We've collectively spent nearly 200 hours researching and testing portable hard drives in just the past four years. I've spent the last two years reviewing hard drives and SSDs. Wirecutter has researched and recommended hard drives since early 2012, and our PC team has over eight years of combined experience testing hard drives and solid-state drives. (Make sure not to buy the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast by mistake-that's a different drive that we do not recommend.) Why you should trust us It's twice as thick as our top pick and almost twice as heavy, too. It was faster at sequential reading in our HD Tune test, but it was slower in our other testing. If you want more storage and don't mind a larger, heavier drive, we continue to recommend the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable, which costs less per terabyte than the 2 TB Backup Plus Slim. Seagate includes handy backup software, too. We recommend the 2 TB model because it's a great value. The Slim has an acceptable 9-percent reported failure rate among nearly 2,701 user reviews. Every other 2 TB portable hard drive is significantly larger, performs slower in our tests, or has a failure rate that's too high to recommend. The Slim has been one of our top picks for the past four years, and it's the only portable hard drive that we've tested that doesn't sacrifice size, speed, or reliability. It's reliable, it's one of the lightest, thinnest hard drives we tested, and it was faster than the competition in our backup and file-transfer tests.
SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS SLIM BEST BUY FULL
Read the full portable hard drive guide here.Īfter 18 hours of new research and testing, we found that the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is still the best portable hard drive for most people. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter.