Built with the form factor of a credit card, the Seagate 1TB One Touch SSD White – Portable External Solid State Drive lets you seamlessly scroll, edit, organize, and directly stream a large collection of stored photos and videos. Beneath its black woven fabric exterior, the One Touch is equipped with 1TB SSD and a bus-powered USB 3.0 interface that delivers data transfer speeds of up to 400 MB/s. The One Touch is formatted as exFAT, meaning it will work with both Windows 7 and later, as well as macOS 10.12 and later without the need for a reformat. However, a reformat may be required for use with Apple’s Time Machine. Get more Seagate One Touch SSD review. Which one is better – Seagate One Touch SSD vs Samsung T5.
Compare Seagate One Touch SSD vs Samsung T5
The Samsung T5 SSD comes with a USB-C port, and supports USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 transfers, which means you can get much higher speeds than regular USB 3.0 connections. The Seagate OneTouch SSD on the other hand, uses USB 3.0 to connect with a computer or laptop. That’s a little sad, because this port here on the OneTouch SSD is that weird USB Micro-B cable you’d find on external hard disks (Seagate One Touch SSD vs Samsung T5).
Seagate says you can get speeds up to 400MB/s on its offering, while Samsung claims speeds of 540MB/s instead. Points to Samsung for using a more advanced, faster connection type (Seagate One Touch SSD vs Samsung T5).
Samsung T5 SSD performs consistently faster than the Seagate OneTouch SSD. The Samsung T5 SSD reached write speeds of 467.8MB/s and read speeds of 490.2MB/s while the Seagate OneTouch SSD got write speeds of 219MB/s and read speeds of 372.8MB/s on an average.
The metal build does make the Samsung T5 SSD a stronger SSD as well, so it will definitely be able to take more drops and bumps than the Seagate OneTouch SSD. Basically, if you find yourself dropping your products often, the Samsung T5 is probably a better bet.
Both Samsung and Seagate offer a limited 3 year warranty on their respective SSDs, which means that if your SSD fails on you for some reason, you can get support from the companies.
| Seagate 1TB One Touch SSD White – Portable External Solid State Drive | Samsung (MU-PA1T0B/AM) T5 Portable SSD – 1TB | SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable External SSD – Up to 550MB/s | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard-Drive Size | 1 TB | 1.0 TB | 1.0 TB |
| Hardware Connectivity | USB, USB Type C, USB 3.0 | USB 3.0 | USB 3.0 |
| Item Dimensions | 2.95 x 2.19 x 0.39 inches | 0.41 x 2.91 x 2.26 inches | 3.79 x 1.95 x 0.35 inches |
| Size | 1TB | 1 TB | 1TB |
What is good in Seagate 1TB One Touch SSD White – Portable External Solid State Drive?
Mini and light
Credit-card small and greyhound fast, the One Touch SSD blends a textile design with a swift SSD and USB 3.0 transfers, continuous backup, plus access to apps like Mylio and Adobe. The result is a personalized, on-the-go solution that lets you seamlessly scroll, edit, organize, and directly stream a huge collection of stored photos and videos.
Carry with you
About the size of a credit card, the One Touch SSD is small enough to tuck away in a wallet, shirt pocket, or bag. And when it’s time to transfer or back up files, its fabric enclosure makes the process less mundane and a little more personalized.
An External SSD for photos and videos
Transfer high-res photos faster and stream videos directly from your drive to your laptop with SSD-boosted speeds of up to 400 MB/s. Whether you’re traveling, at the office, or just scrolling through old memories, the One Touch SSD comes ready with on-the-go durability and space for must-have content.
Sync with both Mac and Windows
Compatible with Mac and Windows laptops and equipped with Sync Plus software, the One Touch SSD is a USB 3.0 drive offering continuous backup while plugged in, making file protection more user-friendly whether you’re on the go or at home. Please note that reformatting may be required for use with Apple’s Time Machine.
Mylio for photo organizing
Life happens – photos add up and memories get scattered. Put the puzzle pieces back together with a one-year complimentary subscription to Mylio Create, an intuitive yet powerful app that helps you organize photos and create a life calendar of your memories, all while having the freedom to protect, edit, share, and sync them across multiple devices. This is your world, so manage it beautifully.
Edit Photos with Adobe Creative Cloud
Easily edit, organize, store, and share your full-resolution photos from almost anywhere with a two-month complimentary membership to Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan. Edit photos with the powerful and easy-to-use interface of Lightroom CC and combine images into rich, multilayered artwork with Photoshop CC.
USB 3.1 Gen 1
USB 3.1 Gen 1 features a maximum throughput of 5 Gb/s. USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.0 are synonymous.
Seagate One Touch SSD review
Design
The Onetouch from Seagate is about the size of an old-fashioned matchbox made out of ABS plastic. At 75x56x10mm for a weight of only 65g, it is small enough to be shoved in a trouser’s pocket without an unwieldy bulge.
