Hard bargain
You could be forgiven for thinking hard drives were the washed-up has-beens of storage. SSDs are more exciting these days, with even basic USB 3.0 drives like Seagate’s One Touch (£73 for 500GB from www.snipca.com/34455, see our review, Issue 578, page 24) reading files at more than 400MB per second (MB/s). This desktop hard drive could only manage a maximum of 188MB/s reading and 153MB/s writing, plummeting to single figures in trickier random-access tests.
That’s not bad for a mechanical drive, though, and it’s quiet, too, taking advantage of its relatively large case to run without a fan – like an SSD. The big advantage, of course, is price. At the time of writing, the Backup Plus Hub could be found at £85 for 4TB, £109 for 6TB,…
