Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB USB 3.0 Drive Review
by Ganesh T S on August 4, 2015 8:00 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
In the introductory section, we had mentioned about some value-adding features of the Backup Plus Portable drive. In order to take advantage of these features, the Seagate Dashboard app needs to be installed first. The app allows configuration of the backup sources, restoration of backups, connection to cloud services such as Dropbox / Google Drive / Nero Drive and associating the drive with those services (if applicable). The general interface and available options in the Seagate Dashboard can be seen in the video below.
The Dashboard also allows upload and download of photos / videos associated with a Facebook or Flickr account. In terms of other features, the free 200GB on OneDrive is available only after the product is registered (launching the registration through the setup program in the drive automatically populates the necessary serial number field). Lyve is yet another standalone application that can be used to back up photos and videos to the drive as well as the cloud. The download link is again provided on the page launched by the setup program in the drive. Seagate also provides Paragon drivers for Windows and Mac OS - allowing the former to read and write HFS+ drives and the latter to read and write NTFS drives.
Coming to the business end of the review, we need to discuss the pricing. The 4TB Backup Plus Portable was launched with a MSRP of $240, but the street price for the STDR4000100 seems to be closer to $200. The performance of the disk is what one would expect from a traditional PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) drive. Our DAS suite benchmark doesn't reveal any SMR (shingled magnetic recording) firmware tricks. (Update - 10/21/2016: The drive uses platters that operate partly in PMR mode and partly in SMR, along with multi-tier caching (MTC) which includes DRAM and flash - The efficiency of MTC ensures that an empty drive maintains as much consistency as a PMR drive even under heavy traffic.) Pretty much the only improvement idea that we can think of is a larger internal buffer. On the whole, at $0.05 / GB, it is one of the most cost-effective and easily portable storage media currently available for purchase. The value-added features such as the free OneDrive storage and the functional Seagate Dashboard app serve to sweeten the deal.
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Jurgen_modeling - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Does anyone know the power consumption of this drive?I have a Seagate portable 2.5inch 3TB USB3 drive which did not like my Surface Pro 3. When directly hooked up to the Surface Pro 3, the harddisk made scratching noises and could not boot properly. When I hooked up the Seagate 3TB drive to an external USB-based docking station, everything was fine. Other than power draw, I have no idea what else could have caused this issue. I suppose power draw on the 4TB to be similar or worse than on the 3TB drive.
hlmcompany - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Jurgen, I do not know the power availability specific to a Surface Pro 3 for USB. However, portable hosts, like the SP3, do vary the power state for various devices, including USB ports. The max specified by the USB 3.0 standard is 900 mA, while the minimum is 150 mA.aoshiryaev - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
The speeds reported are low! I have a 1tb USB 3 Transcend drive that reports 200MB seq read/write. Is it possible speed is diminished by capacity somehow?MrSpadge - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
To reach 200 MB/s with an HDD it must be a 3.5" 7.2k rpm model with 1 TB platters, being measured at the beginning of the drive (fastest section). This is a 2.5" drive (slower) at 5.4k rpm (slower).fokka - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
this. a portable 2.5" 1tb drive won't reach anywhere near 200MB/s. half of that if you're lucky. higher values might be due to the cache or some measuring artefacts like you often see in windows.Notmyusualid - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
No, its possible you got your numbers wrong my friend.stevenrix - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I own this drive, it is very fast if you want to write big files, a big of 1 gb can be transferred in 4 or 5 seconds which isn't bad for a 2.5 inch drive. With tiny files it's a nightmare.For the warranty, I had to send an email to Seagate because it was written "2 years of warranty" in french and "3 years of warranty" in english on the box. It turned out that this drive would be under warranty for 3.5 years.
So far I am satisfied with this drive, I hope this unit won't fail in the next couple of years.
Samus - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Ganesh, can you disassemble the drive case and take a photo for us?Also, can you take another CDI screen shot after a few hours of use. I'm curious where the load/unload cycle count (APM) value sits with this drive. My guess is its at 64, but I can do some math from the SMART values to determine how aggressive the power saving is set...helping determine the drives lifespan.
ummduh - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Have to second this. Does the internal drive use a standard SATA connector?Sort of shocked no one took the case off for a look-see.
Per Hansson - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
Me to, I would really like to know if it's using a SATA connector or if it's USB direct.