A few years back, the drives came with free cloud storage (OneDrive) for a limited time. Seagate's portable drives have come with different value additions over the last several years. The Seagate Backup Plus models we are looking at today belong to that category. Mass-market bus-powered hard drives typically employ a USB 3.0 micro-B interface port (contrast this with the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive that comes with a Type-C port). Today, we are taking a look at the high-capacity Seagate Backup Plus Portable 5TB drive and the ultra-thin Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB dual-platter drive.

The high density platters also allows them to deliver slim hard drives (at industry-leading capacity points taking thickness into consideration). This enables higher data storage density in their platters, which, in turn enables them to deliver the highest capacity 2.5' hard drives. While Western Digital and Toshiba use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for their 2.5' hard drives, Seagate makes use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR). Of these, only Seagate has a 5TB model in the market currently. The number of vendors delivering portable, bus-powered hard drives is limited: only Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba serve this market. Both of them adopt SMR platters (similar to the Backup Plus models being sold since late 2016), and given the performance impact of SMR, today we'll be taking a detailed look at how SMR in bus-powered hard drives behaves for consumer workloads. Earlier this year, Seagate announced an update to their massive 5TB Backup Plus Portable, while also introducing a new svelte 2TB Backup Plus Slim external hard drive.

This market segment has been stuck at the 4TB mainstream capacity point for a few years now, with the z-height of the models coming in at well over 15mm. HDD vendors have typically used their 2.5' drives for bus-powered high-capacity models.

Hard drives continue to remain the storage media of choice for cost-conscious consumers with bulk storage requirements.

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