by Mike Bowser

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I remember one of the first hard drives I ever purchased was back in 1999 at the grand opening of the Fry’s Electronics store in San Marcos. It was an internal 160GB hard drive that I paid $300 at the time for. It was a pain to install because you had to put an expansion card on the inside of your computer that the drive could plug into in order for your computer to see the drive; however, once I had it installed it was like sliced bread for me. It has been 14 years since I bought that drive and the industry for computer storage has expanded immensely. The Seagate Slim Portable hard drive is just another addition to the vast lineup of available storage devices on the market today.

The Seagate Slim is one of the thinnest portable hard drives I have seen on the market. Seagate touts this hard drive as being as thin as a pencil which you can see from my picture below, it passes the test. One thing to remember is when you see the word portable, it just means that the hard drive requires no external power supply, it will get its power from the USB port when you plug it into the computer.  I really like the physical attributes of this drive because it provides a whopping 500GB of storage while being thin enough to carry around in your pocket or bag.  The drive supports USB 3.0 technology which means faster transfer speeds.

The drive also comes with a pre-loaded NTFS driver that you can install on your MAC making the sharing of files between your PC and MAC headache free.  Most hard drives have a loud motor to spin the drive which can be distracting but this one was whisper quiet, which surprised me.

The hard drive is the one component that I hate to lose the most when it comes to any of my computers or electronic devices mainly because anything else in your computer can be physically replaced such as the motherboard, CPU or memory; however, when it comes to my home movies, pictures and personal files, those are extremely hard to replace especially if I don’t have them backed up somewhere.

I use hard drives for a wide variety of purposes to store my family photos and home movies. I can attach my portable hard drive to my WD TV media player so that I can stream any of my own content from my hard drive to my television. Check out my review on the WD TV Live Media player here.

The portable hard drive comes in handy when I want to set up a virtual computer and run it directly off of the hard drive at school for instructing students. The lack of a power capable makes this hard drive extremely diverse as I don’t have to worry about looking for an open outlet if I want to use it. One of the coolest features that Seagate has added to its hard drive lineup is the Seagate dashboard software which is included with the drive.

All you have to do is install the software on your computer and follow the menus. You have 3 options: set backup plans to protect your data, upload pictures and videos to your social network and download pictures and videos from your social network.

Protect Your Data

When you click the protect option you have a choice to protect now which will immediately starts backing up all of your data files to your Seagate hard drive or you can click on the new backup plan which will let you customize your backup.

Under the customized backup plan you have a number of options to protect specific types of data such as videos, pictures, music, documents or you can specify exactly what files you want backed up on your computer to your Seagate hard drive.

You then have the option to select when you want the back up to take place, just once as a snapshot, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly or continuously (whenever something changes in the files you have marked for backup).

Share Your Data

From the main Seagate dashboard if you click on the share media to your social network button, you will be prompted to choose from three social media sites to upload your data to Facebook, Flickr or YouTube.

I went with the Facebook option for my test.  Seagate connected me to my Facebook account after I correctly entered my user id and password ( you will need an active social networking account to use this option). I had to allow the Seagate dashboard app to interface with my Facebook account.

I uploaded 5 pictures of the half marathon my wife and I did last November as a test for my Facebook account.

Save Your Data

From the main Seagate dashboard menu if you click on the Save button you can download your pictures and video from your Facebook, Flickr or YouTube account. The program creates a folder on your Seagate drive with all your media. This is great when you want to back up or copy your social media content to your hard drive from the web.

From a Dad’s Perspective

This is solid hard drive that you can not go wrong with in purchasing. If I had one setback it would be that the drive is so thin that I get a little scared that it might snap in half if I put too much pressure on it. The Seagate dashboard interface feels a little sluggish at times but it gets the job done. The options in the software are very nice giving you the ability to schedule your backups and customize them around what works for your specific needs rather than an all or nothing scenario. I really enjoyed the social networking upload and backup capabilities as often times when we go on a vacation my wife will want to upload a lot of pictures from our trip to her Facebook account and the webpage interface can be slow and cumbersome at times, but not so with the Seagate hard drive. It also comes in handy when she uploads a number of pictures to her Facebook page and she deletes them off her phone giving us no backup of her Facebook content. Hooking this drive up to her account gave me a great way to backup her pictures and videos with ease rather then having to download everything manually through the Facebook webpage interface.

The Seagate Slim Portable 500GB hard drive is available at Bestbuy new for $79.99. You can also get it on sale at Amazon.com for $79.99 with Free Super Saver shipping.  This is a great deal!  Take advantage of it!

*  I  was given a Seagate Slim Portable 500 GB Hard drive in exchange for my opinions.