SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS FAST 4TB

SEAGATE'S BACKUP PLUS FAST drive is portable storage for power users, plain and simple. It's the highest capacity portable hard drive in captivity, and Seagate achieves this feat by striping together two 9.5mm Samsung M9T 2TB hard drives into a RAID 0 array. As soon as you plug it in, the OS sees the drive as a 3.63TB formatted volume, so you don't have to do any setup. Unfortunately, you can't modify it to be a RAID 1 array.

The drive is a bus-powered USB 3.0 model, so it doesn't need auxiliary power of any kind, and it even includes two USB cables; one for modern systems that can provide enough power though a single port, and a Yshaped cable for those with older PCs that require two connections to pump enough juice into the drive. Since it's designed to be used as a backup drive, it includes a tool called Seagate Dashboard. This software acts as a hub for several backup tasks including backing up data on a PC, the data on your smartphone (iOS and Android only), and saving your social media data on Facebook, Flickr, and Youtube. You can also restore your backups to their original location, as well. PC backups can be simple (videos, music, etc.) or you can select individual files and folders. You can then have it back up continuously or on a schedule.

It's slick, easy-to-use, and works like a charm. You can even create system "snapshots" instead of individual files and folders, which we appreciated. In testing, the RAID 0 configuration showed why it used to be the go-to setup for power users, as this is one fast drive. It was able to sustain around 200MB/s in our file copy test, which is faster than the speediest desktop hard-disk drives available. It also didn't choke on any of the files we offered it, unlike its solid-state brethren in this roundup. Overall, this is one sweet drive. We don't like how thick it is, but that comes with the two-drive territory. It's fast though, holds a ton of data, and includes slick backup software, too. If you need more storage than an SSD drive allows, this is the one to buy.