth #S2743, for anyone struggling to navigate the conference halls.) Seagate didn't name any specific products that have been updated with Fornetix's software, nor did the company say how this partnership might affect the price of its government-ready drives.

The supercomputing world is full of multi-million, and sometimes multi-billion, dollar compute clusters that feature the most powerful compute capabilities on the planet. Often, orchestrating tens of thousands of CPUs, GPUs, Knights Landing or FPGAs working in concert across a bleeding-edge networking infrastructure all comes to a crashing halt due to the ever-present nemesis of primary storage.

Seagate announced the ClusterStor 300N at Supercomputing 2016 as its solution to the storage bottleneck. The first step to jumping the storage hurdle is to employ the correct high-performance file system, so Seagate offers the Lustre parallel distributed file system and Spectrum Scale (licensed GPFS Global Parallel File System from IBM), which are two of the most popular HPC filesystems.

However, the hardware is the big change to the ClusterStor 300N equation. Supercomputers require massive bursts of data either to or from the compute cluster during normal operations (up to and beyond 100GB/s), such as during a checkpointing operation, which easily overwhelms the primary storage system. The data bursts are transitory in nature, and building the entire storage system to handle the speed of the bursts increases costs dramatically, which isn't the best solution when data bursts only occur for a small fraction of the operating time.

Burst buffers are the most common solution. A burst buffer is a dedicated intermediary appliance packed to the gills with RAM and flash technology that sets between the compute cluster and primary storage. The burst buffer absorbs the overwhelming and short-lived bursts and then flushes the data to the HDD layer at its leisure. The buffer removes any performance penalties from the slow disk-based storage and negates the need to upgrade the entire storage subsystem, and while it adds cost, it's always more cost-effective than upgrading the entire system. Many burst buffers start in the $500,000 range and move up from there, and they also require proprietary agents running on the compute cluster, which steals cycles. Some also require specialized non-POSIX compliant file systems. 

Seagate's answer is to utilize some of the tools from its LSI acquisition, which brought in much-needed flash technology. The company gave its Nytro series, which we recently reviewed, a makeover and embedded it into the storage controller, but the key concept of flash-based acceleration remains the same. The system uses up to 3.2TB Seagate Nytro Accelerators and a combination of its caching software (a newer evolution of the LSI CacheCade technology), which transparently directs data to the correct location. The software directs incoming large-block data, which HDDs can handle, to the HDD pool.  The SSD absorbs small-block random, mixed, or unaligned data for faster performance. Much like a burst buffer, the Nytro Accelerators flush the data sequentially--which boosts performance--to the HDDs. The caching software is transparent and works without any changes to the host or filesystem.

The result is up to a (claimed) 1,200% improvement with small random write data, and Seagate also upgraded the metadata manager to support a doubled 100,000 file creations per second.

Being an HDD vendor, one would expect Seagate to make improvements upon the underlying HDD resource, which it has. The company upgraded to 12Gbps SAS controllers and also employs its latest SMR HDDs, which help increase density and reduce cost. Substandard performance scaling is one of the primary challenges for en masse HDD deployments, but Seagate provided a chart that claims it provides up to 84% of the performance of the underlying HDDs, which is impressive. Seagate also notes the ClusterStor 300N offers up to 112GBps of throughput per rack.

SMR HDDs do have performance limitations, particularly with random data, but Seagate noted it defrays that with system-level data management techniques, and a dollop of flash goes a long way to addressing small random I/O for the hybrid and all-flash configurations. 

The ClusterStor series comes in all-flash variants, which are the most expensive; hybrid configurations designed to offer a balance between flash performance and HDD economics; and HDD-only models.

The company refreshed the processors with Intel's 14nm Broadwell Xeon line, which offers up to 25% more cores, and it also doubled the amount of memory the system supports. The company also has the requisite bleeding-edge networking offerings with EDR InfiniBand and 40GbE on the menu for systems that ship in Q4 2016 and the addition of 100GbE and Omni-Path will arrive in Q1 2017.

Leading-edge shipments begin in Q4 2016, and general availability is scheduled for Q1 2017.

