Seagate Ultra Touch external HDD review: Storage, services, and sustainability

As great as SSDs are, there is still a place for hard disk drives in a PC user’s arsenal. Data backup is a prime example, where capacity trumps speed in this task that typically runs during off hours. Seagate’s Ultra Touch HDD offers up to 5TB of capacity, along with some other added features, which could be enough to make it stand out above other options.

Further reading: See our roundup of the best external drives to learn about competing products.

Thanks to the exFAT file system, the portable Seagate Ultra Touch HDD is compatible with Windows, Mac OS, as well as Chrome OS. It can be connected via USB-C. The drive comes with a Type-C to C cable with a decent length of 19.30 inches. It does not include any adapters for connection variants.

In the benchmark tests with CrystalDiskMark, the Ultra Touch proved to be a high performer. On average, the data rates are over 155MB/s for reading and writing. The external HDD is a tad stronger in reading than in writing.

This is confirmed by the real-world results, where it reads our test DVD at a good 143MB/s and writes at over 139MB/s. The difference between reads and writes is clear when it comes to our music package test, which consists of over 1000 MP3 files: Here, the Touch achieves a good 110MB/s in reading, but only just under 65MB/s in writing.

The Touch’s Seagate HDD operates at 5400 revolutions per minute and has 128MB cache.

The software features are generous: In addition to Seagate Toolkit, which provides hardware-encrypted password protection, there are two trial subscriptions for six months each for Dropbox Backup Plan for backing up to the cloud and Mylio Photos for managing and enhancing pictures.

There are only so many ways you can dress up the somewhat stodgy category of HDDs. But given that we all still have a use for them, Seagate’s Ultra Touch is a fine cadidate for the job.

Further reading: 3 reasons you should still buy a hard drive.

This review was translated from German to English and originally appeared on pcwelt.de.