Let’s return to the Backup Plus Slim, though: should you buy it? The simple answer is probably not, there are cheaper hard disk drives out there from Seagate itself. If that trend continues, a 1TB external SSD will cost less than a 1TB hard drive this time next year. A recent glut of inventory means that SSD prices have fallen significantly, dangerously approaching the symbolic floor of $100 per TB, about twice what a hard disk of similar capacity costs today. Speaking of which, it might not be long before we wave goodbye to hard drives anyway. Seagate itself said back in 2012 that 60TB hard drives may come to the market by 2020, but instead fired up a 60TB SSD (which uses flash memory) in 2016. That explains why the platter capacity has stagnated at 1TB since, well, September 2015.

As it stands, the big players do not seem to have any intention of investing R&D in smaller platters to go in the drives equipped by the Backup Plus Slim. Should Seagate have swapped the LM0007 for the LMZ15, a newer, potentially faster hard drive? Maybe – but then there’s very little incentive to do so. That’s great if you have any inclination towards the creative side of computing, but not so great if you only want quality storage on the cheap (the drive comes with a two-year warranty, by the way). The drive comes with the brand new Mylio photo management software and a two-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, but no storage applications like, say, the WD My Passport Ultra range. It was cool to the touch during use, and barely audible. The Backup Plus Slim scored between 141 and 144MBps on reads and around 137MBps on write speeds, while a 10GB file was transferred at 128MBps.

It is a slightly-better-than-average performer as shown in our CrystalDiskMark and Atto benchmarks. Surprisingly, though, that drive costs more on its own than when packaged as the Backup Plus Slim. This product uses the old ST2000LM007 drive, as we mentioned, a disk which has two 1TB platters spinning at 5,400 RPM with 128MB cache.

Here’s how the Seagate Backup Plus Slim performed in our benchmark tests:ĬrystalDiskMark: 141MBps (read) 137MBps (write)Ītto: 144MBps (read, 256mb) 137MBps (write, 256mb)

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