Specifications And Features

The Seagate Innov8 uses a stylish enclosure to entice users to backup data to a massive 8TB desktop hard drive. The enclosure takes advantage of a single cable to provide both power and data transmission in a bid to simplify high-capacity external storage.

If there was ever an external hard drive to get excited about, the Seagate Innov8 is it. The product looks amazing with a theme reminiscent of the art deco era. I'm not talking about the building or interior designs, but the cars from the 1920's built by specialty coachbuilders with the large grill openings that swoop from one side to the other.

Form meets function with the Innov8; it's more than just a pretty box that holds legacy technology. The drive features USB Type-C technology that provides ample power and data throughput with a single cable. The Innov8 differs from other desktop external hard drives we've tested because it uses a single cable connection. Other solutions require an additional power source, usually a wall wart or a power brick, but who has an empty power plug next to a computer?

Seagate pushed the capacity envelope for the last two years and managed to reach higher areal density measurements, which provides more capacity, faster than the competing hard disk drive manufacturers. The push to 10TB (and soon 12TB) capacities have left the 8TB models a step behind the leading edge, but it provides a price point that is low enough for use in other categories, like external storage. The eight in Innov8 refers to the massive 8TB drive inside the system that provides a storage capacity boost to desktop systems.

Specifications

Seagate doesn't disclose a lot of information on the Innov8 other than its size, weight, and type of data connection. Seagate nestled a 5,900-RPM ST8000AS0002 8TB HDD inside of the sealed case. Desktop hard drives require 12V power, in contrast to the 2.5" models that require just 5V.  A 12V connection was not available directly until the USB 3.1 Type-C specification came about, and the 5-volt line didn't provide enough amps for a conversion. The new Type-C external connection provides ample power to utilize a 3.5-inch disk drive and other power hungry accessories.

The Innov8 weighs roughly three pounds, so it's not ideal for portable usage. It is small enough to travel if you have a briefcase, large travel bag or another similar carryall. I wouldn't want to lug it around in a purse or backpack, but it does fit.

Pricing And Warranty

There is only one model to discuss so we can drive right in. The Seagate Innov8 ships with a three-year warranty and sells for $329.99 at Newegg. Most resellers still carry the drive at the original $349.99 MSRP.

Accessory Package

Inside the box, you receive a USB 3.1 Type-C cable and a product manual that also covers the warranty terms. The software package is on the drive, and we'll examine it later in the review.

Packaging

There is a market for price-conscious shoppers, but the Innov8 is not in that class. The Seagate Innov8 8TB external hard disk drive ships in premium packaging that reflects its premium price--this isn't a cookie cutter plastic box from Taiwan or China.

A Closer Look

I haven't been to the Innov8 case manufacturing facility, but the enclosure looks like it was sand cast from aluminum like a Ferrari or Ducati engine. Seagate machined the sides to give a smooth, shiny edge that reminds me of the art deco era cars from the 1920s. The pictures don't do the drive justice; it really does look amazing.

A small machined face houses the USB Type-C connector. Type-C is reversible, so you can just plug and play with either side of the cable facing up. You will notice there is no power connector. USB 2.0 doesn't provide enough power for the drive and using the Innov8 with a legacy port is not an option. 

Software Interface

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 multimedia file sharing. 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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Performance Testing And Conclusion

Comparison Products

We chose three products to compare to the Seagate Innov8 8TB external hard drive. The Seagate Backup Plus 8TB external HDD we recently tested is the most comparable product. We also reached into the archive for the Western Digital MyBook 1TB, which is one of the most popular external drives sold in the US and Europe. Finally, we brought in the ioSafe Rugged Portable armed with a 750GB HDD, which is a product with similar heft.

Sequential Scaling Block Sizes

The two Seagate 8TB external drives deliver nearly identical sequential performance as we sweep along the various block sizes. The older Backup Plus has a dip with 16KB block writes, but Seagate smoothed that out with the newer firmware it uses in the Innov8. The USB 3.1 Innov8 also delivers slightly higher peak performance with large blocks. The two legacy external drives, which represent products you may soon replace, are much slower than the new breed of high-capacity models shipping today.

