Seagate Backup Plus Hub 8TB

Hubba Hub-ba!

Desktop external storage hasn’t seen the same dramatic capacity increases as portable drives in past years, and though 8,000GB of disk space is in no way an insignificant amount, it’s not quite revolutionary for an external desktop-bound drive. That said, when you consider what consumers are looking for in a new hard drive, ‘exciting’ probably isn’t a factor that we’d expect to be high on anyone’s shortlist. Value, speed, size and features, on the other hand, probably will be and the 8TB Backup Plus Hub pleasingly manages to excel in all four of those categories.

On the beveled front edge of this desktop drive’s plastic case are a pair of USB 3.0 ports that double as conveniently located places you can charge a phone or tablet or, alternately, plug in portable USB drives to backup to the Hub’s own internal storage. Obviously, this is where the unit gets the ‘Hub’ element of it’s name from and it’s a neat addition that you’ll generally only come across in higher-end NAS boxes... despite every desktop drive theoretically having the higher capacity, power and onboard USB hardware to do so.

There’s naturally a bit of a speed boost associated with bigger ‘desktop’ external drives (at least compared to their portable cousins) and the Backup Plus Hub’s sequential read and write speeds of 198MB/s and 188MB/s, respectively, are testament to that. When you consider that most portable drives hit between 110MB/s and 125MB/s, that’s a considerable jump, meaning doing system backups will be quicker, as will editing big media files stored directly on the drive.

At $419, this 8TB drive also works out to be exceptionally good value at 5.2 cents per gigabyte and with the additional hub perks, this is one highly desirable digital storehouse.