What’s more a blend of materials (plastic, fabric and metal) gives it a unique touch although, truth be said, we’re not sure about how the cloth finish will withstand the test of time.
As for most external SSD, there’s a lonely physical connector, which in this case is a flat Type-A USB port, a disappointing choice as a Type-C connector is the defacto standard nowadays. Next to it is a white status LED that informs the user of any activity. There’s a short cable provided with the drive and that’s it.
Seagate One Touch SSD software review
Let’s talk about the Mylio Create software first; this is worth $50 and is essentially a cloud-free photo management storage service, available for free for the first year. It has an upper limit to the number of files it can take (50,000 for that tier) and you can connect up to four computers (but unlimited mobile devices) to it. Hard drives, cloud storage providers and NAS devices do not count toward your device limit. It allows RAW image editing; just bear in mind that the pictures are stored on the drive itself.
Adobe Creative Cloud Photography is also bundled and costs $9.99 per month. It includes Lightroom on desktop and mobile, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop on desktop and iPad, your own portfolio website and social media tools and 20GB of Adobe cloud storage (about 4,000 JPEGs).
Seagate also includes Sync Plus which is a rudimentary backup tool that transparently copies all files in the user area of a device to the SSD on the fly/in real time which means that, any document saved will be automatically copied to the SSD assuming it is connected.
How to use Seagate One Touch SSD (review)?
If all you want is 1TB of drive space (or 500GB), then the Seagate One Touch is a remarkably simple product to unpack and use. Remove the drive from the packaging, connect the cable and plug it into a USB 3.0 port on the computer, and if the OS understands the default exFAT format, it should see the mechanism and allocate it a drive letter.
From here you can move and save files to the One Touch SDD like it is an internal drive, and the performance is almost as good as a SATA connected SSD. However, Seagate provides more than the physical hardware, if you are prepared to register the product using the software that is already on the drive.
Once you’ve registered Seagate will provide an application called Seagate Toolkit that includes Sync Plus, a tool that automatically copies all the files in the user area of the computer to the external storage. It does this transfer live, so the next time you save a document it will be automatically copied to the One Touch SSD if it is connected.
If you have files that live outside the typical user folder structure, you can create a new Sync Plus plan for those folders, and if the sync is bidirectional and deleted files are archived. For most users, this drive is exactly what they require and buying this hardware and not using this facility would be an utter travesty.
In addition to Sync Plus, Seagate is also promoting Adobe Mylio, a photo organisation and distribution service that is currently free and the Seagate registration tool will install that if you want it. The Mylio functionality appears to offer something that Apple, Google and Microsoft already deliver, but the choice is yours.
You also get an introductory two-month Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan, and after that time that service costs £9.98/$9.99 per month.
Seagate One Touch SSD performance review
Here’s how the Seagate Onetouch 1TB external SSD performed in our suite of benchmark tests:
AJA: 400MBps (read); 373MBps (write)
CrystalDiskMark: 465MBps (read); 448MBps (write)
Atto: 444MBps (read, 256mb); 441MBps (write, 256mb)
AS SSD: 415MBps (seq read); 394MBps (seq write)
Seagate rates the drive at up 400MBps on read/write speeds, which is mildly disappointing. The drive is formatted exFAT and doesn’t require any special software to connect to our test device, a Dell Latitude 7490.
It uses a JMicron 500-series USB to SATA bridge controller with Toshiba TLC 3D NAND chips; the combination should easily hit well above 400MBps as we’ve seen similar setups elsewhere reach those numbers.
Crystaldiskmark and ATTO benchmarks both delivered numbers more than 10% higher than Seagate’s own estimates, which goes to prove that they were conservative ones. The bottleneck is the USB 3.0 port that has a top theoretical speed of 5Gbps, although in reality, 75% of that is considered the absolute maximum in real life.
Alternate
At $148 at Amazon the Onetouch 1TB is one of the dearer Seagate external SSD products with this capacity. That is still cheaper than the Samsung T5 or the Sandisk Extreme portable SSD of similar ilk plus you get the software bundle.
You can save yourself a tenner by opting for the plain vanilla Seagate Expansion 1TB SSD which is essentially the same model without the fabric finish, the software bundle but with a Type-C connector instead. You still get the same components and the three-year warranty.
If you can make do with a slightly lower capacity, then consider the PD400 from Teamgroup which sports a very similar design to the Samsung T5; it has a 960GB capacity but costs only $105. With a chassis made entirely of aluminum, it is IP66 rated which means that it is splash-proof and dust-proof. The other advantage is that it has a Type-C connector, which means that it can connect directly to a compatible Android smartphone.
Slightly more expensive but more rugged is the ADATA SD600Q at $110 for $960GB; it adheres to the MIL-STD-810G 516.6 standard and has a rugged design. It loses out to the PD400 because it uses a flat USB connector but is still up there on our list as an alternative.