Upgradable Interface

Like its predecessor, the FreeAgent GoFlex, the Seagate Backup Plus drive itself has a detachable SATA-to-USB 3.0 adaptor. This allows you to upgrade to a faster FireWire 800 or Thunderbolt interface, or reuse the drive's USB 3.0 interface with older GoFlex drives that came with the slower USB 3.0 interface.

As the pictures below show, you can pull out the adaptor, revealing a standard SATA power and data interface nestled inside the drive. Seagate designed the case to prevent you from directly attaching the standard SATA power and data cables to it, but barring that limitation, there is no reason why you cannot connect this drive to your computer using standard SATA cables.

According to Seagate, all of these GoFlex interface adaptors will work with the newer Backup Plus drives :

• Thunderbolt
• Powered eSATA (or eSATAp)
• FireWire 800
• USB 3.0 - standard height (14.5 mm) and Slim versions
• USB 2.0 - standard height (14.5 mm) and Slim versions

The reverse is also true - all Backup Plus interface adaptors (both standard 14.5 mm height, and full 22 mm height models) will work with the older GoFlex drives, with a singular exception - the standard-height Backup Plus interface adaptor will not work with GoFlex drives that have storage capacities of 1 TB and above. This means the interface adaptor that shipped with this particular Backup Plus drive will not work with high capacity GoFlex drives like the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex (1.5 TB) or the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex (1 TB).

As you can see from this picture, both the GoFlex (left) and the Backup Plus (right) interface adaptors look the same. Even though we know that this particular Backup Plus adaptor won't work with the 1.5 TB FreeAgent GoFlex drive we have in the lab, we decided to try swapping their interface connectors.

Surprisingly, while we had no problem inserting the GoFlex interface adaptor into the Backup Plus drive, we couldn't get the Backup Plus interface adaptor to lock properly with the FreeAgent GoFlex drive. On closer inspection, we discovered that the Backup Plus interface adaptor was wider than the socket of the GoFlex drive, preventing the adaptor from fully locking into place. This is the reason why Seagate said that this interface adaptor will not work with their larger capacity GoFlex drives.

USB 3.0 Interface

The Seagate Backup Plus drive supports USB 3.0 right out of the box. The USB cable is separate from the interface adaptor, allowing you to swap it for a longer one. This may be importance since the cable that ships with the Backup Plus drive is 18 inches long, but that includes the length of the connectors. The actual cable length is just 36 cm or just over 14 inches.

The USB 3.0 interface adaptor has a Micro-B USB 3.0 port, which is actually a combination of a standard Micro-B USB 2.0 port and a Micro-A USB 3.0 port. What this means is if you lose or forgot to bring along the USB 3.0 cable, you can actually insert and use a Micro-B USB 2.0 cable to access the drive.

This new wider connector also allows for a more positive lock. This is useful for careless users who like to lift external drives by their cables - it makes it harder for the cable to dislodge and drop the drive, usually killing it in the process. However, this doesn't mean you should continue to do that with this drive!

Although this Backup Plus drive supports USB 2.0 as well as the newer USB 3.0 interface, using it with a USB 2.0 port will cripple its performance as USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical throughput of 480 Mbits/s, or about 33 MB/s in real life. Once you upgrade your computer to USB 3.0, you will instantly experience a marked improvement in this external drive's performance as USB 3.0 offers a maximum theoretical throughput of 5.0 Gbits/s, which would translate into a real-world throughput of about 400 MB/s. We will demonstrate in our benchmark tests how much difference USB 3.0 makes over USB 2.0.

Usable Capacity

This Seagate Backup Plus drive has an official formatted capacity of 1 TB. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Windows 7.

The actual formatted capacity was 1,000,203,833,344 bytes. This is slightly (203 MB) more than the official formatted capacity. With about 125 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity was slightly above 1 TB.

The Backup Plus drive actually comes with the Seagate Dashboard suite of backup and social media sharing software (for Windows and Mac) stored inside. The software takes up about 260 MB of space, but Seagate also included 400 MB worth of demostration videos, so the whole thing takes up about 678 MB of space.

Before you delete the whole folder, it would be a good idea to store a copy elsewhere, even if you don't want to use it. You never know if you might change your mind later.

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