The Seagate Fast SSD is a range of portable USB-C external SSD ranging in capacity from 250GB to 2TB. It is as fast as any external SATA/600 drive can be.
The Seagate Fast SSD is a direct competitor for external SSD drives like Samsung T5, Toshiba X10 and WD My Passport SSD. All of these use a SATA/600 interface over USB so speed is limited to what the drive interface can support, e.g. a maximum of 600MBps.
Review: Seagate Fast SSD (Website here)
The test was conducted using Lenovo’s 920Yoga (our pick of the 4K, 2-in-1 notebooks this year) with 2 x 40Gbps (5,000MB/s) Thunderbolt 3 ports and a USB-A 3.0, 5Gbps (625MB/s) port.
Being the latest cab off the rank the Seagate Fast SSD performs very well.
Using the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C mode 5Gbps) Crystal Disk Mark recorded 560/497MBps sequential read/write speeds. Seagate advertise 540/500 –nice to see conservative figures for a change. It also did quite well on larger files managing 19/30MB/s on 1GB files.
Using the USB-A, 5Gbps port, in theory, should have been just as fast as USB-C over Thunderbolt. It wasn’t but don’t blame the drive. USB-A is half-duplex meaning it is like a one-lane road that stops when traffic is coming the other way.
Sequential read/write dropped to 41/40MB/s and larger 256MB, 512MB and 1GB files dropped off enormously. If you buy this drive make sure you have USB-C 3.1 Gen1 (or later)ports if you need is for fast transfer.
Features
- Being SSD,it is shock resistant
- Comes with 45cm USB-C cable and USB-A – use the former for advertised speed
- Folder Syncing software and Seagate Toolkit backup and mirroring software
- PC and Mac compatible (may require a format touse for Time Machine)
- Small – 94 x 79 x 9mm x 82g
- No IP rating so keep it dry
Prices (courtesy Harris Technology).
- 250GB $179
- 500GB $259
- 1TB $569
- 2TB TBA
GadgetGuy’s take. Seagate Fast SSD external backup
Good price and performance from a respected company. Our only advice is to use it with USB-C ports only.
If you need more speed, then look at Thunderbolt 3 only drives like the  Samsung X5 that can achieve 2815/2097MBps on the sequential read/write test using the Yoga 920.