Seagate make two external USB drives. The Seagate Backup Plus and the Seagate Expansion. They are both USB 3 compatible. They both come with a three-year warranty in Australia, although in the USA the expansion only has a 1 year warranty. The Backup Plus model costs $20 more. A lot of reviewers say that the backup plus is more reliable (e.g. this one). But is there any difference? I pulled them apart to see!
What I bought.
I went down to our local Officeworks store and bought a 2TB Seagate backup plus for $129 and a 2TB Seagate expansion for $109.
I opened them up to see what was different, and did some tests.
Here is what I found…
What’s inside?
It turns out the hard drives are exactly the same!
On the left is the drive out of the Seagate Backup Plus, it is labelled ‘Desktop HDD’.
On the right is the drive out of the Seagate expansion. It is labelled ‘Barracuda’.
But take a look at the model number ( you may need to click on the picture to enlarge it). They both have exactly the same model number – ST2000DM001. This is Seagate’s low-cost desktop hard drive.
So the Seagate backup plus and the Seagate expansion have exactly the same hard disk drive inside them.
In terms of hard disk reliability, seek times and so forth it makes no difference whether you get the backup plus or the expansion.
For this reason, if you are just connecting them to your Apple Macintosh computer to use as an external hard drive for some extra room, or to backup, it doesn’t make a difference what model you purchase.
The names are misleading…
You can use the ‘Backup Plus’ for expansion.
You can use the ‘Expansion’ for backup.
So are there any differences?
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