Portable drives are all well and good but what if you want to save something substantial without the risk of losing it in public transportation? Meet the Seagate Backup Plus Hub, a rather large external hard drive that wasn’t really meant for portability but rather reliability and flexibility.
Unboxing
The Seagate Backup Plus Hub comes with most of the accessories you would need from an external hard drive. Inside the rather sizeable box is the drive itself, a power adapter with several removable plugs, and a USB 3.0 Micro B to Type-A cable.
In addition, the drive also comes with a warranty card and a two-month membership to the Adobe Creative Photography Plan. Those who are interested in getting the offer need to redeem it by January 31, 2020.
Up close with the Seagate Backup Plus Hub 4TB
The most immediate thing about the Seagate Backup Plus Hub when taking it out of the box is its design. The device is clad in a shiny, black exterior that is sure to get the attention of some people.
Its eye-catching design, however, does have its downside. The Seagate Backup Plus Hub is an incredible dust and fingerprint magnet and is easily scratched. Left in the open for just a couple of hours, the drive started to accumulate a lot of dust. Although this wouldn’t be much of a problem if you give the drive a quick wipe down every now and then.
As far as dimensions go, the Seagate Backup Plus Hub measures in at 198.1 x 41 x 118mm. It’s not as large as older external storage devices with 3.5-inch drives, but it’s not as portable as external 2.5-inch drives.
Due to its power requirements, the drive does need a 12V/3A power adapter to run. Just beside the A/C plug is a USB 3.0 Micro-B port needed to connect the drive to your device.
Located at the front of the drive is its logo (which lights up in white when turned on) and two USB ports. These two USB ports as especially helpful to ultrathin devices that have removed most of their ports and instead using dongles to expand their connectivity. With this solution, you’re not losing the use of a USB port but instead gaining another by plugging in the drive.
As an added bonus, the USB ports on the Seagate Backup Plus Hub are powered. The ports will allow you to charge your smartphone although they won’t be compatible with Quick Charge devices.
Scattered at the top and bottom of the device are perforations. The top holes, however, are blocked by plastic. While the bottom perforations actually have holes in them, their location are inefficient since they are going to be probably blocked by the surface that you’re placing the drive on. Alternatively, you can lay the drive on its side to fully utilize the bottom cavities.
It would have been nice if the drive had all the perforations act as an exhaust system in order for the drive to breathe. This would have affected the drive positively by letting the heat out instead of keeping it in.
The device is using a 3.5-inch drive for storage instead of a faster SSD. This fact, however, isn’t really a downside. It might not be as fast as a portable SSD but Seagate has traded speed for capacity. With a capacity of 4TB (also available in 6TB, 8TB, and 10TB models), the drive will be sufficient enough for most users.
Software
The Seagate Backup Plus Hub 4TB is supported by the Seagate Dashboard. Essentially, the software acts as a one-stop-shop whenever you want to backup and restore files. The software also offers automatic backup schedules of your files.
It even has the option to automatically sync your files to the cloud. Currently, it supports three cloud options: Dropbox, Google Drive, and One Drive.
Although there are options to backup your mobile device and upload and download photos from Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube, it seems that Seagate has stopped developing these features (presumably for a better solution).
We have tried logging onto our Facebook profile in order to upload some photos stored on the drive, we were only greeted by a failure message.
Benchmarks
The Seagate Backup Plus Hub 4TB is automatically formatted to NTFS out of the box. Apple users, however, would need to download Seagate’s Paragon Driver in order to use them. Alternatively, Apple users can also format the drive to convert it to the HFS+ file system.
In order to test its speed, we fired up our usual set of benchmarking programs. In our tests, we will be looking at Sequential Read and Write speeds as well as 4KiB performance.
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.1
“CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds.”
ATTO Disk Benchmark
“The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adapters (HBAs), hard drives and, SSD drives.”
The Seagate Backup Plus Hub won’t be breaking any external drive speed records soon but it performs as expected. It is also one of the fastest spinning drives we’ve seen yet.
Conclusion
Priced at USD 89.99 (PhP 7,500 in the Philippines) The Seagate Backup Plus Hub might not be as portable as some drives in the market, but it offers one of the most important thing to consider when buying an external hard drive: capacity.
With a massive 4TB pool of storage (with other options having 6TB, 8TB, and 10TB capacities), the device is more than enough satiate most consumer’s storage needs.
Aside from its capacity, the device is also offering an integrated USB hub. As we’ve said before, most notebooks are now trading ports for thinness and less weight. With limited USB ports in some occasions, it’s helpful to have a device that adds another USB port for use.
In terms of speed, the Seagate Backup Plus Hub isn’t as fast as portable SSDs in the market. With that said, it isn’t slow by any means necessary. You might be in for a bit of a wait when transferring files but the device was designed that way: staying in the background keeping your work and files safe.
With these in mind, we are comfortable in giving the Seagate Backup Plus Hub our 100% Satisfying External Storage award. If you’re looking for a reliable and capacious external drive that can automatically backup your files, then give the Seagate Backup Plus Hub a serious consideration.
