Samsung just announced the T7 Touch series of portable SSDs. The word ‘touch’ in that phrase referred to the embedded fingerprint security sensor. It allowed the contents of the device to be biometrically secured.
Is it reasonable to assume that the Seagate One Touch is identical? No, it’s all about branding. For 1- and 2-TB capacities, the model number is ‘STKG500400’ with ‘1000’ or ‘2000’ in the centre.
To add fuel to the branding fire, Seagate released a previous One Touch (STJE) in 2019. It only had a USB 3.0 interface (USB 3.1 Gen 1) rather than the USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface of the new One Touch.
Apart from those points, the new One Touch SSD joins a field that includes some of the best and most affordable portable SSDs on the market, such as the Crucial X8.
What you will see here!
Price of Seagate One Touch SSD
Seagate does not sell directly through its own website in the United Kingdom. It costs £162.80 for 1TB, and £58.50for 2TB (2TB). You’ll have to pay a little more than
STKG1000400 (401, 402, and 403) is the model for 2021, while the previous model is part of the STJE1000400 series.
If you don’t need the new drive’s improved performance, the older STJE1000400 is still available for cheaper money, with the 1TB unit costing roughly £149.99/US$169.99 from several online shops.
Design & Build
The official images of the new One Touch SSD make it tough to see. It is far smaller than most customers will expect. The initial design was little, and this one is even more so.
That’s substantially smaller than a 2.5in the disc and only slightly larger than an mSATA module, at 70mm long and 50mm broad. It’s also extremely lightweight, weighing less than 80g including cords, and hence easy to carry in your pocket.
The majority of the structure is plastic, with something like a fabric finish on the sides and an aluminum cover on top. Given the One Touch SSD’s lightweight, I expect the metal top panel to be incredibly thin. It may even provide some further protection from incidental damage.
It comes with two USB cables that support both USB-C and USB-A connections right out of the box. The drive has a USB-C port.
The cable between them is only 14cm long if you don’t count the bayonet-holding parts. While this is good for connecting the drive to a laptop. Users connecting to a desktop computer’s rear port will find the limited length inconvenient.
The only other noticeable physical feature is a little activity LED on the edge of the USB-C connector. It isn’t in the best location for visibility. It’s also available in three different colors: black, silver, and blue.
It’s also worth noting for potential purchasers that you might want to keep the box because Seagate doesn’t include a pouch for the disc and cords.
Specs & Features
The One Touch SSD is available in practically de facto capacities of 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, with 1TB of flash storage in the review hardware we examined.
Because the designers desire the freedom to choose suppliers based only on price, Seagate hasn’t specified which NAND modules and controllers the drive uses. However, it’s logical to believe that it employs the same technology as the Seagate Barracuda NVMe SSDs, which is overspecified for the USB-connected technology’s requirements.
While the drive will function with earlier USB 3.0 ports. It was built for USB 3.2 interfaces in both USB-A and USB-C.
The drive is pre-formatted under the exFAT file system. It can be used with most recent Windows PCs, Apple Macs, or even Android phones without needing to be reformatted. Hardware registration software for Windows and Mac OS (but not Linux) are installed on the drive. You can uninstall them to free up space.
What’s missing are any hardware encryption options. Though any folder encrypting software can be used on this device for further protection. If you desire biometric encryption, the Samsung T7 Touch (also USB 3.2 Gen 2) is a good option.
The Seagate One Touch SDD is designed to be a fairly simple solution with this feature set. Requiring just that the user be able to connect it via USB and know-how drive letters & folder structures function.
Software
Seagate has preserved the free software that came with the original One Touch SSD, Sync Plus (1.5.02), as a downloadable toolkit that you can acquire when you register the unit.
The drive includes a system for locating the registration web addresses, making the process surprisingly simple. You can define rules for dynamically transferring local folders to the external drive once you’ve downloaded and installed the Toolkit. There is some control over the sync, allowing for complete bi-directional operation or the retention of locally deleted files on the external disc.
This is the one function that every owner of an external hard drive requires, and Seagate deserves credit for coming up with a viable solution and including it in the One Touch’s pricing. Sync Plus is only compatible with Seagate external drives.
There’s also an Android app, but you’ll need a phone or tablet that supports USB-C to connect the drive.
While either of these desires may be useful for individuals who have always intended to utilize these services, they are of little utility to those who have no intention of adding to Adobe‘s already enormous coffers. Registration also looks to create a lot of follow-up emails from Mylio.
While the One Touch SSD is attractive and portable, these features are essentially irrelevant if the insides don’t operate well, so let’s look into that component of the device.
Performance
In comparison, the first generation One Touch SSD drives could only accomplish read speeds of roughly 412MB/s and write speeds of around 402MB/s.
The low bandwidth of the USB 3.1 Gen 1 interface, combined with an SSD that uses reused SATA SSD technology, resulted in this performance level.
NVMe disc technology and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection with twice the theoretical bandwidth are used in the new One Touch. It now has a speed that is more than double that of its predecessor.
The important point to note here is that it can accomplish these speeds when plugged into a Gen 2 port, but they will be slower if you use an older USB 3.0 connector (now called USB 3.1 Gen 1).
Connecting to a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection, on the other hand, displayed substantially faster read and write speeds of 1,023MB/s and 991MB/s, respectively. Those numbers are close to the theoretical USB 3.2 Gen 2 limit of 1,200MB/s, and they’re on par with the faster external SSDs.
Performance plummeted to 864MB/s in sustained real-world’ tests, where writing continues until the onboard cache is depleted. That’s impressive, and it outperforms several NVMe M.2 SSDs.
Overall, the performance of the new One Touch SSD is noticeably better than that of the previous one.
What is the difference between a One Touch SSD and an Ultra Touch SSD?
The data transmission speed of a Seagate Fabric Enclosure One Touch Solid State Drive is up to 400 MB per second. The Seagate Fabric Enclosure Ultra Touch Solid State Drive boasts a maximum data transfer speed of 500 MB per second, which is 25% quicker than the competition.
Is Seagate One Touch a good fit?
Problem: The drive isn’t working on my Android phone.
The Seagate SSD Touch app is only compatible with Seagate One Touch SSD and Seagate Ultra Touch SSD.
What is the speed of the Seagate One Touch SSD?
1,030 megabits per second
With One Touch SSD, you can boost your performance while also gaining some downtime. With transfer speeds of up to 1,030 MB/s, an Android app to backup photographs and videos — freeing up device space — plus up to 2 TB capacity, and simple plug-and-play USB-C Windows and Mac compatibility to keep files close at hand.
Conclusion
Seagate has once again created a faultless product; the One Touch is everything one expected and more. While the software bundle may be worth the extra cost for some, it does increase the price by about a third when compared to cheaper competitors.
The premium software and technology bundle that comes with the Seagate OneTouch is its unique selling point, and it wishes that others, such as WDC, will follow suit. It is smaller than competitive rivals with comparable performance and comes with a long guarantee.
On price, it falls short of the competition. It is currently one of the more costly USB 3.2 SSDs on the market, and while it performs wonderfully, despite the excellent app suite that comes with it, it is difficult to justify the premium.
The Seagate One Touch SSD, with its high-level specs and speeds and compact design, could be the correct selection for you if you really need one of the best external drives for Mac or one of the finest external drives for any other purpose.
