Seagate Backup Plus for Mac External Desktop Hard Drive Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,312 words · ~6 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the seate Backup Plus for Mac it is time machine
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compatible and it is a backup for your
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digital life including well your time machine which is I mean apparently
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apples are time machines no I'm just kidding I know what time machine is um
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basically it's just you know Apple's clever branding for you know what I
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don't have to prove I know what time machine is I think you guys believe me I know what time machine is um so yeah it
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works with time machine it also works with Facebook so what's really cool
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about all of their Backup Plus drives is the software that's included with a
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Backup Plus drive not only backs up your computer but can also back up data that
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you have stored in the cloud I mean remember Facebook is just cloud storage
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basically I mean you take a bunch of photos you upload them to Facebook and then you don't necessarily think about
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how safe they are you know what if uh what if Facebook didn't exist tomorrow
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and it took all your photos with it well this way you can make sure that your
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Facebook photos and other social media sites can be backed up as well I heard
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that they're going to be working on adding support for YouTube so I really hope they do that although it wouldn't
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necessarily work for me because I have a lot of stuff on YouTube but if you just
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have like you know a couple pictures of your dog or like your baby that you
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wanted to show you know baby's grandma or whatever on a YouTube account you
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want to make sure you have it backed up somewhere this will work for you now it
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is compatible with Mac and PC the only real difference between a Mac edition
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Drive and a PC edition Drive is the
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included cabl so let's have a look at what is included with our Mac edition
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Drive we' got a quick start guide plug the thing into the other thing and the
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first thing seate limited warranty that is a 2-year warranty on this particular
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retail product we've got in
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here all of our cables so there's your power cable for the unit itself as well
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as a USB 2 cable and the math Edition I
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think actually includes more CBL a FireWire 800 cable so that is once again
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more useful for Mac users than it is for PC users CU not a lot of PCS use
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firewire 800 because it is a slow
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redundant standard at this point in time with USB 3 just giving it the old how do
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you do in terms of performance so the dock down here is oh this is kind of
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cool why does it do that okay well it has two fire wire 800 ports why does it
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do that oh can you can you daisy chain firewire 800 that's kind of cool okay so
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it has power in fire wire as well as USB
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2 so you can use it on a PC performance will just kind of uh bite compared to
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using usb3 or fire wire 800 so the drive
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is pretty bog standard okay so youve got your ventilation at the top it looks
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pretty slick it has a soft touch feel that's another difference between the
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Apple skew and the PC skew that we saw before um that one had more of a shiny
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finish to it whereas this one is a more of a matte finish um in terms of
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ventilation you've also got ventilation at the back so passive air flow is going
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to kind of come up through here float up through the top I mean drives run so
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cool these days especially seagate's latest ones using the one tbyte platters
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so this is a 2 tab Drive which means there's only two platters in there um it
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also has a fair bit of metal in the enclosure so it has some weight to it and this piece up here is actually metal
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so you don't have to worry too much about the heat just getting contained in
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there now what I love about seates drives originally I was sort of this was
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a bit of a head scratcher for me because they released this drive and the sales
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pitch as far as I could tell was like you buy a drive and then you like it
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doesn't have an interface on it and you like the interface chipset in the cable
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and you plug it in and then you have whatever interface you want now that
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it's sort of more mature and they have a lot more products as part of the ecosystem it totally makes sense to me
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now so instead of building expensive enclosures that have a bunch of
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different chipsets in them seate builds a less expensive enclosure that has no
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logic in it whatsoever it's just an enclosure with a SATA interface at the
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back no problem then they actually put
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the logic that you need into a cable or a docking station or whatever else so
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the fire wire chips set and the power is all done in here not in here this is
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just a drive that is you know nice and compatible and whatnot so this is one of
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their last generation notebook uh like
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portable drives so that's USB 3 in fact
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if this you know Drive in here could be powered by this I could actually just do
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that cuz it's just oh no I can't even do that they're not going to let me do that okay well I thought maybe um but because
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this requires a drive that's low power enough to be powered by a USB port it
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probably makes sense that they don't let me do that because it would just be bad
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try to draw too much power from the USB port and then no one would be happy okay
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so this goes on here now not only this but you can actually take this drive and
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you can swap it onto a variety of other different docks whether they USB 3 at
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the back or whether you have like the whole big like Thunderbolt one so you
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can daisy chain a bunch of Thunderbolt external drives um and another thing
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that you can do with them is you can actually just keep one dock next to your computer whether it's Thunderbolt or USB
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3 or whatever else the case may be I'd recommend something pretty high performance if you're going to use it to
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actually run applications or or edit photos or video off of but what's cool
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about it is you can actually just kind of leave it there and then you can use
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these these drives more as like cassettes so you go and you keep a bunch
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on your bookshelf you label them with whatever you know data happens to be on
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them you know like you know my private Video Collection or whatever else the
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case may be and then you just go and plug in whichever one you happen to need
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at a given time and you're good to go you just when you're done you unplug it
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and put it somewhere safe and then no big problems can occur so I think that
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pretty much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing of the seate
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Backup Plus for mac and don't forget to subscribe C's Tech tips for unboxings
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