Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch

amazon Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch reviews

Combining performance and powerful encryption, Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Touch portable drive is a great choice for everyday backups and security-priority uses. Plus, a fabric jacket adds to the appeal.

Seagate’s Backup Plus Ultra Touch external hard drive offers an uncanny sense of class in a market rife with homogenous, plastic-coated storage devices. This portable drive has a rare feature in mobile technology: texture. It is covered with a woven fabric that feels like a friendly and close object in your hand. Plus, you’ll have peace of mind: It’s easy to password-protect Ultra Touch, and your data is secured with AES 256-bit hardware encryption. Overall, this drive is well worth the money for Windows or Mac users, standing out in the long-sought merchandise category.

This hard drive changes

First, sensitivity. The Ultra Touch’s textile cover, available in black or white, wraps around the top and one end of the drive’s plastic housing, adding a touch of style and grip to what otherwise would be another plastic hard drive case. The drive that I have on hand for testing is the white one with a capacity of 2TB. (Seagate also offers a $69.99 1TB capacity.

Fabric wrap aside, the case is sturdy yet lightweight, with a bright white drive-activity LED on the bottom of the chassis face and a Micro-USB Type-B connector along the bottom edge. (This drive-side connector may look non-standard, but alternative cables using it are readily available.) The chassis edges are gently rounded, with no sharp corners to poke or grab. Shirt pocket or laptop compartment. Seagate’s swirly logo lives, unobtrusively, in the bottom left corner of the case.

As you’d expect, the drive is small and light, measuring just 0.46 inches thick and measuring 3.1 x 4.5 inches. It weighs only 5.3 ounces. (That’s about the same size but 1.7 ounces lighter than LaCie’s Similar Portable Drive, a 2019 release I’m reviewing alongside this model.)

Even though the drive case is plastic, the whole thing feels solid and sturdy. It’s not expensive, but it’s not cheap. As for the fabric, the jacket remains to be seen how well it resists scratches and dirt; you can’t just throw it in the washer/dryer. To keep in mind: While the fabrics have a nice, human feel, I don’t find them all prettier or more slip-resistant than plastic or metal.

Capabilities and Interfaces

While 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 a 4TB or 5TB mechanism inside). The 2TB unit I’m reviewing still offers a fair amount of storage for mainstream use. After all, a 2TB drive can hold about 4 million 500K photos or half a million regular MP3 files. For most people, it’s music and photos worth a lifetime unless they tend to save in lossless music or very high-resolution photo formats.

At $89.99 MSRP for this 2TB version, the final price of the storage here is a tempting 4.5 cents per gigabyte. You’ll occasionally see 2TB portable drives for sale for $10 or less, so we expect Ultra Touch to see the same reseller discounts to stay competitive. The 1TB version of the drive is worth much less than the $69.99 MSRP, so the cost per gig is much higher. If you may need the full 2TB of space, get the full 2TB.

Indeed, 2TB seems to be the capacity appeal of today for disk-based portable drives. A typical use case for this type of device is media storage (music, photos, or video) or backup, and 2TB is usually enough to do the job. Of course, many of us use external drives for both, and there’s plenty of room for the drive to do dual duty unless you’re a serious photographer or videographer.

Ultra Touch supports USB 3.x over a USB Type-A or USB Type-C connection. The Micro-USB Type-B cable ends in a regular Type-A port, and the Type-A-to-C adapter is included in the box. Of course, the drive is also compatible with USB 2.0, but transfer speeds will slow down if you use one of those ports.

By default, the drive is formatted in the exFAT file system, which should be fine for most Windows or Mac installations and allows cross-platform readability. Mac users may need to format the drive in HFS+ if they want to use Apple’s Time Machine. And some Windows users may want to reformat the drive to NTFS for optimal performance. If you decide to reformat, don’t forget to temporarily copy any backups or other utilities to another drive and then copy them back to Ultra Touch after formatting.

Security and Software

As said earlier, the market for portable external hard drives is saturated. All the drives you see from the major manufacturers tend to perform; similarly, they’re all well made, and they even cost about the same. Drive manufacturers need other ways to differentiate them.

These devices contain valuable information and are small enough to be easily lost or stolen; a good differentiator provides an easy-to-deploy security measure. That’s what Seagate did here. Seagate has offered Backup Plus Ultra Touch buyers a double measure.

