Experience a trio of external Seagate hard drives: HDDs still have a lot of life left in the SSD and cloud era

SSD is fast, cloud is convenient, but HDD still has the advantage in capacity and cost. The new Seagate HDD trio is aimed at storing, backing up and moving large data. SSD has now become an almost default choice on computers, from popular laptops to high-performance workstations. Cloud also makes syncing and accessing data between multiple devices much more convenient than before. However, when the amount of data to be stored begins to be measured in terabytes, HDD still has advantages that the above two solutions cannot completely replace.

I had the opportunity to quickly experience three new generation external HDD models from Seagate including One Touch Portable, Expansion Portable and Expansion Desktop. All three aim for a fairly familiar story: expanding storage space and creating an additional place to backup data. However, each line is suitable for a different scale of use, from a few TB of personal data to carry to dozens of TB fixed on the desk.

Three new external HDD options from Seagate

Of the three products, Seagate One Touch Portable is the one with the most included features. This is still a 2.5 inch portable HDD so the size is quite compact, can be put in a backpack and get power directly from the computer without needing a separate adapter.

The One Touch design has also been refreshed this time with wavy lines on the upper half of the drive's body. The connection port switched to USB-C so it is more suitable for today's laptops. In the box there is a USB-C cable about 0.5 m long.

The difference between One Touch and Expansion lies largely in the software and backup capabilities. Seagate Toolkit supports backup setup, while the drive also features password protection combined with hardware encryption. Seagate also includes Rescue Data Recovery Services under a 3-year limited warranty along with some software benefits like Adobe Creative Cloud Pro.

The capacity of this generation One Touch is up to 4TB, but in Vietnam the product will initially be sold with a 2TB version, while a 4TB version is expected to appear later. If your needs are simpler, the Seagate Expansion Portable has a plug-and-play approach. This is also a 2.5 inch HDD, compact and does not require a separate power source. Unlike One Touch, Expansion focuses mainly on adding more capacity to the computer instead of management and security features.

The Expansion Portable uses a USB Micro-B connection on the drive, and Seagate provides a Micro-B to USB-C cable about 0.5 m long. The fact that the other end is USB-C makes it easy to use directly with most new laptops without having to find a USB-A adapter. The product line has a maximum capacity of 4TB; The Vietnamese market also started with the 2TB version first.

The new design is quite interesting with a square body, rounded four corners and many wavy layers running around the edges. Compared to traditional desktop HDDs, which often have a rather hard box shape, this design looks modern and is also in sync with the language of the new One Touch.

Expansion Desktop has capacity options up to 30TB. In Vietnam, Seagate plans to launch 8TB and 16TB first, higher capacity levels will appear later. The connection on the drive is still USB Micro-B, comes with a Micro-B to USB-C cable about 0.8 m long.

HDD still has the advantage when the amount of data is increasingly large

At this point, I don't think there are many reasons to compare HDD with SSD in terms of speed. SSD is much faster, from access time to read and write speed, and is clearly more suitable for installing operating systems, applications or placing projects that are directly working. But not all the data we have needs that kind of speed. An example that is quite close to the need to create content is the original footage after each shoot. A completed project can leave behind hundreds of GB of data including raw video, photos, audio, editing projects and high-quality finished products. These files still need to be kept because they may need to be reused later, but most of the time they just sit there. If accumulated over many projects, some TB will run out very quickly.

This is the type of data that is suitable for HDDs: it needs to be saved more than it needs to be accessed frequently. SSDs can still do the job, but the investment cost per TB will be significantly higher as capacity increases. With desktop HDD, users can own 8TB, 16TB or even dozens of TB in one device. Cloud solves the problem in a different way. The biggest advantage is that data can be accessed from many places and there is no need to keep a physical device nearby. In return, large capacity often comes with maintenance costs, and upload/download speed depends entirely on network connection. So HDD, SSD and cloud are actually not necessarily mutually exclusive. SSD can hold working data, HDD is for large data and long-term storage, and cloud takes care of files that need to be synchronized or create another layer of backup.