Full LBA Span Performance

During these tests, we read and write with 128KB block data across the entire user LBA space of the drives. We've all noticed that hard drives lose performance over time as more data populates the platters. The drives will write to the fastest portion of the platters first (the outer tracks). As data fills the drive, it has to write the progressively slower areas of the platters (inner tracks).

The Innov8 reads sequential data back at roughly 170 MB/s at its peak, but that drops to just under 100 MB/s when the platters are full. The data writes peak at 190 MB/s but drop to just 80 MB/s when the drive is nearly full.

File Transfers

With such a large performance increase over many of the other external storage products in this review, you might expect the Innov8 to dominate the real-world file transfer tests. That isn't the case, though. The Seagate Innov8 outperforms the other products with ease during pure sequential data transfers, but small files prove to be problematic.

The game transfer test using the rFactor directory has a mix of large and small block files. It's an excellent mix of data, but more importantly, it's a popular piece of software that has millions of users. The mixed data reduces the performance of the two Seagate 8TB products, and the legacy external hard disk drives surpass both of the newer products. 

The backup directory test features real-world data in all sizes. Some examples include PDF, Word, Excel, MP3, JPEGs and MP4 (video files). The wide 15.3GB assortment of data pushes the Seagate Innov8 to the back of the performance pack.

Conclusion

I've never been hard on external storage products as long as they work as advertised. With the Seagate Innov8, there really isn't an advertised performance specification. The product web page doesn't advertise any features other than a single cable design and a tagline that reads: "Boundaries Are Now Off Limits." Honestly, it's hard to determine what that even means.

The Seagate Innov8 (STFG8000400) is expensive at $349.99. We're glad to see Newegg lower the price, but $329.99 is only a small gesture. The Innov8's ST8000AS0002 HDD retails for $249.99 by itself, so you pay a high premium for the external enclosure compared to buying the drive in a cheap plastic enclosure case from a third-party vendor.

Pricing and value are secondary with this product; you are really buying the look and software features rather than the hard drive itself. The Seagate Innov8 looks amazing. It's also somewhat bulky, but in this case, that's a good thing. I wouldn't want to take it with me, but I sure would want to look at it sitting on a desk. Some people have cars in the garage just to look at. The Innov8 has a beautiful enclosure that you can actually use, and it is still very stylish. It's not for everyone; I'll be the first to admit that. I'm not even sure if I would spend $330 to own one just to look at and store data on.

That's where the value-add accessory package closes the gap. Seagate's backup software is excellent, and the overall package is second to none. Users get a number of extra features, like the ability to access the data from on the road and schedule backup operations. If you already own a NAS these features may seem basic, but for a large number of computer users a dedicated NAS is off the table due to cost and complexity. The Seagate Innov8 is a backup solution for those looking for a simple setup, attractive design, and proven reliability.

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Seagate recently brought back its BarraCuda line with new 10TB 3.5" models, and now it has added beefy 5TB 2.5" models that are the first 2.5" HDDs to break the 5TB barrier. Seagate also increased the density of its FireCuda 2.5" SSHDs up to 2TB.

BarraCuda 5TB 2.5" HDDs

Seagate designed the BarraCuda 2.5" line for high-performance applications (at least as high-performance as HDDs can be) with capacities that range from 500GB to 5TB. The 3TB, 4TB, and 5TB models feature a 15mm Z-height (thickness), so they won't slip into the overwhelming majority of laptops. Seagate offers the thicker 2.5" models for external use cases, such as enclosures or drive docks. Of course, a 15mm 2.5" drive will fit nicely into a computer case, so it might be useful for SFF applications, although you might need an adapter. The 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB models feature the 7mm Z-height, which allows them to fit inside laptops.

The SATA 6Gbps BarraCuda series uses standard PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), which is a nice surprise, as we expected the company to use SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) for the 5TB model. (EDIT: The drive is an SMR drive, but Seagate omitted that designation in its manual. Seagate representatives indicate the company will correct the manual. More detail here.) SMR suffers performance disadvantages during random write workloads, but the faster PMR technology allows the drive to offer faster, more responsive performance in diverse workloads.

