Despite these drives’ flashy appearances and impressively thin statures, they are only $10 more expensive than their slightly thicker Seagate Backup Plus Slim cousins. The pricing isn’t overly premium, though: The 2TB drive costs just $99, while the 1TB version rings up at $69. These gold and platinum finishes are available only on Seagate’s Ultra Slim models, signifying their status as high-end products (and not coincidentally, matching well to certain Apple laptops). Try not to think of a golf ball, though it won’t matter you will. We tested the Ultra Slim drive in its 2TB iteration, but it is available in both 1TB and 2TB capacities, in either gold or platinum paint jobs with a unique, repeating circular-divots pattern. SMR started on bigger desktop drives Seagate’s first SMR drive was the 8TB Backup Plus Desktop Drive we tested last year. SMR allows for higher data densities in a smaller physical area, and as a result we now have 2TB hard drives that are slimmer than before. The drive’s waif-ish profile is the result of new recording technology that Seagate is bringing to the portable-drive market named shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which overlays bits of data on top of one another like roof tiles. The drive measures just 9.6mm thick, making it the thinnest external drive of this capacity that we’ve tested and the thinnest 2TB hard drive on the market. It’s a traditional hard drive complete with spinning platters, read/write heads, the works. The drive is so thin and light that, when we first took it out of the box, we thought for a moment that it must house an SSD inside. The Backup Plus Ultra Slim drive we received for testing is new for 2016 and came in a 2TB capacity.

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