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Seagate Review: Hands-On With the 4TB Backup Plus Portable Hard Drive With Lyve Integration

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Seagate has long sold a line of Backup Plus external hard drives that offer large amounts of storage space at a reasonable price, and in June, the company announced two new features added to all hard drives in the Backup Plus line: 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage and the Lyve photo and video management app for automatically backing up photos.

Seagate also announced a new high capacity Backup Plus Portable hard drive, with 4TB of storage and a 20.5mm form factor, priced at $240. Seagate invited us to test out its newest hard drive to test the Backup Plus hard drive and the new Lyve app and service it ships with.

seagatebackupplusinbox.jpg

Seagate's new Backup Plus offers the same 4TB of storage that the Backup Plus Fast offers, but it's less expensive and it is a single 4TB hard drive instead of two external drives in a RAID 0 configuration. It's also got more storage than the Backup Plus Slim, which caps out at 2TB, allowing Seagate's newest offering to fill a void between the two existing products (Fast and Slim) in the Backup Plus family.

Design and Features

Seagate's been selling its Backup Plus line for years. Design wise, the 4TB Backup Plus looks like any standard 2.5-inch portable hard drive. It measures in at 4.5 inches in length, 3.1 inches in width, it's .807 inches thick (20.5mm), and it weighs 0.54 pounds. In terms of usability, those dimensions mean it's slim and easy to slip into a bag or a backpack.

seagatebackupplusfront.jpg

The Backup Plus has a traditional black casing that's half metal and half plastic, with the metal plate located on the front of the drive. An LED on the front lights up when the hard drive is plugged in, and there's a single USB port on one side.


Click here to read more...

Article Link: Seagate Review: Hands-On With the 4TB Backup Plus Portable Hard Drive With Lyve Integration
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/review/seagate-4tb-backup-plus-portable-hard-drive/
MacRumors said:



Seagate has long sold a line of Backup Plus external hard drives that offer large amounts of storage space at a reasonable price, and in June, the company announced two new features added to all hard drives in the Backup Plus line: 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage and the Lyve photo and video management app for automatically backing up photos.

Seagate also announced a new high capacity Backup Plus Portable hard drive, with 4TB of storage and a 20.5mm form factor, priced at $240. Seagate invited us to test out its newest hard drive to test the Backup Plus hard drive and the new Lyve app and service it ships with.

seagatebackupplusinbox.jpg

Seagate's new Backup Plus offers the same 4TB of storage that the Backup Plus Fast offers, but it's less expensive and it is a single 4TB hard drive instead of two external drives in a RAID 0 configuration. It's also got more storage than the Backup Plus Slim, which caps out at 2TB, allowing Seagate's newest offering to fill a void between the two existing products (Fast and Slim) in the Backup Plus family.

Design and Features

Seagate's been selling its Backup Plus line for years. Design wise, the 4TB Backup Plus looks like any standard 2.5-inch portable hard drive. It measures in at 4.5 inches in length, 3.1 inches in width, it's .807 inches thick (20.5mm), and it weighs 0.54 pounds. In terms of usability, those dimensions mean it's slim and easy to slip into a bag or a backpack.

seagatebackupplusfront.jpg

The Backup Plus has a traditional black casing that's half metal and half plastic, with the metal plate located on the front of the drive. An LED on the front lights up when the hard drive is plugged in, and there's a single USB port on one side.


Click here to read more...

Article Link: Seagate Review: Hands-On With the 4TB Backup Plus Portable Hard Drive With Lyve Integration
Click to expand...
Have you been able to test the drive with large chunks of photos - say over 100GB? I've been dealing with this issue on an ongoing basis with Seagate recently. Somewhere between 30GB and 70GB into a large transfer of photos (common when upgrading to a new drive) the Backup Plus slows to less than ~30MB/s and never recovers. The problem is peculiar to HFS+ - it doesn't occur under NTFS (or any other filesystem, as far as I know). It won't happen with large files (like videos) or under the common Windows filesystems.

When I was working with Seagate on it, they acknowledged the issue with their 5TB (desktop) SMR drive, but then suddenly denied the same issue was also occurring with their desktop 4TB (non-SMR) drive. I don't know what happened, because up until that point their engineers were able to closely duplicate my findings.


Could you test the new drive under HFS+ with a large number of photos? A Mac forum would be the perfect place for this, and Mac users will care about this issue. Seagate took me very seriously and was trying to fix the issue, but I don't know if they succeeded. I'm curious whether they've fixed it quietly, or whether the issue also exists for the portable line.
 
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MacRumors said:
...so to use the drive without formatting, users will need to install Seagate's NTFS driver for Mac. With the driver, the Backup Plus can be used interchangeably between Windows and Mac computers without needing to reformat.
Click to expand...

I can think of lots of uses for an NTFS driver for OSX, but I'm not sure that's the path I'd choose for my backup drive, even an automated one.

In the interest of disclosure, I'm currently using a 2GB 2.5" external drive for Time Machine backups and a set of 1GB 2.5" external drives for cloned (i.e. bootable) drive backups via SuperDuper!, easily one of my favorite Mac features.
 
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JustThinkin' said:
Have you been able to test the drive with large chunks of photos - say over 100GB? I've been dealing with this issue on an ongoing basis with Seagate recently. Somewhere between 30GB and 70GB into a large transfer of photos (common when upgrading to a new drive) the Backup Plus slows to less than ~30MB/s and never recovers. The problem is peculiar to HFS+ - it doesn't occur under NTFS (or any other filesystem, as far as I know). It won't happen with large files (like videos) or under the common Windows filesystems.
When I was working with Seagate on it, they acknowledged the issue with their 5TB (desktop) SMR drive, but then suddenly denied the same issue was also occurring with their desktop 4TB (non-SMR) drive. I don't know what happened, because up until that point their engineers were able to closely duplicate my findings.
Could you test the new drive under HFS+ with a large number of photos? A Mac forum would be the perfect place for this, and Mac users will care about this issue. Seagate took me very seriously and was trying to fix the issue, but I don't know if they succeeded. I'm curious whether they've fixed it quietly, or whether the issue also exists for the portable line.
Click to expand...