The Power Bits

The 2.5" BarraCuda models have a 5,400RPM spindle speed that limits the data transfer rate to 140MB/s, but the slower spindle speed helps reduce power consumption. The entire range of BarraCuda 2.5" HDDs have an average 1.9/2.1W read/write power consumption rating and idle/sleep at 1.1W/.18W. HDDs require a big "jolt" of energy to get started, which could limit applications in power-constrained USB 2.0 external enclosures. Seagate limited the startup current to 1.2A, which allows the company to retain backward compatibility with legacy enclosures.

As expected, the drives also have 128MB of cache, a somewhat relaxed UBER rating of 1 per 10E14, a 55TB per year workload rating, and two-year warranty. Surprisingly, the drive has a 600,000 cycle load/unload rating, which provides more than enough durability for external use.

The Density Bits

Seagate is using the 1TB platter technology it announced earlier this year (1,307 Gb/in² average areal density) to achieve the increased density. The 5TB model features five platters and ten heads. The drives also use standard air-based technology, in contrast to the helium designs that have yet to penetrate the 2.5" segment. A combination of SMR and helium could theoretically offer much higher density, so there is still room for further density enhancements beyond 5TB with existing technology. HDD vendors tend to use a base HDD design for several products with various performance ratings, so it is reasonable to expect 2.5" 5TB 7,200RPM enterprise models in the future.

Seagate's move to high-density 2.5" products is essential as it attempts to stave off denser SSDs. The 2TB limit in the 2.5" 7mm form factor continues to be a sore spot, as Samsung already has 4TB SSDs with the same measurements. HDDs still enjoy a significant price advantage, however: A 4TB Samsung 850 EVO will set you back $1,499, whereas Seagate said the BarraCuda will retail for a mere $55-$85 depending on capacity. However, SSDs continue to steal more market share in the notebook segment every quarter. Seagate's focus on the external segment is wise as it continues to retreat into "cheap and deep" applications.

The 2.5" FireCudas

Seagate is also talking up its previously announced FireCuda SSHD. Like the BarraCuda series, the FireCuda series comes in both 2.5" and 3.5" flavors. The 2.5" models previously topped out at 1TB, but Seagate announced a new 2TB model. The company injected 8GB of NAND flash into the 2.5" 1TB FireCuda, along with its Multi-Tier Caching algorithms, to boost workload performance in mainstream/gaming applications.

We consider 8GB of NAND to be anemic for the 1TB FireCuda, as the desktop SSHDs feature up to 32GB of flash. Seagate curiously chose to stay with the same 8GB NAND package for the new 2TB model.

The Multi-Tier Caching algorithms dynamically identify "hot" (frequently requested) data and promote it to, or evict it from, the NAND cache accordingly. However, if a user requires data that isn't held in the cache, they notice a measurable performance decline as the drive recovers the data from the spinning platters. More cache allows the drive to accelerate more data, so the size of the cache has a profound performance impact.

We think a sizable bump in NAND capacity, perhaps as high as 64GB, would help speed SSHD adoption. SSHDs really haven't taken off, but Seagate intends to keep plucking away with its speedy SSD alternatives. The FireCuda features a 5-year warranty and is available now. Seagate indicated the 2TB FireCuda will retail for $85-$95.

EDIT 11:20am PST 11/17/2016 - The 5TB BarraCuda is an SMR drive, but Seagate omitted that designation in its manual. Seagate will correct the manual. More detail here.)

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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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.

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Specifications And Features

Thin is in. A quick look at most new business-class notebooks, a majority of external storage products, and even your monitor sitting right in front of you confirms the trend. Height challenged products may look cool, but when it comes to storage, you can't pack as many bits into a slim design. Thankfully, companies like LaCie give us options, such as the small capacity products that satisfy the need for trendy slim designs. The company also provides larger devices for massive storage capacity when the job requires it.

LaCie's Porsche Design line consists of three products. The largest is a desktop model that currently pegs the capacity scale at 8TB. The drive is fairly large, uses a wall outlet for power and doesn't meet the standards for portable use. The Porsche Design Mobile Drive is on the other end of the scale with a slim 10mm Z-height and up to 2TB's of storage capacity. Both products are very attractive and useful for their intended use case, but there was a gap in the middle. LaCie recently filled that gap with the new Mobile Drive 4TB.

The LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive with 4TB of storage has double the Z-height (thickness) of the 1TB and 2TB products. To reach the massive 4TB capacity point, LaCie needed to use a taller hard drive. 2.5-inch hard drives range from 5mm to 15mm with a few stops in between. In time, the hard drive companies will release a 4TB product in a slimmer form factor, but for now, the Momentus / Laptop HDD (Seagate Branding) only ships with the large 15mm thickness.

Specifications

The Porsche Design Mobile Drive product line consists of four part numbers that fall into three capacities. The mid-tier 2TB product ships in two colors; silver like the rest of its siblings and gold for a little extra bling. The large 4TB model offers twice the storage capacity of the others but also uses a taller, and heavier, enclosure.

This isn't the first 4TB external HDD we've tested. Several months ago, we tested the 4TB LaCie Rugged RAID ($379.99). The Rugged RAID unit requires two 2TB hard disk drives to provide high capacity, but some users prefer a single drive to a RAID pair. The latter adds an extra device to the storage pool, thus increasing the odds of a failure in a RAID 0 array.

The Porsche Design Mobile Drive 4TB uses a USB Type-C connector but still delivers the same bandwidth as 5Gbps USB 3.0. The interface speed isn't much of a concern with hard drives because the connection bandwidth isn't the limiting factor.

LaCie doesn't list performance specifications for the Porsche Design series. We’ve noticed this troubling trend with the HDD companies on several products over the last couple of years.

We found a Seagate ST4000LM016 from the Momentus / Laptop HDD product line inside the enclosure. This drive uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to reach the high capacity point. SMR is a controversial subject because it's similar to three-bit per cell flash. SMR increases capacity, but it writes data slower when the drive is full because the manufacturer overlaps the recording tracks. The overlap means that existing data on the overlapped tracks is affected by writing new data to neighboring tracks. The drive must read the data, modify it and then rewrite it to overwrite the existing data, just like an SSD. This isn't a big problem for mass storage with a normal sequential workload, but SMR encounters performance problems with random data during heavy use.

Pricing And Warranty

B&H lists the 4TB Porsche Design Mobile Drive for $229.99, and the drives are in stock. The 2TB silver model retails for $149.99 and the 1TB model for $109.99. All three products include a 3-year warranty that covers manufacturer's defects.

Packaging

The LaCie Porsche Design Mobile sells online and in retail stores. LaCie chose to use a full retail package that outlines many of the specifications and features of the product.

LaCie packaged the drive in a plastic container to keep it secure. The accessories and paper Quick Installation Guide fit under the drive in a recessed area of the plastic container.

Accessory Package

The drive ships with two cables in the package. The cables give users the ability to connect to a legacy USB 3.0 Type-A port, and also the new USB Type-C port featured on many new PCs and Apple products. I feel this would have been a great product to include a combo cable with. We're starting to see cables with a Type-A adapter cap fitted over the end of a USB Type-C connector. The cables are fairly low-cost, less than $15 online, but we've yet to use one, so we can't comment on quality.

A Closer Look

The drive itself is a full metal design that aims to add both style and protection to your data. Inside is a small printed circuit board attached to a Seagate Laptop HDD (Part Number ST4000LM016). A support structure keeps the components together but also reduces direct vibration to the delicate internals.

The drive uses the new USB Type-C connector, but it still offers the same 5Gbps peak transfer performance found with USB 3.0.

Software Interface

The Porsche Design Mobile Drive ships with applications loaded on the drive so you don't have to find and download the software from the LaCie website. The software is also available on the site in case you lose or delete it.

After you find the software, you can run the installer, which asks you questions during the setup. The software will format your drive and even give you the option to set up two partitions. Non-Windows devices can access the first partition (but Windows can access the data too), and the second partition has the NTFS file system that only Windows can access without third-party tools.

LaCie's software suite includes backup scheduling software, encryption management and formatting tools. LaCie also gives customers access to backup software for Mac products. We pulled these software images from the Rugged RAID, but the software, setup and features are identical.

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Performance Testing And Conclusion

Comparison Products

Our test group includes the previously reviewed Sony PSZ-HB2T 2TB and LaCie Rugged RAID 4TB. The two products utilize a dual interface design that supports both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2. The charts also list the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB. A full feature review for this model will come in the following weeks, but you get a sneak peek of its performance in this review. 

