A 4TB Hard Drive for Backup is ideal for backing up your personal collection of photos, videos and music. It’s also a great choice for backing up a single PC or multiple Mac computers. You may even want to use it for a complete system image backup or to copy files back and forth between different PCs for testing or transferring games, apps or other software.
You can find these drives for well below the $300 price of an SSD, and they offer similar storage capacities in a much more portable package. But don’t be fooled by claims of high transfer speeds. A drive claiming USB 3.0 speeds of up to 2,000 MB/s won’t do you any good if your laptop only has USB 2.0 ports, for example.
4TB Hard Drive for Backup: Keep Your Data Safe
The Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB uses a Samsung Momentus ST4000LM016 drive inside. While information on this model is scarce on the Seagate website, CrystalDiskInfo provides a good amount of detail about the internal drive. The external drive itself is a sleek black box with a simple design and a white disk-activity light. It measures 0.8 by 3.1 by 4.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 8.6 ounces.
With its fast speed, extra features such as the Seagate Lyve personal cloud service and a low cost per TB, this drive earns our Editors’ Choice award. Yes, the Toshiba consumer HDD in our test unit is a bit faster, but that extra speed isn’t worth double the price, especially for someone looking for an easy-to-use, inexpensive solution for backing up a single PC or a whole household.