First things first. The Seagate Backup Plus Hub isn’t a portable harddrive. It’s an external drive, more specifically one that is to be ideally used alongside a desktop. This compact external drive with a monstrous storage of 8TB will set you back S$599, but if you are a an avid photographer or videographer, it comes highly recommended.
Design
Coming in at 1.06kg and 118 x 41 x 198.1mm, the Seagate Backup Plus Hub is actually a surprisingly compact hard drive given its 8TB size. It comes along with a power adapter to function due to it being an external hard drive and not a mini portable drive.
What’s interesting is the fact that it has 2 USB ports instead of just one. So whilst you normally lose a port when you connect a hard drive to your computer. That doesn’t occur with the Backup Plus Hub.
User Experience
It comes formatted in NTFS so most PC users should have no issues using it right out of the box.
Plugging it in and using it is a breeze, I can see how 8TB worth of storage could be useful for media junkies, but perhaps not so much for the average Joe. If you tend to do tons of video editing or photography and require extensive usage of the Adobe Suite, you may find this hard drive coming in handy.
Of course, the Seagate Dashboard backup software comes together with your hard drive. The 3 different backup methods, namely the PC Backup, Mobile Backup and Social, to back up your computer, your mobile devices, and your social website data do come in handy and is definitely very easy to use.
Drive speed was also fairly good, it seemed to have around a 180-200MBPS read/write speed, which was fairly decent and CNET gave is a rating of 181.3 which is higher than the Seagate Backup Plus Desktops’ 150.9.
Verdict
Whether or not you should get the Seagate Backup Plus Hub would depend on a few factors. The first question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you need 8TB worth of memory. If you aren’t a media professional, chances are, the answer is no. The second question you have to ask yourself is whether you are a serial laptop or desktop user. I would only recommend the Backup Plus Hub for desktop users since it’s actually quite heavy. It’s portable for an 8TB external drive, but portable hard drive would be a better choice for laptop users.
