Accessories: 5 out of 5
While the included accessories do not completely offset the asking price… less than twenty dollars for a 4TB drive is a bargain to say the least. As such, the accessories list is worth 5 out of 5.
Read performance: 19 out 25
Not that long ago the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB’s combination of read performance and capacity would have been about as good as it got for this type of device. Time of course marches on, so while it is decent, it is best considered ‘pretty good’. Not great, but not bad either.
Write performance: 31 out of 40
As with the read performance, we doubt many will find the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB’s write performance to be a major bottleneck. Yes, there are faster. Ye,s the older controller does handicap it somewhat. But at the end of the day you can not expect miracles from 5400rpm drives. You will be trading performance for capacity. As such it is pretty good for its class, and smidgen above average for its asking price.
Warranty: 6 out of 10
A two-year warranty is pretty much the definition of mediocre. We understand the reasoning behind this decision, as Hard Disk Drive external storage is notorious for dying an early death, but it still less than impressive.
Value: 19 out of 20
The Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB may not be quite as good a value as the Ultra Touch 1TB (as even after the value added software is included in the equation it is not free) but it is very, very close. A mere 5 dollars per TB is about as good as you are going to find. Of course for those who do not care about such things the asking price is easily justified. You will get more than 80 percent of the various 5TB’s performance… at about 65 percent the asking price. No matter which way you slice it the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB is a pretty darn good value.
Final Score: 80 / 100
While it may lack the shear value of the Ultra Touch 1TB drive we recently review, the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB is still a pretty darn good value. Even excluding the value-added software from the equation this drive does offer good capacity, decent performance, and even decent looks. So much so there are good arguments to be made for opting for the smaller 4TB capacity versions over the larger 5TB models. Even if you will be sacrificing a bit of performance along with 20 percent of the capacity.
