When comparing WD My Passport vs Seagate Backup Plus Slim, the Slant community recommends Seagate Backup Plus Slim for most people. In the question“What are the best external hard drives?” Seagate Backup Plus Slim is ranked 1st while WD My Passport is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Seagate Backup Plus Slim is:
The Backup Plus Slim comes with a very user-friendly software dashboard called the Seagate Dashboard which lets you back up your PC, mobile devices, and social media, or restore an existing backup.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Very portable
At 0.54lbs, it's quite portable and easy to just throw into a bag and carry around.
Pro Relatively long warranty
The WD My Passport comes with a 3-year warranty.
Pro Large Capacity options
Models available to up to 4TB.
Pro Supports Mac and PC
Supports both NTFS and HFS+(needs formating).
Pro Has a backup software
Western Digital provides a backup application that can be downloaded from the manufacturer's site. You can use the application to create automated backups or manual on-demand backups.
Pro WD is generally more reliable than Seagate Drives
Pro Comes with a very helpful and useful software dashboard that lets you instantly backup all your data and files
The Backup Plus Slim comes with a very user-friendly software dashboard called the Seagate Dashboard which lets you back up your PC, mobile devices, and social media, or restore an existing backup.
Pro Very reliable
One of the most important things to keep in mind when picking a hard drive, or any kind of storage hardware for that matter is reliability. The Seagate Backup Plus Slim recorded 587 failure reports out of 8,948 user reviews, giving the Slim a 6.5 percent reported failure rate. This is quite good for a portable hard drive since 10 percent failure rate is the threshold for a reliable hard drive.
Pro Very portable
The Seagate Backup Slim, true to its name is one of the slimmest and most portable hard drives on the market. It's less than half an inch thick (0.48inch), it weighs just 5.6 ounces, and it's 4.47 inches long and 2.99 inches wide which makes it easy to just throw into a bag pocket when you are on the go.
Pro Has a mobile app that backs up all your data on your smartphone
Seagate has a mobile app called The Seagate Mobile Backup app available for both iOS and Android that backs up your contacts, messages, photos, and other data from your smartphone to your hard drive via Wi-Fi or your phone’s data connection to a drive that is plugged into a computer running the Dashboard software.
Pro The case can take some physical abuse without being damaged
The Seagate Backup Plus Slim has a hard and sturdy case that does not flex or creak under pressure. It's also durable to scratches from keys or other hard objects.
Cons
Con Relatively slow for single-file transfers
Even though it has a 201.8MB/s write speed, according to benchmarks it's surprisingly slow with single-file transfers compared to other portable hard drives.
Con Doesn't have a Thunderbolt port
If you use a Mac or a higher end Windows unit, you may have experienced the speed of Thunderbolt external devices. Thunderbolt drives are more expensive than USB drives. Though, a similar 5400 rpm drive using a Thunderbolt connection can read 1.5x faster than USB 3. But you may not care depending on your usage. It has not hurt some users, some 80% of computer users will not find any benefit to Thunderbolt.
Con The USB port is prone to breaking if you are not careful
The USB port wobbles up and down when you apply even a little bit of pressure to the USB cable and for this reason you must make sure to leave the hard drive unplugged when transporting it since it's quite easy to break the port accidentally.
Con You need to use an encryption software to encrypt your files
Does not have hardware encryption built-in. You'll have to use an encryption software if you want to encrypt the files you have stored in this hard drive.