Introduction

Seagate Ultra Compact SSD is an interesting portable storage solution from the house of Seagate, a titan in the storage industry. It blurs the line between portable SSDs and USB flash-drives. Shaped like a flash drive from 20 years ago, with a detachable cap that conceals its USB connector, it comes in capacities more typical of portable SSDs than flash drives, with performance to match. The drive also comes with several design innovations carried over from the company's LaCie Rugged family of durable portable storage devices.

The Seagate Ultra Compact SSD comes in capacities of 1 TB and 2 TB—capacities more typical of portable SSDs. When you think of USB flash drives, even in the USB 3.2-class, you're looking at capacities such as 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, with series-topping 1 TB variants. This is why the drive fits the description of a portable SSD. Add to this, the sustained write performance on offer more closely align with those of an SSD as opposed to a flash drive. In another era where businesses would hand out Windows 2 Go portable drives to employees, this would have been the ideal kind of product.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Seagate Ultra Compact SSD is that it lacks a USB type-A interface, and instead offers a 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 type-C interface. There's not even a USB A-to-C adapter in the package. This, along with the sustained write performance and large capacities strengthen its positioning as a portable SSD. Seagate refers to this as a "cable-free portable SSD."

The Seagate Ultra Compact SSD is built into a solid aluminium alloy chassis that dissipates heat from its controller. This is encased in a removable silicone sleeve along with a silicone cap that fits into the sleeve. The sleeve contributes to the drive's 3-meter drop endurance, and IP54-rated water- and dust-resistance.

Seagate sweetens the deal by offering three years of Seagate Rescue data recovery services. During this time, if you find that you've accidentally deleted or formatted your drive, you can mail the drive to Seagate (free shipping both ways), and they'll attempt to recover the data for you. You also get six month subscriptions of Dropbox Backup and Mylio Photos+, a photo organizer software.

Prices of all memory and storage products are haywire due to the industry-wide acute shortage of NAND flash chips. The Seagate Ultra Compact SSD 2 TB launched at US$179, but at the time of this review, it was found online for $314, which is what we used in our cost-performance calculations.