The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim will be available in the first quarter of 2016 at either Amazon or and features a two-year warranty.Seagate Backup Plus external hard drive is often used for Time Machine backup. The new Backup Plus Ultra Slim features a two-year warranty, which is the same as the previous-generation PMR-based product. The Backup Plus Ultra Slim will retail for $99.99 for the 1 TB model and $129.99 for the 2 TB model. SMR is geared to provide increased density and reduced cost.

These types of data almost always consist of large-block sequential data patterns, thus preventing users from experiencing any noticeable performance slowdown. Seagate is wise to position the drives for backup, photo and video applications. In an effort to increase adoption, Seagate is expanding its SMR scope to the client space for select applications, such as backup, archival tasks, videos and photo storage.

Unfortunately, the architecture requires customizations to the broader computing environment to mitigate the performance limitations, which has hampered adoption (particularly in the face of very efficient helium HDDs). SMR HDDs debuted in the enterprise space with the Seagate Archive 8TB HDD, which brought the cost-per-GB down to a mere 3 cents-per-GB.

The internal functions of an SMR drive borrow heavily from SSD technology, namely the technique of abstracting the sector mapping scheme, to reduce the overall impact of the inevitable data re-write process.Īs a result, SMR drives are unsuitable for any type of random write data but perform fine with sequential data. The only disadvantage to SMR recording is that it suffers slow performance in some workloads due to the nature of the overlapped data tracks, which have to be re-written in large blocks whenever data is changed or moved.

Seagate backup plus slim setup