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Seagate's One Touch (starts at $289.99 for 8TB, as tested) is a welcome addition to what's typically a snoozy corner of the PC peripherals market: desktop-size external hard drives. It is unusually portable for such a drive, and it's powered by its host computer over the same USB Type-C connection used to exchange data—no bulky AC adapter or spare electrical outlet required. The One Touch is too large to be pocketable, but it fits easily in a travel bag or backpack. It provides relatively cheap (if slow) terabytes at a time when they are desperately needed, and it earns our Editors' Choice award as an ideal external desktop-style hard drive for basic storage and local backups.
Design: High Capacity With No Wall Wart
The One Touch measures 1.6 by 5.2 by 7.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.5 pounds. Part of its gray frame features a wraparound pattern of curved grooves, lending some welcome flair to this external hard drive and providing ventilation for the drive mechanism.
At one of the drive's short ends is a USB Type-C port, and the One Touch comes with a short cable for connecting to a computer. The drive both transfers data and receives power over this USB-C connection.
As a result, it won't work with all USB ports; Seagate states that the computer's USB port must deliver at least 15 watts to power the drive. (Unlike solid-state drives, which have no moving parts, hard drives store their data on spinning platters. These drives and their motors consume more power.) At the end of this review, I go into detail about my experience testing the One Touch on a variety of computers to determine which ones deliver the required power over USB.
On the bottom of the drive, four tiny rubberized feet deter the chassis from sliding around your desk.
Features: A Bus-Powered Breakthrough in Capacity
Bus-powered platter hard drives, in a small, portable form factor that incorporates a 2.5-inch spinning drive mechanism, have long been commonplace. Two years ago, before Western Digital spun off its Sandisk brand into an independent company, it introduced a line of portable 6TB hard drives—among them the WD My Passport, Works with USB-C, the WD My Passport Ultra, and the Sandisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD. These are the highest-capacity small-format hard drives I've encountered that can be powered directly from a computer. WD surprised a lot of industry watchers by being able to squeeze an extra platter into these small drives.
Now, Seagate has launched two larger, heavier bus-powered hard drives: the Seagate FireCuda X Vault, and the One Touch tested here, whose capacities start at 8TB and reach into the 20TB range. Although they aren't as portable as the small-format models, they are still easy to transport in a travel bag or backpack.
Price and Capacity: A Bargain in Today's Storage Market
The One Touch comes in three capacities ranging from 8TB to 24TB, with the top size being the highest-capacity bus-powered hard drive available. That 24GB peak version offers four times the storage of WD's 6TB pocket-size models. The One Touch base model lists for $10 less than the 8TB FireCuda X, but at the 20TB level, it sells for $150 more.
These put SSD prices to shame, with 8TB SSD models (the roomiest mainstream external SSD units you'll find) such as the Sandisk Desk Drive and Crucial X10 retailing for more than $800. Granted, spinning hard drives can't compete with SSDs on speed, but they do well for game and media libraries, archiving, and other low-impact tasks at a fraction of SSD prices.
The One Touch comes with a two-year warranty, shorter than the typical three- or five-year plans you get with most external SSDs. The drive includes Seagate Toolkit software, which lets you set up incremental backups and password protection for the drive, though it lacks hardware-based encryption. Also included is a two-year subscription to Rescue Data Recovery Services.
Performance Tests: Zippy for a Bus-Powered Hard Drive
I test external hard drives using PC Labs' external-storage testbed, a Windows desktop PC built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard, an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. I also run a slate of Mac-based testing, using a recent Apple MacBook Pro.
I subjected the One Touch to PC Labs' usual suite of external-storage benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, the PCMark 10 data drive benchmark, the 3DMark Storage gaming test, Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test, and our homebrew file-transfer test. The One Touch comes formatted in exFAT, which ensures compatibility with macOS, Windows, and Linux computers as well as most mobile devices and gaming consoles. To test the One Touch, I ran the two Mac-based tests (Blackmagic, and the folder transfer) first, reformatted the drive to the primarily Windows-centric NTFS, and then ran Crystal DiskMark, PCMark 10, and 3DMark Storage.
The competing pool of drives in the bar chart below consists entirely of portable, bus-powered models based on 2.5-inch mechanisms.
In my Crystal DiskMark testing, the One Touch posted sequential read and write scores second only to the FireCuda X Vault, about 9% off its pace and much faster than the other bus-powered, pocketable hard drives we have reviewed. The desktop-size 16TB Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub (not charted here), which I tested in 2021, was faster than the One Touch on sequential reads, but it's a different, deskbound animal, requiring an external power adapter.
The One Touch's PCMark 10 score, though a whisker shy of the FireCuda X's, was nontrivially faster than our other comparison drives. The same was true in our macOS-based Blackmagic testing. In the gaming-centric 3DMark Storage benchmark, the One Touch just edged out the FireCuda X, which is marketed as a gaming hard drive, but the difference in their scores (the same 2% as on PCMark 10) is within the margin of error. Call it a tie.
Although hard drives can't compete with even the slowest SSDs in terms of throughput and benchmark results, the One Touch performs very well among its USB-powered hard drive brethren. Just know that it's much bigger than a portable hard drive based on a 2.5-inch laptop-style mechanism.
Compatibility: Works With Most PCs and Macs (But Not the MacBook Neo)
In addition to our formal benchmark testing on our Windows and MacBook testbeds, I did some ad hoc compatibility testing, because Seagate states that the One Touch requires 15 watts of power from its host computer, a figure that may not be stated (or accurate) in laptop specs.
I tried the One Touch using a slew of Windows and Mac laptops, including a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, an HP Pavilion Aero 13, an Acer Aspire 14 AI, an Asus ProArt P16, and an Apple MacBook Neo. It worked fine with all of them except, unsurprisingly, the cheapest—the Neo. When I connected the One Touch to either of its USB-C ports, I got a message reading "Accessory Needs Power," and was unable to see or mount the hard drive in the Disk Utility app. I got the same message whether the Neo was connected to its own AC adapter or using battery power. (One of the USB-C ports on the Neo is a USB 2.0 port under the skin, so at least that port was no surprise.)
I would have been shocked if the One Touch worked with my iPad; when I plugged it in, I got the message that there wasn't enough power.