There are a limited number of 4TB portable hard disk drives on the market. Seagate managed to pack a lot of capacity into a very small package.

Sequential Scaling Block Sizes

The three single-drive external HDDs deliver nearly identical sequential performance. The USB 3.0 Sony PSZ-HB2T enjoys a slight performance increase with 8KB and 16KB block sizes. The LaCie Rugged RAID (two HDDs in RAID 0) has a much higher performance ceiling, but the cost also increases proportionally with the performance.

Full LBA Span Performance

In this test, we read and write data across the entire user LBA range to find the peak, median and low performance. Hard disk drives operate at a higher speed while working on the outside of the platter, but the inner section of the platter is slower. The drives write new data to the outer tracks first, which is why your HDD-powered notebook or desktop starts out fast but becomes slower as you populate the drive with data.

Again, we see the three single-drive products delivering nearly identical performance, while the Rugged RAID offers nearly a 2x improvement.

File Transfers

To demonstrate real-world performance, we have three tests to represent the most common data types stored on portable storage devices. The first test transfers a Blu-ray ISO of a popular movie to the drives, so the workload consists of a large block sequential transfer.

In the second test, we transfer the entire directory of rFactor, a PC video game. The drive transfers both small and large blocks of information during the test.

The third test involves transferring 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 files.

Just as before, the three single-HDD products all group together with similar performance. The Rugged RAID steps away from the crowd with the highest level of performance, just as you would expect.

The LaCie Porsche Design Mobile 4TB struggled with the backup and game directory tests, which have a mixture of small and large block data. SMR hard disk drives tend to struggle with small block transfers. The test reveals performance degradation when small-block data is mixed in with large sequential blocks of data. Users will have to decide if the additional storage capacity, and lower cost, is worth the slower performance. I'm going to guess that most shopping for the largest portable HDD will make the trade and never look back.

Conclusion

LaCie raised the bar for portable storage once again. The Rugged RAID was a great breakout product, but the company passed the additional expense of two 2TB HDDs connected to a RAID bridge (required to reach the 4TB capacity mark) to the user. The new Porsche Design Mobile Drive reduces the overall expense required to reach the high capacity mark, and the company passes those savings on to end users.

This product doesn't improve performance over existing products, but we didn't observe a crippling reduction in performance, either. Users get a 2x capacity increase over the existing products in the line without twice the cost. The Porsche Design Mobile Drive offers a great balance of capacity and price while holding the performance steady.

LaCie has stepped to the forefront of both external and Thunderbolt technology products. For a long time we looked at the LaCie products as a niche for wealthy elites with more money than sense, but in the last couple of years the prices have come down, and the products now offer leading technology features. Before, we would get a product that looked amazing but lacked true innovative features. That isn't the Seagate LaCie we have today. The product we tested, and others like the 12big, shows LaCie's leadership and determination to be a real premium brand.

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Adata announced its new HD700 and HV620S hard drives. The HD700 is a ruggedized drive that the company designed to weather the shocks and vibrations found in the mobile world, and the HV620S slots in as the slim and stylish drive. 

HD700 Gets Rugged

The HD700 is the more interesting drive of the two due to its ruggedized design, which can tolerate a wide range of hostile conditions, such as water, dust, variable temperatures and shock conditions. The drive conforms to the MIL-STD-810G 516.6 requirements, which is a military specification that manufacturers can only achieve if their products pass an extensive range of shock-based tests.

The HD700 employs a triple-layer design to handle the extremes that includes an inner cushioned mounting, a shock resistant plastic enclosure, and a removable silicone/rubber layer (multiple colors available). A G Shock Sensor alerts the user via a blinking red light when the device is under duress due to a shock-related event, and it parks the drive heads to prevent data destruction. The light returns to blue when the drive resumes normal operation.

The HD700 is certified as waterproof and dustproof through the IEC IP56 specification, which assures that it will sustain a range of water-based incidents, such as dripping, spraying, splashing and jetting water, and of course, full immersion. The drive also adds in 256-bit AES data encryption, so the James Bond types can use it as well. The drive comes in both 1 TB and 2 TB models and communicates via USB 3.0. 

