Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB
Actually, you get more than 2TB of storage with this portable drive…
For the most part, portable external hard drives tend to be pretty much alike: compact boxes that wrap a disk in plastic or metal. This one is the latter type, so it feels tough. The model tested is the same size and weight as the 1TB version, which is just £15 less.
In terms of performance, its mean average transfer rates when reading (114.1MB/sec) and writing (124.7MB/ sec) sequentially to the disk are respectable. In our tougher test of accessing random locations, the mean average of 22.5MB/sec when reading isn’t great, yet 67.8MB/sec when writing is pretty good.
The drive includes two years of online storage on OneDrive, which integrates with OS X just as easily as the likes of Dropbox and iCloud Drive. This space is useful for backing up your most important files, but also to transfer files to and from a Windows PC without unplugging things. Or, if you need faster transfer of very large files in Boot Camp, the included NTFS driver means you can keep the drive in that format and also write to it from OS X.
Seagate’s Lyve app consolidates photos and videos on the drive and makes them available to other devices online, but you might see that as redundant if you use iCloud Photo Library. Alan Stonebridge
For the most part, a good performer for a drive of its kind, backed up with a practical software bundle. A big stand with useful features, but a few flaws – most notably that it doesn’t have an external power supply.