Seagate announced an updated lineup of its popular Backup Plus hard drives in January, debuting the Backup Plus Slim and Backup Plus Portable, both available for purchase now and ideal for those who need lots of storage space at an affordable price.
Backup Plus Slim and Backup Plus Portable are your run of the mill hard drives. The Backup Plus Slim is the slimmer of the two models because it has less storage space, measuring 4.5 inches by 3 inches with a thickness of about half an inch.
The Backup Plus Portable is about the same size but is an inch thicker and almost twice as heavy (eight ounces vs. four). Neither of these drives take up much space, so they’re ideal for backup or other purposes and can be tucked away in a drawer for later.
Design-wise, the two hard drives are made from a black plastic material with a brushed aluminum front plate. The test models I have are silver, but they come in black, a light blue, and red
The Backup Plus Slim offers 1TB or 2TB of storage, and the Backup Plus Portable is available with 4TB or 5TB of storage space. Both are formatted to work with Mac or Windows.
These hard drives are using standard USB-A cables to plug into a computer, which means that if you want to use them with Apple’s modern Macs, you’ll need a USB-A to USB-C adapter.
USB-C hard drives aren’t any more expensive than these Seagate backup hard drives, so if you have a USB-C machine, it’s not even worth picking one up unless you’re swapping files between computers and staying within one computer. A Mac or Windows machine that uses USB-A. For older machines that still have USB-A ports, these hard drives will work fine, and functionally, they’re fine with an adapter on a USB-C machine.
There is nothing special about the transfer speed of Backup Plus Slim and Backup Plus Portable. Seagate says they can reach transfer speeds of 120MB/s, and in my testing on a 2016 MacBook Pro with USB-C, I even saw transfer speeds slightly higher at 130MB/s.
You don’t want to use standard hard drives in situations where you need fast file transfer capabilities, but for things like backups where you have hours to backup, these drives work well.
Both hard drives are equipped with links to register them on Seagate’s website, as well as options to download Seagate’s Toolkit software to automatically sync files between the drives and mirrored folders on your Mac. You can use them with Windows and Mac machines without the need to reformat.
Seagate sells these hard drives with a one-year Create plan for Mylio, photo organizing software that lets you upload photos to the cloud and access them on multiple devices, but after that year, it costs $50/year to use it.
There’s also free two-month access to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan, which costs $9.99/month to use after the trial period. Mylio and Creative Cloud are both optional, so if you’re not interested in those services, you don’t need to sign up for them.
bottom line
If you’ve made the switch to USB-C and only have a USB-C machine, Seagate’s Backup Plus Portable and Backup Plus Slim probably aren’t the best options for you, since you’ll need a dongle.
If you’re still using a USB-A machine or a mix of USB-C and USB-A, these hard drives are a cost-effective way to get plenty of storage for Time Machine backups, offloading photos, and more.
How to buy
Seagate’s Backup Plus Slim is available from Amazon, with 1TB storage for $55 and 2TB storage for $70. Backup Plus Portable is available from Amazon for $110 for 4TB storage and $125 for 5TB storage.
Note: Seagate provided MacRumors with a Backup Plus Portable and Backup Plus Slim for the purpose of this review. No other compensation was received.
