power consumption eagate 4tb backup plus portable drive

In my testing, I didn't need to use the Y-shaped cable at all, but you might need it if you plan to use the Fast with older laptops. This cable is needed only when you use the Fast with a computer that can't provide enough power for the drive to work from a single USB port. The second cable is a Y-shaped cable that can draw power from two USB ports of a computer. One of them is a standard USB 3.0 cable, similar to those accompanying other portable drives. The drive itself includes two USB cables. This is a must-have feature for a portable drive, since it saves you from carrying too many things. Despite having two internal drives, the Fast is still bus-powered, meaning it doesn't require a separate power adapter. On one side, it has a standard Micro-USB 3.0 port. In fact, it's slightly shorter, or narrower than some other thinner drives. Other than its thick profile, the drive itself is still very compact. However, this is quite normal for portable drives. Note that you can't open the Fast to service the internal drives by yourself, and you can't change it to a RAID 1 setup, either. If you use it to host hot data, such as movies or photos that you're working on, make sure you back them up to another drive as soon as you're done. Rather, use it to store a backup of your original files. For this reason, you shouldn't use the Fast to store your only copy of data.

Generally, RAID 0 heightens the risk of data loss because if one of the internal drives fails, you'll lose data on both. That makes it the highest capacity portable drive on the market, doubling the amount of space any runner-up can offer. These two hard drives are combined into a single volume in a RAID 0 configuration to offer the total storage space of 4TB.

But it's thick for a good reason: it's the first portable drive I've seen that houses two internal hard drives on the inside, stacked one on top of the other. At 0.8 inch, it's almost twice the thickness of other drives, such as the Backup Plus or the WD My Passport Slim. The Backup Plus Fast bucks the trend of going slim in portable drives. Microsoft Windows (XP or later), Mac OS 10.4.6 or later

Looking for other storage alternatives? Check out CNET's list of best hard drives and storage devices. All things considered, at the current price of $270 for 4TB, it's really a great deal. On top of that, the device itself is also thicker than others.īut as a drive designed to host a backup copy of your data, the Backup Plus Fast makes an excellent choice for those who need lots of storage space as well as top performance on the go. The only drawback of this drive is the fact that RAID 0 generally has higher risk of data loss. This latest member of Seagate's Backup Plus family of compact external hard drives achieves that by combining two internal hard drives on the inside in a RAID 0 configuration, effectively doubling both the current capacity and performance.

Power consumption eagate 4tb backup plus portable drive