More serious photographers with our 14-frames-per-second-shooting digital SLRs and our multiple external hard drives, and our online photo sharing services, and our Facebook, oh yes, who can forget about Facebook, where we upload and share every digital image and video of our lives? How could we possibly get a handle on all these files, let alone access them quickly wherever we are so we can show them off to friends, relatives, and, most importantly, to potential clients? Even non-photographers like, for instance, my mom, capture way too many photos on cameras and smartphones and iPads, which they have no idea what do with or how to find. Spearheaded by former Microsoft Chief Technical Officer David Vaskevitch, Mylio stands for “My Life Is Organized,” which is a cute way of saying that most of our lives are really a complete digital mess. The Backup Plus Portable won’t set the world on fire, and if you don’t need the Mylio Create application, the 2016 edition will be a better buy.The multi-device image management service known as Mylio made quite a splash when it launched at the PhotoPlus Expo show last fall. With that in mind, Seagate did what it had to do in its best interests – namely the bare minimum: a new shell with a few minor improvements. New technologies like HAMR or Helium are reserved for more lucrative markets like data centers where the need for smaller 2.5-inch hard disk drives is, well, non-existent.įor those looking for the highest volumetric capacity around without breaking the bank, you simply can’t go wrong with a 5TB portable drive. There’s not much hardware improvement that can be made as there is little to no incentive to invest in R&D. Large capacity portable hard drives have reached a plateau. The Armor A60 even comes with a USB Type-C connector and cable holder. The other model is slightly cheaper at $145 and is both waterproof and shockproof. The SP050TBPHDD3LS3K costs $149 and has a distinctive diamond-patterned design with a bookmark that acts as a sliding protector for the USB port. Silicon Power has two drives sporting a 5TB capacity and both of them are waterproof.

Is it worth paying $20 extra for those benefits? Yes, at least in our opinion. There’s also the 2016 version of the Backup Plus that retails for 15% less than its 2019 counterpart – but it lacks the new design, the Type-C plug converter and the Mylio Create subscription. However, it has a more attractive finish and a Type-C connector. The LaCie Porsche Design 5TB USB-C Mobile Hard Drive is far more expensive and doesn’t come with the Mylio Create software bundle. The irony here is that competitors are likely to use the same Seagate 5TB internal hard drive. A 10GB file was transferred in about 78 seconds from the laptop’s drive to the portable device, which equates to a real-life speed of around 128MBps – half the speed of some of the slower external solid-state drives we’ve evaluated. Overall, the drive performed above average in our two tests (CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 and Atto 4) achieving read speeds of between 131 and 146MBps, and write speeds of between 130 and 139MBps. Ironically, the barebones 5TB drive is up to 50% more expensive than the external model, despite having fewer materials (no cable, chassis or electronics) the laws of supply and demand at work. It carries a two-year warranty, as does the Backup Plus Portable. This ST5000LM000 drive also has 128MB cache and a spindle speed of 5,400RPM. It is a 12.5mm tall, five-platter model, with each platter having a 1TB capacity. The 5TB hard disk drive used by the Backup Plus Portable was actually launched back in 2016.

Here’s how the Seagate Backup Plus Portable performed in our benchmark tests:ĬrystalDiskMark: 146MBps (read) 130MBps (write)Ītto: 131MBps (read, 256mb) 139MBps (write, 256mb) Performance

Mylio create software