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Storage mainstay Seagate has been churning out hard drives and SSDs for decades, as well as innumerable portable hard drives. But it’s largely left portable SSDs to its premium, Apple-focused
LaCiebrand. But today the company is announcing its Ultra-Compact SSD, an external solid-state drive available in 1TB and 2TB capacities that, with its slender design and built-in USB-C port, looks like a high-end flash drive, rather than a traditional portable SSD.
These kinds of drives, sometimes called SSD sticks, that pack SSD-like performance and a built-in USB port for cable-free use, have become increasingly common in the last couple of years, with the
SK Hynix Tube T31being our current favorite of what we’re still classifying as the
best flash drives.
We’ll have to do some testing to find out if Seagate’s drive deserves a spot on the above list, but its pretty external shell aside, it has some interesting things going for it that may make it worth considering even if it isn’t the fastest performer. Like many other Seagate products, the Ultra-Compact SSD ships with three years of the company’s
Rescue Data Recoveryservice, as well as six-month trials of cloud backup and image organization services. That’s not going to be important for everyone, but the data recovery service will certainly appeal many who’ve lost irreplaceable data to a drive crash in the past.
Dropbox Backup and Mylio Photos+ image organization and backup services.
Seagate-Ultra Compact SSD specs
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| Pricing | $90.99 | $179.99 |
| Interface / Protocol | USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps) | USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps) |
| Sequential Read | Up to 1,000 MB/s | Up to 1,000 MB/s |
| Sequential Write | Up to 1,000 MB/s | Up to 1,000 MB/s |
| Dimensions | 2.7 (L) x .7(W) x 0.34(H) inches (without sleeve) | 2.7 (L) x .7(W) x 0.34(H) inches (without sleeve) |
| 11.15 grams | 19.6 grams (without sleeve) | 19.6 grams (without sleeve) |
| Warranty | 3 years | 3 years |
Design of the Seagate-Ultra Compact SSD
With a single-piece aluminum silver shell (with plastic plugs on the font and back) and a 2.7 x 0.7 x 0.34 inches, Seagate’s drive looks and feels great. The cap over the USB-C port is all rubber, but it stays on much better than most plastic flash drive caps. And if you’re worried about scratching up the metal, the company also includes a gray rubber sleeve that matches the cap. That does add a little bulk to the drive, but it’s still small enough that it shouldn’t interfere with nearby ports like many competing high-end stick SSDs or flash drives.
Seagate points out that the drive is made up of at least 35% recycled materials (likely the aluminum), and it’s rated for drops up to 3 meters and sports IP54 dust and water resistance. Those specs are likely only while using the sleeve, but the drive feels plenty rugged without it for travel in typical conditions.
Software and included extras
The Seagate Ultra-Compact SSD ships with Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery service for three years, which families or users dealing with truly irreplaceable data will no doubt find appealing. That said, my personal history with drives like this tells me it’s far more likely that you’d lose a drive this than have it randomly fail and lock you out of data access. If you’re worried about losing things like family photos, a cloud backup of what’s on the drive might be more useful.
Speaking of that, the drive also ships with a six-month trial of
Dropbox Backupand the
Mylio Photos+image organization and backup service. I don’t expect these are going to sway many potential buyers, but at least the trials aren’t the more typical 90-day variety. Six months will likely give you enough time to decide whether or not a service is worth paying for.
Comparison products
As a 2TB device in a flash drive form factor, the Seagate Ultra-Compact SSD doesn’t have a ton of direct competition, as many competing drives like the SK Hynix Tube T31 and Kingston DataTraveler Max) both top out at 1TB. The Transcend ESD310 does go up to 2TB though, and is selling for the same $179 price as the MSRP of the 2TB Seagate drive. And while it’s significantly wider, the ADATA SC750 is also available at 2TB for as little as $119. You’ll find all of these drives and more in our benchmark charts below.
Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.
Landing more or less in the middle of our competing cable-free flash drive and SSD comparisons, this isn’t a great showing for Seagate’s drive. But the drive is still much closer to the best drives here than the worst.
Transfer Rates – DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 10GB dataset. We copy 1,204 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.
Again the Seagate drive fails to impress here, at least on read speeds. But its write speed of nearly 512 MB/s puts it in 4th place among the other drives tested here. And 570 MB/s mixed-file reads is still is still a solid showing for a drive this small.
Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.
While again not the fastest of the bunch, Seagate’s Ultra-Compact SSD manages a balanced read and write speed both easily above 1,000 MB/s (so above its rated speed) in this test. Only our favorite SK Hynix Tube T31 is markedly better on both fronts. But remember, its capacity tops out at 1TB.
On the flip side, there’s little positive to say about the Seagate drive’s small file write results here, other than they aren’t dramatically worse than the worst competing drives in our testing pool. If you’re looking for an external drive to directly run an operating system or demanding programs off of, there are lots of better options.
Bottom line
There’s lots to like about the design as well as the bundled data recovery features of Seagate’s Ultra-Compact SSD. And its performance, while far from class-leading, is still good enough to please mainstream consumers – especially those stepping up from a portable hard drive or an old space-cramped flash drive for backing up key files.
But apart from its compact size and spacious 2TB option, there’s little to set it apart from the pack unless you count its bottom-rung small file performance – which to be fair won’t matter much to those just looking to move files on and off the drive for backup or other sneakernet purposes. And when you consider Adata’s SC750 was faster on nearly all of our tests for $60 less, Seagate’s compact metal shell and three years of data recovery service need to do a lot of heavy lifting to make Seagate’s drive appealing.
Still, with a decent price drop over its initial MSRP, it could be worth considering. It has the nicest design of any of these stick SSDs I’ve used yet, and its performance is still good enough for my typical tasks, like moving test result files and game files between PCs.
MORE: Best SSDs
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