First, the drive can be password protected. During the setup process, you will be asked to provide a password. (It’s optional, though.) Be careful because once you’ve specified the password, you’ll need it to unlock your drive, and if you lose the password, Seagate can’t save you. You can always reset the drive if needed, but doing so will erase any stored data.

Second, the data on the Ultra Touch is protected with AES-256 hardware encryption. If you don’t like data encryption technology, know: This is a pretty strict tool. Some estimate that a supercomputer will take hundreds of thousands of years to become an AES-256 protected device. Can the NSA or some other entity open your drive? Perhaps, especially if the agency tried to open the door to infiltrate. But you can consider your data well protected from common and serious intrusions by a determined government agency. (And, if you’re concerned about the NSA getting into your business, you’re more worried about which hard drive to buy.)

Another difference comes in Seagate’s Toolkit utility, which allows users to manage their passwords and security. It allows them to set up backup plans and to sync and restore data. The Toolkit can also create manual backups if you don’t want to automate that process. The Toolkit, on the other hand, isn’t on the drive; you have to download it, generally at the same time you register the drive.

Additionally, Seagate offers the driver a free one-year subscription to Mylio Create, a photo organizer app that helps you edit, share, and sync your images across multiple devices. Suppose you’re an avid photographer taking hundreds of photos a week. In that case, you might find Mylio Create useful, assuming you’re not already using Photoshop Elements, Affinity Photo, or some other photo manager.

Seagate also includes a free two-month membership to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan, which gives you access to Adobe’s Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC applications.

Again, these products are made available to you during the product registration process; they are not installed on the drive. You will need a live Internet connection to continue these trials if you wish.

where can you get a Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch online

Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch, 1 TB, USB-C + USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive, White, 4 mo Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan and Two-yr Rescue Services (STHH1000402): Buy it now

Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch 2TB Portable Hard Drive with Recovery Services: Buy it now

Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch STHH2000400 2 TB Portable Hard Drive – External – Black – USB 3.0 Type C – 256-bit Encryption Standard (Renewed): Buy it now

Performance: Plate on the face

No wonder the 2TB Ultra Touch drive performs well, like any other similar 5,400rpm device from a major manufacturer.

Hard Drive

We started with the drive formatted to NTFS on our Windows 10 storage test. The PCMark 7 secondary memory test measures a drive’s performance while simulating a wide range of real-world productivity workloads.

On this test, the Ultra Touch scored 1,245, slightly better than the LaCie Mobile Drive and slightly lower than the WD My Passport. The ADATA and WD Elements entries manually outperform the Ultra Touch, but all five drives fall within the 700-point range; in the real world, the performance difference would be negligible, except for some edge cases.

Next: Crystal DiskMark. Its sequential read/write tests are a raw speed best-case, the straight-line scenario with a continuously set data set. It measures read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps).

Backup Plus Ultra Touch did as well or better than the other tested drives. But as expected, it all works the same way. While the Ultra Touch returned the fastest read and second fastest wrote speeds of the drives tested, the write speeds of the ADATA HD830 and LaCie Mobile Drive were only marginally superior.

Switched to a 2016 MacBook Pro and formatted the drive to an exFAT file system to run the BlackMagic Disk Speed ​​Test.

No surprises here at all. Of the drives we tested, all scores were within a few digits of each other, with the Backup Plus Ultra Touch leading the way. The unit’s sister drive, the 2TB LaCie Portable Drive, once again posts very similar numbers. (LaCie is a sub-brand of Seagate’s.) WD My Passport comes in the back of the package.

In our drag-and-drop folder transfer test, which involves copying a 1.2GB folder from one folder location on the drive to another, Backup Plus Ultra Touch was paired with LaCie Mobile Drive; both take 11 seconds to do the transfer…

The other drives tested took longer, but only for a second or two. It is a cleansing.

Luxury Look, Performance on Par

Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch ticks all the boxes for portable external hard drives. The woven fabric finish gives the device a classy touch, good performance, and Seagate convenience and built-in security add value. If you’re looking for affordable, secure storage that can rival the best of them all, the Backup Plus Ultra Touch is a solid choice with a warm and fuzzy side — something rarely is said about the world of PC storage.

Advantages

Fabric cover.

Small and light.

Seagate Toolkit provides handy backup/restore functions, as well as mirroring.

Data is password protected and AES-256 hardware encrypted.

Defect

The fabric cover is a bit slippery to hold.

Seagate Toolkit is a separate download.