Slimmer, More Stylish: HV620S

The HV620S is the slim and non-rugged drive for more mundane use cases. The new model slots in as the thinner variant of the HV620 and features a slim 11.5 mm Z-height (thickness). The drive features the same G Shock sensor protection as the HD700, although it's not military-grade shock resistant, and it also employs AES-256 encryption.

The HV620S comes in 1 TB capacities only and communicates via USB 3.0. Adata has not released the MSRP or performance specifications of either device, but we expect the fair to middling sequential throughput seen with most external hard drives.

Shock(ing)

It's no secret that SSDs are supplanting HDDs in the notebook market (44 percent of units shipped last year), and the SSD vendors are now aiming directly at the external and portable HDD segment with offerings like the Samsung Portable SSD T3 and the SanDisk Extreme 500 Portable SSD. These new flashy competitors are nearly impervious to shock, which is one of the key reasons that they are experiencing rapid adoption. The HD700 levels the playing field a bit in this respect, as military-grade shock resistance is sufficient for most users.

HDDs still offer a tremendous cost advantage, and that equates to additional capacity per dollar. For instance, the Samsung T3 weighs in at roughly $750 for 2 TB, and the SanDisk Extreme 500 commands $150 for its maximum 480 GB capacity point. By contrast, external hard drives that are similar to the Adata drives tend to fall into the $80 range for 1 TB and $125 range for 2 TB capacity points.

The race might get a bit closer as the price of flash drops. Professional users and the speed-obsessed will go for flash, while most mainstream users will still opt for cheap HDD capacity.

Paul Alcorn is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.

Specifications, Pricing, Warranty & Accessories

Rugged storage is all the rage these days. We recently reviewed the LaCie Rugged RAID Thunderbolt Portable Storage, learning more about how photographers and videographers use high-capacity devices on the road to protect their work.

In a perfect world, every shoot would take place indoors with carefully-placed lighting, climate-controlled rooms and only a few people around, none of them tripping over your valuable equipment. But in the real world, these professionals often have to deal with dust, dirt and water. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that there are standards for grading resistance to environmental conditions.

Sony has some of the best imaging products in the world, with Alpha cameras and professional video products used to record some of the most memorable content on television. With the transition to 4K underway, even small clips take up an enormous amount of space on disk. At high-quality settings, the most powerful models can record data at 600 Mb/s (75 MB/s). They can also record directly to external storage devices like Sony's PSZ-x products.

Today, we're testing the PSZ-HB2T rugged external storage drive. This model features two interfaces, one USB 3.0 and the other Thunderbolt. The drive comes formatted in exFAT for use with other Sony products, and offers IPX5-level dust resistance and IP4X-level water resistance. This is the same rating as the previously-tested LaCie Rugged RAID, meaning the drive can take water splashing against it, but not submersion or a dusty environment with little ingress.

Specifications

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Sony offers six different SKUs in its PSZ series. There are three main groups, starting with one model that fits a 256GB solid-state drive inside the enclosure. Three models ranging from 500GB to 2TB connect via USB 3.0 or FireWire 800, just like the single SSD version. But the solution we're testing today ships with either 1TB (PSZ-HB1T) or 2TB (PSZ-HA2T) of capacity and differs from the other models by replacing FireWire 800 with a more modern Thunderbolt port.

Inside, we find a Samsung (now part of Seagate) SpinPoint M9T 5400 RPM 2TB hard drive.

Pricing & Warranty

We found the PSZ-HB1T (1TB model) for as low as $169 and the PSZ-HB2T for $273. The PSZ-HA models with FireWire 800 instead of Thunderbolt are a bit cheaper. The 1TB drive costs just $139, while the 2TB version sells for $250. The one SSD-equipped offering is priced at just $120, but it's also the lowest-capacity family member.

Accessories

Our sample shipped with two paper documents. The first is a simple statement that covers the terms of the limited warranty, while the second serves as an instruction manual (providing you're able to read its very small print). There's also a sticker included so that you can write down the enclosure's data contents.

