by Rob Kay
Anyone who makes videos knows that one of the biggest issues is efficiently and expediently storing your content. This is especially a concern when you’re on the road.
While the future of storage is in the cloud, there are still situations where a portable hard drive is needed. If you’re going this route, one great product is the Seagate Backup Plus 2TB Portable hard drive.
Why am I smitten with it?
First off, it’s compact — smaller than an iPhone.
It comes with a candy apple red finish, a USB 3.0 drive cable and Seagate’s proprietary Dashboard software. It’s pretty much plug and play. The drive is powered by juice coming from the USB port, so there’s no plugging it into your wall.
That makes it ideal for travel and use with a laptop.
This drive is super quiet and when plugged into the USB port, a thin sliver of light is visible on the upper left hand corner of the case to show that it is operational. While the unit is is either reading or writing data, the light pulsates–shifting between dim and bright, rather than blinking like most hard drive status lights.
There are two terabytes of storage on this tiny little box, and it’s plenty fast–even at 5400 rpm. It backed up all the data in my desktop PC in less than an hour. You can use Dashboard to back up your PC, your smartphone and your social media sites. Using Dashboard system, backups can be slated hourly, daily, weekly or monthly, or simply schedule a continuous backup which adds data from new or altered files. It also gives you an option to back up into the Seagate’s cloud service called Nero.
I’ve been using this drive for the last few months and it works flawlessly.
As alluded to above, you don’t need an outside power source–just a USB cable. The drive itself only needs 0.7-2.3W to operate. The drive uses a standard blue USB 3 cable which is backwards compatible to USB2. The upshot is that you can plug it into any Mac or PC. USB 3 is fast, but if you link it to a Mac that doesn’t have USB 3 capability it will run at the slower USB 2 speed which means it will take a longer time work its magic.
We kept it plugged into a desktop, and it ran continuously, without getting too hot. (It got warm but not hot.)
Note that about 800 MB of this drive’s space is used up by the proprietary (and pre-loaded Dashboard software) which also includes tutorial videos on using the software to back up all your files including social media files from Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. If you don’t really need this software you can delete it which will in turn frees up a lot of disk space.
If you’re going to be shooting video on the road or even as a backup or archive of your home systems, this is a great option.
My only complaint is that the drive comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable. While this cable length is fine for use with a laptop, it would be bettter if the supplied cable was longer in length to allow one to more easily connect to a desktop computer. Not a deal breaker by any means.
The price is $89 on Amazon which includes a 2-year limited warranty.
Photo by Rob Kay
Questions? Comments? Feel fee to Email Me
It would b nice to have this portable storage device for laptops.
Thank you.
Comments are closed.