Seagate Backup Plus Portable 5TB & Backup Plus Slim 2TB Review: SMR for the Consumer Market
by Ganesh T S on June 18, 2019 8:00 AM ESTHard drives continue to remain the storage media of choice for cost-conscious consumers with bulk storage requirements. HDD vendors have typically used their 2.5" drives for bus-powered high-capacity models. This market segment has been stuck at the 4TB mainstream capacity point for a few years now, with the z-height of the models coming in at well over 15mm. Earlier this year, Seagate announced an update to their massive 5TB Backup Plus Portable, while also introducing a new svelte 2TB Backup Plus Slim external hard drive. Both of them adopt SMR platters (similar to the Backup Plus models being sold since late 2016), and given the performance impact of SMR, today we'll be taking a detailed look at how SMR in bus-powered hard drives behaves for consumer workloads.
Introduction and Product Impressions
The number of vendors delivering portable, bus-powered hard drives is limited: only Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba serve this market. Of these, only Seagate has a 5TB model in the market currently. While Western Digital and Toshiba use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for their 2.5" hard drives, Seagate makes use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR). This enables higher data storage density in their platters, which, in turn enables them to deliver the highest capacity 2.5" hard drives. The high density platters also allows them to deliver slim hard drives (at industry-leading capacity points taking thickness into consideration). Today, we are taking a look at the high-capacity Seagate Backup Plus Portable 5TB drive and the ultra-thin Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB dual-platter drive.
Mass-market bus-powered hard drives typically employ a USB 3.0 micro-B interface port (contrast this with the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive that comes with a Type-C port). The Seagate Backup Plus models we are looking at today belong to that category. Seagate's portable drives have come with different value additions over the last several years. A few years back, the drives came with free cloud storage (OneDrive) for a limited time. Recently, we have seen them bundle a two-month subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud package with select models. The Seagate Backup Plus models also come with value additions: In addition to the aforementioned Creative Cloud, Seagate also offers the Mylio Create cloud-based photo organization feature.
Package-wise, the two drives are remarkably similar. They come with a 18 inch. USB 3.0 Type-A male to Micro-B male cable. The cable color depends on the color of the drive itself. Other than that, we have a quick-start guide and a bunch of papers describing the value additions.
The drives come pre-formatted in exFAT, guaranteeing compatibility with both Macs and Windows-based systems. A setup executable is also available to help users get step-by-step guidance for product registration, warranty activation, and redemption of the value additions.
Moving on to the technical details, we get a quick understanding of the internals using CrystalDiskInfo.
Internal Drive Characteristics | ||
Typical of bus-powered hard drives, both the Seagate Backup Plus Portable and Slim are 5400 RPM drives. It turns out that the internal drive of the Portable (the ST5000LM000) is available in the retail market as a Seagate BarraCuda Compute drive, while the one in the Slim (the ST2000LM007) is marketed as a Seagate Mobile HDD.
We have reviewed a number of bus-powered hard drives over the last few years. The table below presents the detailed specifications and miscellaneous aspects of all those units and how the two Seagate Backup Plus models being reviewed today compare against them.
Comparative HDD-Based Direct-Attached Storage Device Configurations | ||
Aspect | ||
Bridge Configuration | SATA III to USB 3.0 Micro-B | SATA III to USB 3.0 Micro-B |
Power | Bus-Powered | Bus-Powered |
Internal Drive | ST5000LM000-2AN170 5TB 5400 RPM 2.5" SATA Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda Compute |
ST2000LM007-1R8174 2TB 5400 RPM 2.5" SATA Hard Drive Seagate Mobile HDD |
Physical Dimensions | 115.3 mm x 20.9 mm x 80 mm | 114.8 mm x 11.7 mm x 78 mm |
Weight | 265 grams | 126 grams |
Cable | USB 3.0 Micro-B to Type-A | USB 3.0 Micro-B to Type-A |
Evaluated Capacity | 5TB | 2TB |
Price | $95 | $70 |
Review Link | Seagate Backup Plus Portable 5TB Review | Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB Review |
The key things to note here include the thickness of the Backup Plus Slim and with its weight. With a z-height of 11.7mm, it is comfortably the thinnest external hard-drive we have reviewed. At 126g, it comes in at barely half the weight of the other models in the above table.
In the rest of this review, we first take a look at our standard direct-attached storage benchmarks. Following this, we have some performance measurements from a typical external HDD real-world use-case. Finally, we talk about power consumption and provide some concluding remarks.
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abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
You seem to love holding on to your grudges. 5GB, that was a while ago. I used real SCSI back then.MDD1963 - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
5 GB? 1998 or so?oliwek - Thursday, July 4, 2019 - link
Or is it that his '10MB. Not GB' is in fact 10GB ? So the guy speaks about the 5TB drive from the article when he mentions 'having the 5GB' ? LOLHenry 3 Dogg - Sunday, January 30, 2022 - link
Every WD drive I've ever owned has died.My experiences with Seagate drives have been much better.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
Pass because of the 3.0 micro-B connector. Those cables seem to fail an awful lot.Alistair - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
ugh, can't believe it is micro, PASS!moozooh - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Idk what you guys are doing with your USB cables, but I haven't even managed to kill the connectors in my phone and tablet that I've been using every day (often putting them on the cable several times a day, in fact) for the past five years or so. And these are supposed to be backup drives—you don't have to disconnect them at all (and if you do, just pull the computer-side USB plug and don't touch the micro side). The Micro-B isn't great, but it's not THAT bad.Oliseo - Sunday, June 23, 2019 - link
This is the Internet, where sensationalism rules supreme. As soon as people say "seem", you know they're using Weasel words to disguise their own ignorance.badbanana - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
+1Samus - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
I've noticed that, too. A lot of the time I have trouble getting drives to connect - swapping in a different cable solves it.Amazing how some fragile crap like that got standardized, like the bulk of 80-pin PATA cables back in the day that couldn't communicate at ATA133 without corrupting drives, and initial SATA cable connectors that cracks on motherboards.