The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive 5TB is an external hard drive with plenty of capacity. With more devices creating content, consumers find that they need more and more room to backup or store their data. Storing all one’s data from a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, and social media can quickly added up to large amounts of storage space. The Backup Plus 5TB is USB 3.0 connected and supports Windows 7,8, Vista, and XP as well as Mac OS 10.4.6 and later. Users can install the preloaded NTFS driver for Mac and then use the drive back and forth between Windows and Mac without reformatting.
The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive 5TB is an external hard drive with plenty of capacity. With more devices creating content, consumers find that they need more and more room to backup or store their data. Storing all one’s data from a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, and social media can quickly added up to large amounts of storage space. The Backup Plus 5TB is USB 3.0 connected and supports Windows 7,8, Vista, and XP as well as Mac OS 10.4.6 and later. Users can install the preloaded NTFS driver for Mac and then use the drive back and forth between Windows and Mac without reformatting.
Seagate ships the drive with backup software that handles all of the heavy lifting. On the Seagate Dashboard, using the Protect function users can easily schedule automatic backups. Multiple copies of data can be stored, in cases like disaster or accidental rewrites. The Seagate Mobile Backup app allows iOS or Android users to backup up all photos and videos from their mobile device to the drive. And with the Share feature, users can upload multiple files at once to social networks from their Desktop Drive.
The Seagate Plus Desktop Drive 5TB comes with a 2-year limited warranty and has a street price of $220. Seagate also offers the drive in 2TB, 3TB and 4TB capacities.
Seagate Plus Desktop Drive 5TB specifications:
- Capacity: 5TB
- Connections: USB 3.0 x 1
- OS suppurted: Windows 7, 8, Vista, XP; Mac OS 10.4.6 or later
- Dimensions (L x W x D): 179.4mm x 118.1mm x 41.5mm
- Weight: 0.86kg
- Warranty: 2-year limited
Design and build
The Seagate Plus Desktop Drive 5TB is slightly larger than a 3.5” HDD on its own. It has a flat back plastic case on the top and sides with a blue plastic bottom. The front of the device has Seagate branding in the bottom lower right side.
The sides of the drive have plenty of ventilation in a tessellating triangle pattern.
The back of the device has a micro USB 3.0 port and a power supply port on the lower right-hand side, like all 3.5" desktop drives, the drive draws too much power to be bus-powered through the USB port.
Usability/Performance
Using our Consumer Testing Platform, we measured 2MB sequential speeds. The Seagate Plus Desktop Drive 5TB clocked in at a not terribly impressive 108MB/s in the write column and 185MB/s in the read. When testing with 2MB random transfer speeds, which is a less practical use case for this product, the Seagate Backup Plus measured read and write speeds at 26MB/s and 64MB/s respectively.
For those backing up with a Mac, Time Machine will be the likely backup client of choice, but for PC users Seagate includes what is one of the most robust software solutions available. The software manages backups either manually or via schedule and what's more it can support backing up mobile devices and images from social media sites like Facebook and Flickr.
The dashboard also provides usage information about the drive and includes drive health information and support options.
In the external drive market a lot of software gets bundled together with the drives but very little of it is actually useful. Seagate has a clean and easy to use suite that is very good and worth installing.
Conclusion
The Seagate Plus Desktop Drive 5TB is a USB 3.0 connected external hard drive with a backup-centric focus. It supports both Mac and Windows OS and can be used between the two interchangeably without reformatting. The drive can be set for automatic backups, mobile backups through iOS and Android, and it can support backing up from online services like Facebook.
While not having the fastest speeds in our testing, the main focus of the Seagate Plus Desktop Drive 5TB is an easy way to centralize all of a user's backups easily and have plenty of capacity to spare. Being able to switch between Windows and Mac without reformatting is a big plus. Storing multiple copies of a given file is important to anyone who may need to restore back to an earlier draft, from a mistake or from a disaster. And being able to backing-up from a mobile device and Facebook can be important to the consumer that spends a bulk of their time on mobile devices versus computers. Overall we're looking at the package here and from out of box to backing up, the Seagate drive gets it done.
Pros
- Allows mobile backups from iOS and Android
- Multiple copies of data can be stored
- Easy to use software package
Cons
- Short warranty for a more premium offering
- Expected better sequential transfer numbers
The Bottom Line
The Seagate Plus Desktop Drive 5TB is a external drive with plenty of capacity, OS flexibility, and lots of options for use with social media for those looking for a reliable central repository for all of their files and media.
Seagate Backup Plus 5TB at Amazon