Two cables come bundled, and they're around .6 meters long. One is a USB 3.0 cable and the other facilitate Thunderbolt connectivity. Thunderbolt cables are particularly expensive compared to most other interfaces, so we're glad to see Sony include one in its package.

Software

The system ships with software on the drive that you can install on your PC or Mac. This package lets you easily format the drive in different file systems. Some of the available options work with Apple products, while NTFS only works with Windows-based systems. The drive is formatted in exFAT from the factory, allowing you to read data from the drive on both platforms.

A Closer Look

The system ships in a brown box that lists a few of its specifications and post-format capacity. We found the travel case interesting because it looks like a film case once used for analog media.

Inside, there are separate compartments for the storage device, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt cables.

A rubber bumper protects the drive from accidental falls. The PSZ-SA25 model with its SSD would give you more shock protection, but if course at the expense of limited capacity.

The bumper also acts as a stacking system for securely fitting more than one drive on top of another. One side has recesses, while the other has small feet that match the recesses in a stacked position.

The rubber also protrudes out from the metal case to offer better corner protection. A carefully hidden LED just behind the plastic end cover emits light when the drive is connected.

The two interface connections are hidden by form-fitted covers that give the system its IP54 dust- and water-resistance ratings. We took the main drive out of the bumper to get a better look at its dual interface.

Performance Testing And Conclusion

Sequential Scaling Block Sizes

To start our testing, we look at sequential reads and writes according to block sizes. Some products are tuned to deliver higher performance depending on the type of data being transferred. But most of the tuning happens with solid-state storage, rather than mechanical disks.

We tested the PSZ-HB2T with both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connections. Surprisingly, USB 3.0 delivered higher performance than Thunderbolt when it came to sequential transfers.

Full LBA Span Performance

Now we're reading and writing across the entire user logical block addressing range of the drives. Hard disks read and write faster along the outer portion of their platters, and lose performance as more data occupies the drive. This test allows us to isolate the maximum and minimum transfer rates.

In our test with 128KB blocks, Sony's PSZ-HB2T delivered 131 MB/s on the outer tracks, 95 MB/s in the middle and just 54 MB/s on the inner tracks. It should also be noted that you get more consistent performance with USB 3.0 than Thunderbolt.

File Transfers

Rounding out our external storage performance test are simple file transfers to the unit we're evaluating. We use Disk Bench to measure the results in both throughput and time. Time, it turns out, is a better measurement for displaying results because everyone can relate to it. We also added Adata's SE730—a flash-based external storage model—to the results.

When working with large-block data moved sequentially, the PSZ-HB2T's USB 3.0 port is fastest. When we shifted over to mixed data, the Thunderbolt connection took the lead. Thunderbolt can handle small file transfers better than USB, so this didn't surprise us. The Game Directory Transfer Test (using rFactor) consists of almost all small files, and really shows the difference in interface connection speeds.

Conclusion

As media files continue to get larger, the need for high-capacity portable storage also increases. The transition to 4K video is happening swiftly, putting more emphasis on speed and size. Sony's latest external storage model can sustain high bit rate 4K transfers for half of the drive's capacity, but not across the full user LBA range. This could be an issue for professionals using the disk as a direct-attached target, and it'll likely strain a camera's buffering system. In my experience, once the buffer fills, the camera drops frames to ease the load. However, I've admittedly never used a full professional 4K system designed to deliver broadcast-quality video. I have used professional-grade 1080p devices that record at 60 frames per second, so I'm one generation behind the curve.

As an external backup storage device, Sony's PSZ-HB2T is an average solution once you factor out its enhanced durability features. It's essentially a low-cost 2.5-inch hard drive inside a fancy case that you can drop from waist-level heights.

Then again, there are very few ruggedized external storage products on the market that aren't SSD-based. Sony's biggest competitor is probably LaCie, and that company's Rugged Thunderbolt is a direct competitor (LAC9000489 2TB model at $270 MSRP) to the product we tested today. Unfortunately for Sony, it fails to hit a more attractive price point. Surely that won't come as a surprise to anyone who has compared the prices of Sony consumer electronics to those of other manufacturers.  

All of these types of products tend to cost significantly more than their non-rugged counterparts. Who knew rubber and foam were so expensive?

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Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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