Seagate Backup Plus Fast (4 Tera Byte )

Seagate introduced Backup Plus FAST portable drive; the world's first portable 4TB storage device, providing twice the capacity and speed of existing external portable drives. This new Seagate Backup Plus FAST drive features a super speed USB 3.0 interface to deliver transfer speeds up to 220MB per second, making it the perfect companion for a field photographer or filmmaker looking to quickly move large files to backup.

"With Backup Plus FAST, Seagate has taken a very mature product category and has delivered innovative enhancements to address the real world challenges of our customers," said Rajesh Khurana, country manager, India & SAARC, Philippines, Vietnam, Indo-China, Singapore for Seagate Technology. "The performance and capacity of this new portable drive is beyond that of any other external offering to date. We believe that the Backup Plus FAST drive will be widely adopted by creative professionals as the go-to back up device for the field."

The metal top-case of Seagate Backup Plus FAST drive is a quality sturdy design and is resistant to scratches and fingerprints. It needs no external power supply and is compact enough to fit easily in a camera bag or backpack while delivering the same or higher capacity of today's desktop drives. The drive is configured as RAID 0, which stripes the data across both drives increasing the volume capacity and transfer speed.

"Speed and capacity are of the utmost importance in my work which calls for the latest in digital photography and video technologies. When dealing with the large files these devices produce, whether it is a still photo, time-lapse video or 4k video; having high-capacity reliable and fast storage can make the difference between a project succeeding or failing" says Jim Sugar, veteran National Geographic photographer. "Ingesting, editing, managing, and backing up these files, which are often gigabytes in size, represent the crucial steps that make up my digital workflow."

"My job depends on how the technology performs, because if the camera, computer and hard drives do not function as expected, either the project will be a failure or the time spent in post-production will be impacted tremendously. Time is valuable to a filmmaker or photographer and anything that can speed up the necessary processes is valuable to me and in the end, the client."

This new offering also includes the same easy to use backup software that has made the Seagate Backup Plus line up so popular. The Seagate Dashboard software provides an easy one-click backup solution, but can also be set as a scheduled backup up as needed. Additionally, the Dashboard software will back up Facebook and Flickr albums to ensure that even video and photos shared through these networks are backed up and easy to find. Use the Save and Share features to download and upload content from these social network sites. Even all the photos you have been tagged in can be backed up from your social networks to the drive.

The latest update to the Dashboard now also includes a mobile backup application to provide protection for one's digital data on mobile devices. Install the free Seagate Mobile Backup app on an iOS or Android mobile device to back up all of the pictures and videos from that device to a drive or a cloud service. Back up from mobile devices can also be sent directly to the drive via a WiFi connection while within your network, or utilize cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Drive while on the road.

Backing up your computer is essential to protect against viruses and malware as well as mechanical failure of the hard drive. Your digital photos are especially irreplaceable. An external hard drive like this makes back-up quick and easy, but store that external hard drive securely. If your house is destroyed in a fire or blown apart by a tornado or hurricane that external drive sitting by your computer could well be destroyed too. Cloud storage is one option, but simply backing up your digital photos to a flash drive(s) and keeping them in your bank safety deposit box is a cheap alternative too.

Yep. Thanks for the links - people should know what they’re getting into...

My work laptop has two drives in RAID1 - if one fails I’m good to go again in a few minutes - unless the error is caused by software, as I (painfully) found out some years ago when installing SP3 for XP from MS’s own server and it somehow nuked both drives at once. Argh! I was too lazy to remove the second drive for the update and synch the drives later. Lesson learned. Luckily I had a recent backup on an external drive.

An external backup is *always* mandatory.

At the Fort Worth Radio Shack outlet tent sale many years ago, I saw a full length ISA board that allowed data backup to VHS tape players. No software or drivers. They always had something cool at those sales, but I left this one be.

More junk from a drive manufacturer. This garbage started with LaCie’s Bigger Disk with a RAID0 of 2 drives created by the bridgeboard inside the enclosure. Now Seagate bought LaCie and is bringing that crap to their own product lines.

Problem is, the RAID is created by the firmware on the bridge. Break the bridge and you break the RAID. You have to move the drives to an identical bridge to remount the RAID and access the data.

Far better to just use a single 4TB drive enclosure and a single drive. If you have to use RAID0, do it with your operating system in software RAID. That way you can move the drives to anything and the RAID will still mount.

I have nothing against a RAID0 - like anything, with a backup, it is fine. I have a lot of complaint towards firmware based RAIDs that are too easy to break and too hard to fix,

Rick

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