Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB

I've bought a couple of these for my backups. They pack an incredible amount of storage into a very small space. It will be interesting to see how reliable they are. I bought two par mesure de s�curit�. I may buy a third so that I can rotate them and always keep one off-site.

Where do you keep them offsite? I only have a 500gb WD Essentials and its kept in the concrete garage.

I haven't decided yet. I'm still testing them. I'll see if I can keep them at the place where I volunteer.

I have the same for off-site backup. From time to time one of our sons and I swap drives - he lived in London but now lives about 15 miles away so we're able to do this more often.

I have a USB 3 Seagate 1TB expansion drive, it does the job, I don't normally like Seagate, but it seems more reliable than the external 2TB Toshiba one I got.

some software I got says there are problems with Thh tosh, but when I do a sector check on it, everything is fine.

With backup drives, it is best to be conservative and choose tried-and-tested technology instead of going for devices that push current technology to the limit as I have. However, I need more than 1TB and I need it to be very compact, so I have chosen these Seagate drives. I have no idea how reliable they will prove to be, so I have bought two and will probably buy another in case one of them fails. You read horror stories of people who buy just one backup drive and then find that it stops working when they need it the most. They know that the drives in their PCs may fail but they don't consider that backup drives can also fail.

+1

I have 2 on-site backups and 1 off-site. Maybe over the top but given that drives are relatively inexpensive it's a small investment for the peace of mind it brings.

The problem I had with Seagate over the years is reliability or the lack of it, I have had a couple of internal Seagate drives go down on me.
i have used a few makes over the years, Conner, Maxtor, Quantum, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba.

My computer now have 240GB Cosari Neutron SSD, a 120GB corsair force 3, a 2TB Toshiba and a 500GB Seagate hybrid.

Externally I have a Seagate 1TB, a Toshiba 2TB which I do not trust as the smart data says it have a problem, this thread have made me look at the warranty and it is for two years, so I can still claim. i only had it for just over a year.

i also have a old 1 TB Hitachi 3.5 inch and a 8 year 1TB buffalo NAS drive which is still working, slow it may be but oh so useful. I am shocked it is still working, I have no idea what drive is in it, but I know at the time it cost me over £300

The hard drives in the Seagate units are manufactured by Samsung apparently, so here's hoping. It seems to be the USB controllers that fail rather than the drives. Some users of failed units have extracted the hard drives and connected them to SATA controllers and they have worked just fine. OK, you lose your warranty (and the case) but you stand a reasonable chance of getting your data back plus a usable disk drive. Seagate charge $450 for their data recovery service. All they do is remove the hard drive, test it and bung it in a new case. Go figure.

btw: These drives are not available bare yet, so if you want one for your laptop...

Edit: Belay that. They are, but only in 9.5mm height. Still... fine for a laptop.

Edited by micksharpe (Wed 13-Jan-16 22:22:26)

Just orderedthis from Argos, I don't normally like large capacity drives, but at the price it is good, works out just under £25 a TB.

I found out my Toshiba 2GB have a 2 year warranty on it, so that is being sent back to Tosh in Germany once I can get off my backside to ring up the courier to collect it.

I l.ike the storage capacity given in the spec.

4TB: GB.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

I l.ike the storage capacity given in the spec.

4TB: GB.

I did not notice that, but it is certainly a 4TB. if not they can have it back

They've got the dimensions wrong as well:

Size H15.8, W12.4, L4.4cm

Still, that's Argos for you.

Well I have got it here, the base oif the drive looks nicer than the top, I should turn it upside down A mate of mine i met in town thought is was such a good buy, he got one himself, well he got the Expansion version, same price

I wish the light on it would flash when it is doing something, but it don't.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I wish the light on it would flash when it is doing something, but it don't.

It should pulsate gently when it's being accessed.

Any chance of you doing some benchmarks using HD Tune before you populate the drive? I've done some on my disks (using HD Tune and Acronis True Image) and I plan to post them fairly soon.

Edited by micksharpe (Sat 23-Jan-16 21:31:05)

I have never used HD tune before, so I am not sure what I am doing, what part do you want me to use?

I have been having a major problem with my computer. Last night for some reason the computer failed to boot, windows wanted to repair itself but it could not.
Anyway I thought I would use the back up and that decided not to play ball, it did boot up, but then MS decided my computer was not activated. I left it until this morning and decided to reinstall Windows 8.1 from scratch. Up and running now, but still Windows would not activate, so I had to phone their support line and got a automated activation thing, I have done it before with Windows 7, but this time they done if via my phone which is good.
Anyway, it seems like all is back, now I just got to reinstall the software, which is not a bad thing, apart from the plug ins for Photoshop, vegas and after effects.

I have not populated the drive yet, I have nothing to put on it at the moment. My computer back ups are done on the usb 2 Hitachi as my recovery usb don't reconise the USB 3 ports. Anyway I want to keep the usb3 drives for something that needs the speed.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I have never used HD tune before, so I am not sure what I am doing, what part do you want me to use?

'Benchmark' tab - both read and write. Ditto for the 'Random Access' tab. HD Tune will not do the write tests if there are any partitions on the device. Lastly, the 'File Benchmark' tab, for which you must create a formatted partition. I'll put up some of my test results so that you can see what they look like.

Not sure if this is what you want

Benchmark read

Benchmark write

File benchmark

The speeds don't look that great to me, but it could just be me

i normally use Crystal mark this is the results from that

CrystalDiskMark 5.1.1 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 155.139 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 75.025 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.429 MB/s [ 348.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 11.825 MB/s [ 2887.0 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 163.582 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 162.714 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.581 MB/s [ 141.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 8.392 MB/s [ 2048.8 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/01/24 17:01:17
OS : Windows 8.1 Pro [6.3 Build 9600] (x64)


I did remember to move the files that came with the drive elsewhere get rid of the partition and then panicked when I got two unallocated partitions. Two, what the hell is going on? Remember then to convert to GPT, that solved it.

I was reading some info about the drive and it have two Samsung drives in raid format, very strange for Seagate to use Samsung drives i thought and then remembered that Seagate took over Samsung drives department

You should always test backups. Strange it would not activate. Unless it was due to win 10 installation.

The back up worked as such, but it just would not activate for some reason, not sure how you would test a back up to be honest. I must admit i did think oh this is another MS way to get us to install windows 10. I don't windows 10 on this computer.
No data files on the back up anyway, those are stored on another drive and then backed up using different software. It is just software, but it takes a while to reinstall the software, plug ins and drivers.

when I reinstalled windows 8.1 it did try to download windows 10 without me even saying yes or no, I must make sure if I have to reinstall again to unplug the network cable from the homeplug.