By Joel Santo Domingo The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive ($219.99) is basic, utilitarian storage designed to fit the widest possible strata of general users. This hard drive has lots of room for downloaded videos, holds multiple generations of historical backups, and is a relatively inexpensive bucket for anyone who needs to transport scads of large files from one PC to another. Take a look at the Backup Plus Desktop Drive you need to clear up your C: drive or if you need to store an obscene amount of data. It's the highest-capacity hard drives you can buy without complications, like RAID arrays and other multi-drive combinations. And it costs just pennies per gigabyte to boot. It's our new Editors' Choice for desktop-class external hard drives.
Design and Features
The chassis is made of black polycarbonate, with perforations on three faces for cooling. The front has the Seagate logo molded into a corner, while the back has a USB 3.0 port and the jack for the included AC adapter. The desktop-class drive measures about 1.75 by 4.75 by 7 inches (HWD), and multiple units can be stacked upon another on their rubber feet. The bottom panel is faceted, like the surface of a gem, and is also perforated for cooling.
The Backup Plus Desktop is available in four configurations, priced from $99 for 2TB up to $219.99 for the 5TB of our review unit. That's enough to hold thousands of movies or hundreds of thousands of songs and music files. It's also big enough to keep multiple backup versions of your files, particularly if you use an archiving program like Time Machine on a Mac. It has more than double the capacity of the Buffalo Drivestation DDR 2TB (HD-GD2.0U3), and has an extra terabyte over the Western Digital My Book (4TB). Given our review units price and capacity, that works out to 4 cents per gigabyte. That's a better value than even the 6 cents per gigabyte of the Seagate Backup Plus Fast, our Editors' Choice for portable hard drives. Our former Editors' Choice for desktop-class external drives, the IoSafe Solo G3 (1 TB), was discontinued, but the same model is available with a 3TB capacity at a still pricey 13 cents per gigabyte.
You can use the NTFS-formatted drive right away as a drag-and-drop backup drive for a Windows PC, or reformat it to HFS+ and use with Time Machine. You can also download a NTFS driver from Seagate to use it without reformatting HFS+ for file transfer use with a Mac. Seagate includes an installer for its Dashboard program, which can back up all your document files on a Windows PC. It doesn't back up program and operating system files, so you'll need a more specialized software package for full Windows system backup.
The bundled Dashboard program can back up files from your social network accounts and your phone. Install the free app on your Android or Apple phone, and you'll be able to set up automatic backups to your drive over Wi-Fi or the cloud. (You'll need to make sure your computer is on with the drive connected in order for the automatic backup to work.) You can also set Dashboard to check your Facebook and Flickr accounts and download new photos. The IoSafe Solo G3 (1 TB) doesn't have automatic backup.
The Backup Plus Desktop comes with a two-year warranty, That's not bad, but we'd like to see three-year warranty for everything but the cheapest drives.
Performance
The Backup Plus Desktop Drive had a few problems completing the PCMark 7 drive test, we ran into errors that caused the test to fail. That's unfortunate, but not entirely uncommon, so we tested it with the PCMark 5 drive test, where it scored an impressive 10,796 points. That's a bit faster than the Buffalo Drivestation (10,561 points on PCMark 5). On our drag-and-drop test, the Seagate took 14 seconds to copy our 1.2GB test folder. That's on par with the Buffalo drive, but a lot slower than the two seconds of the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, our Editors' Choice for high-end external hard drives. To be fair, the LaCie drive used the blazing-fast Thunderbolt 2 interface and a dual solid-state drive (SSD) RAID array. The LaCie Little Big Disk is the drive for power users, while the Backup Plus Desktop Drive and its peers are better suited for downloads, file copies, and other general tasks. The IoSafe took a leisurely 15 seconds to copy the file and scored a much lower 7,622 points on the PCMark 5 test.
At 4 cents per gigabyte, the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive is a great value. That is a better bargain than even the 6 cents per gigabyte of the Seagate Backup Plus Fast, our Editors' Choice for portable hard drives, and the 13 cents per gigabyte of the IoSafe Solo G3.
Overall, the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop (5TB) is an excellent choice if you need the most storage for the dollar, in a drive that won't travel with you. It's our Editors' Choice for desktop-class external hard drives, replacing the now-discontinued IoSafe Solo G3 due to the Seagate drive's larger-capacity and pennies per gigabyte pricing.
