Home » Review: Seagate Slim

Seagate - slim-500gb-2013-black-comparison-gallery-500x500

 

What is it?

The Seagate Slim is a portable hard drive, that runs on USB 3.0 interface. Our review version comes in the size of 500GB. Apart from being a portable HDD, it also offers backup software, which not only backs your data (and other files) in the HDD, it lets you do the same in the cloud, or on social media websites.

Look and Feel

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The Seagate Slim is one of the thinnest and lightest portable hard drives you’ll see on the market.Not just that, but it also looks and feels beautiful, and is truly something you wouldn’t mind showing off. At only 9.6mm thin, and 150 grams, there isn’t much question there. This makes it lighter than most phones, and almost as thin. In fact, this is probably the one HDD on the market that you can go and buy just for its looks. Our version came in brushed aluminium, but it also features the black colour.

The only thing that concerns me is that being too thin, it feels fragile. However, I don’t think that is much of an issue.

The Hard drive – USB 3.0 data speeds

So it looks and feels good, but how well does it work as a portable hard drive?

Pretty good.

It is of course Plug and Play, and all you need to do is plug it in and it appears as a drive on your computer.

Doing some tests, we were able to read from this at about 100MB/s, while the writing speeds went up to 40MB/s.

Ideally, you do need to connect this to the USB 3.0 port (Blue) on your computer, but it does work with USB 2.0 as well. The data rates were not found to be too bad on USB 2.0 either, and this makes it an ideal one to use with different set ups.

Compatibility

This is compatible with both Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8) as well as MAC OS x 10.6 or higher

Seagate Dashboard

This comes with the Seagate Dashboard software, and while this hard drive is not really intended as a back up drive, using that software you can turn this into one.

The software lets you do the following:

  • Back up your files on the drive, periodically or manually.
  • You can choose how often the backup takes place, as well as which files to choose. You can also let it back up your whole computer, and let it do its thing automatically. Obviously, this will take space on both your drive as well as your computer’s resources.
  • The Back up feature above is only available on PC though, and not Macs. Mac users can use Time Machine on their machines to do the same.
  • Back up your files on Seagate Cloud. The drive comes with a 12 month free membership, and after that you can extend it, or buy extra space.
  • Download your files from social media websites like Facebook and Flickr.
  • Upload to social media, such as Facebook, Flickr, or even YouTube.

How do I get this?

More information on this, and where to get it from can be found on Seagate’s website at the following link:

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/standard/seagate-slim/

Just looking at that look you can see a few buying options, such as Amazon, Currys and eBuyer. As of now, the price hovers about the £44 mark.

Verdict

These days, you just cannot live without having a portable hard drive. You need to save data, and you need to travel with it. If you want to do it in style, you need to look no further!

 

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