(And really, if you're concerned about the NSA getting into your business, you have bigger worries than which hard drive to buy.)Īnother differentiator comes in the form of Seagate's Toolkit utility, which lets users manage passwords and security, and also allows them to set up backup and sync plans and restore data.
But you can consider your data well protected from casual and serious intrusions shy of a determined government agency. Could the NSA or some other such entity open up your drive? Perhaps, especially if the agency has managed to backdoor its way in. Some estimate that it would take a supercomputer many hundreds of thousands of years to brute-force its way into a device protected with AES-256. If you're not up on data encryption technologies, just know: This is pretty stern stuff. Second, data on the Ultra Touch is protected with AES-256 hardware encryption. You can always reset the drive, if you must, but doing so erases any stored data. (It's optional, though.) Be careful, because once you have designated a password, you'll need it to unlock your drive, and if you lose it, Seagate can't rescue you.
During setup, you'll be asked to provide a password. In fact, Seagate has provided Backup Plus Ultra Touch buyers with a double measure.įirst, the drive can be password-protected. Given that these devices contain valuable (indeed, sometimes irreplaceable) information and are small enough to be easily lost or stolen, one good differentiator is to provide a measure of easy-to-deploy security. Of course, many of us use external drives for both, and there's plenty of room for the drive to do double duty, unless you're a serious photographer or videographer.
That's good, because the typical usage case for this sort of device is either media storage (music, photos, or video) or backups, and 2TB is usually enough to do the job.
SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS SLIM 2TB HOW TO USE PORTABLE
Indeed, 2TB seems to be the capacity sweet spot these days for platter-based portable drives.
SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS SLIM 2TB HOW TO USE FULL
If you might need the full 2TB of space, get the full 2TB. The 1TB version of the drive is a much lesser value given the $69.99 MSRP and thus, the much higher cost per gig. At times, you'll see 2TB portable drives on sale for $10 or $20 less, so we expect the Ultra Touch to see similar reseller discounting to stay competitive. For most folks, that's a lifetime's worth of music and photos, unless they tend to save in lossless music formats or very high-res photo formats.Īt an $89.99 MSRP for this 2TB version, the bottom-line price of storage here is an appealing 4.5 cents per gigabyte. After all, a 2TB drive can hold, say, roughly 4 million 500K photos or half a million typical MP3s. One thing to note: While the fabric has a pleasing, humanizing feel, I didn't find it all that much grippier or anti-slip than sheer plastic or metal.Īlthough even the higher-capacity of Seagate's two Ultra Touch drives isn't a storage monster (you can find portable drives around this size with 4TB or 5TB mechanisms inside), the 2TB unit I am looking at still delivers a fair amount of storage for mainstream use. As for the fabric coat, it remains to be seen how well it resists scuffing and dirt you can't just throw it in the washer/dryer, after all. (That's just about the same size as, but 1.7 ounces lighter than, the similar Mobile Drive by LaCie, a 2019 release that I am reviewing alongside this model.)Įven though the drive enclosure is plastic, the whole thing feels solid and sturdy. Seagate's swirl logo lives, unobtrusively, in the lower left-hand corner of the case.Īs you would expect, the drive is small and light, measuring only 0.46 inch thick with a 3.1-by-4.5-inch footprint. (This drive-side connector may look nonstandard, but replacement cables using this connector are widely available.) The chassis' edges are soft and rounded, with no sharp corners to poke or snag on a shirt pocket or laptop bag compartment. The fabric wrap aside, the enclosure is solid but lightweight, bearing a bright-white drive-activity LED at the bottom of the chassis' face, and a Micro-USB Type-B connector along the bottom edge.
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