Actual experience: HDD still does what it needs to do well

The actual test I'm more interested in than the benchmark is copying a large file, because this is also a situation quite close to how these drives are used. With two 2.5 inch portable HDDs, the average copy speed I recorded was about 135 MB/s. Meanwhile, Expansion Desktop uses a 3.5 inch HDD and its own power source maintains about 180–190 MB/s. Of course, these numbers cannot be compared to modern SSDs. But if placed correctly on the needs of the HDD, about 135–190 MB/s is still quite good.

If you think these numbers are not too impressive, try comparing Expansion Desktop's 180–190 MB/s, which is higher than the actual throughput often seen when transferring files over a Gigabit Ethernet network. 1GbE networks have a theoretical limit of 125 MB/s and in practice are often lower than this level due to overhead and many other factors. Therefore, in some situations where it is necessary to transfer hundreds of GB or several TB of data between two systems, copying to HDD and then bringing it to another computer may seem a bit traditional but still very practical. No need to wait for upload to the cloud, regardless of Internet speed or internal network infrastructure, and once the copy is finished, all the data is in your hands.

Portable to carry around, Desktop to have lots of space

Two 2.5 inch HDDs give me a more portable feeling. Just one cable connected to the laptop to both transmit data and power the drive.

At 2TB, they're small enough for me to carry a fairly large amount of photos, videos, or projects between multiple devices. One Touch is more suitable if you want a personal backup solution with more software and security, while Expansion Portable is simpler for those who need a few more TB of capacity that can be put in a backpack.

Expansion Desktop belongs to a different group. Having to have a power adapter makes it not something I want to carry every day, but this is also not the purpose of the product. It is suitable for permanent placement next to a desktop, workstation or a storage system. Another application is to make an external backup drive for a NAS that supports USB storage. Instead of considering the Expansion Desktop as a drive to operate inside the NAS - a job that is suitable for specialized HDD lines like IronWolf - users can periodically back up important data from the NAS to an external HDD, then disconnect the drive and store it separately. This also creates an occasional data connection to the main system.

Having more capacity is not as important as having an additional backup

This is probably the reason why external HDDs are still the most interesting. A laptop with a 2TB SSD or a NAS with 20TB of capacity does not mean the data on it has been backed up. If it exists only on that device, we still only have one copy of data.

External HDD is one of the simple ways to create additional copies. Data in use can be on the SSD, and after completing the job, it can be copied to the HDD for storage. For more important data, users can continue to create an additional copy on the NAS, cloud or another drive. That is also the logic of the often mentioned 3-2-1 backup principle: keep multiple copies of data, on multiple media, and have at least one copy separated from the primary location. An external HDD doesn't solve this entire problem on its own, but it's a relatively easy way to get started.

One Touch has the advantage of Seagate Toolkit when it can set up a more convenient backup process. Expansion aims to be simpler to use, users can organize their data and backup it manually. Expansion Desktop with levels of 8TB, 16TB or higher is suitable when the amount of data to keep exceeds the scale of a few TB. All three lines are also provided by Seagate with Rescue Data Recovery Services. This is a layer of support worth having if a drive crashes, but it's also important to understand that data recovery services are no substitute for proactively backing up from scratch. SSDs will get faster, SSD capacities will increase, and the cloud will certainly become more convenient. But that doesn't make HDD useless. Its role is simply shifting from a place where we regularly work with data to a place where large amounts of data are kept for long periods of time.

For those who only have a few hundred GB of data, an external HDD may not be so necessary. But when photo libraries, videos, footage or projects start to be counted in many TB, the problem is very different. At this time, the ability to have an extra 2TB to carry or 8–16TB to put next to your computer at a reasonable cost is still a very real value. In Vietnam, Seagate One Touch Portable and Expansion Portable will be available for pre-sale with 2TB versions, while Expansion Desktop has two initial options: 8TB and 16TB. The 4TB versions of the two portable models and higher capacity levels of the Expansion Desktop will be available for sale in the near future.