A couple weeks ago I transferred about 4TB to a Seagate Expansion 5TB drive (bigger movie/TV files and not a lot of small ones) and with just dragging and dropping I saw this slowdown. Both were HFS+. I have kludgy little program called FoldersSynchronizer that I tried using its backup function and it didn't seem like the slowdown occurred. I thought it might be a Finder feature.
 
NMBob said:
A couple weeks ago I transferred about 4TB to a Seagate Expansion 5TB drive (bigger movie/TV files and not a lot of small ones) and with just dragging and dropping I saw this slowdown. Both were HFS+. I have kludgy little program called FoldersSynchronizer that I tried using its backup function and it didn't seem like the slowdown occurred. I thought it might be a Finder feature.
Click to expand...
Feature or not ;), it doesn't occur with other brands - at least not with my dataset.

How much did it slow down to - did you get a rough measurement? I presume these files averaged 100MB or more in size - is this correct?
 
iammenasco said:
Con: It's Seagate.
Click to expand...

Fact: all hard drives are unreliable. I would be skeptical of claims that one VENDOR is consistently more unreliable than the others, although one model or series could be. Moral: always have a multifaceted backup strategy. And make sure to keep some copies of all your most important stuff off-premises.
 
I will never buy Seagate nor WD, just bought a 3 TB Toshiba 2.5" drive, also just released last month, before this one was released.
I actually prefer Hitachi drives but sadly they don't have 3-4 TB drives, never had one single Hitachi/IBM drive die on me.
 
Marx55 said:
Rotational HD are old tech. Bring SSD. Once you try it, you never go back.
Click to expand...
You can make a 4TB external SSD now. It will only cost you $1600.

And if you're archiving, the data won't last as long offline - theoretically as little as ~1-3 years.
 
I would buy it if it wasn't seagate. They have by far the highest failure rates in the industry and every one i've had has died on me within months. That coupled by the 4TB having 2 seagate drives in it - if one fails both do. Every other brand has proven reliable for me, especially WD. I think i'll be getting some WD Ultra 3TB portable drives.
 
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Made In Machines said:
I would buy it if it wasn't seagate. They have by far the highest failure rates in the industry and every one i've had has died on me within months. That coupled by the 4TB having 2 seagate drives in it - if one fails both do. Every other brand has proven reliable for me, especially WD. I think i'll be getting some WD Ultra 3TB portable drives.
Click to expand...

Get a Toshiba, or a Hitachi, but I don't think Toshiba has drives bigger than 2 TB.
 
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Too bad it's somewhat expensive, as most external hard drives are. I wish my Mac Pro just had more than 4 eSATA slots. I've tried using bare external enclosures so I could have the freedom to swap out drives, but all 4 I've used have broken down extremely quickly. Not sure why they're so unreliable.

But they WOULD outlast any Seagate drive. :p Hitachi FTW!
 
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Great to see hard drive sizes increase and prices continue to drop. My big issue is that hard drives fail and you have to be crazy to put all your photos, videos, and other personal keepsakes on a single drive. My one recommendation is to make sure you have multiple of these configured in a RAID configuration so if one drive fails, you have a better chance of not losing your data. I know this is obvious, but it amazes me how many folks continue to rely on a single drive for backup.


MacRumors said:



Seagate has long sold a line of Backup Plus external hard drives that offer large amounts of storage space at a reasonable price, and in June, the company announced two new features added to all hard drives in the Backup Plus line: 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage and the Lyve photo and video management app for automatically backing up photos.

Seagate also announced a new high capacity Backup Plus Portable hard drive, with 4TB of storage and a 20.5mm form factor, priced at $240. Seagate invited us to test out its newest hard drive to test the Backup Plus hard drive and the new Lyve app and service it ships with.

seagatebackupplusinbox.jpg

Seagate's new Backup Plus offers the same 4TB of storage that the Backup Plus Fast offers, but it's less expensive and it is a single 4TB hard drive instead of two external drives in a RAID 0 configuration. It's also got more storage than the Backup Plus Slim, which caps out at 2TB, allowing Seagate's newest offering to fill a void between the two existing products (Fast and Slim) in the Backup Plus family.

Design and Features

Seagate's been selling its Backup Plus line for years. Design wise, the 4TB Backup Plus looks like any standard 2.5-inch portable hard drive. It measures in at 4.5 inches in length, 3.1 inches in width, it's .807 inches thick (20.5mm), and it weighs 0.54 pounds. In terms of usability, those dimensions mean it's slim and easy to slip into a bag or a backpack.

seagatebackupplusfront.jpg

The Backup Plus has a traditional black casing that's half metal and half plastic, with the metal plate located on the front of the drive. An LED on the front lights up when the hard drive is plugged in, and there's a single USB port on one side.


Click here to read more...

Article Link: Seagate Review: Hands-On With the 4TB Backup Plus Portable Hard Drive With Lyve Integration
Click to expand...
 
satcomer said:
So Mac OS X are suppose to install NTFS drivers that will break an OS X upgrade and not work in any other version of OS X! Plus like others know it is by Seagate. :confused:
Click to expand...
You can reformat the drive. Actually, you should repartition it entirely so you can use GUID instead of Master Boot Record. And this thing seems to come with bloatware on it, so that's another reason.
 
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