Seagate Ultra Touch Inspection (2025): Green Outdoor Storage
Seagate Ultra Touch Inspection (2025): Green External Storage Overview
Professional ranking
Exx
- 2TB, 4TB or 5TB options
- 30% recycled (by mass)
- Focus on backing up with Seagate Toolkit
Cons
- Efficiency is HDD grade
- No help for USB-A, only USB-C
Our verdict
The angle of ecology in this product is prohibited, and it is likely to add a premium to the value, however, no effort in real recycling should be ignored. This can be a powerful tool, and we especially appreciate the built-in software toolkit.
Value when reviewing
$79.99 (2TB); $124.99 (4TB); $139.99 (5TB)
The Greatest Costs as We Speak: Seagate Extremely Contact (2025)
An experienced journalist predicts every year the final demise of the engine of the common or exhausting garden, and every new product season, this obituary is proven at an inopportune time.
For those companies that make typical heavy-duty engines, such as Seagate, these processes have years of experience in making these goods reliable and profitable. Until NAND flash units reach parity per GB, we will see these elements for a while.
Seagate Extremely Contact is an easy yet efficient external USB drive, available in 2TB, 4TB and 5TB capacities of a 2.5-inch mechanism within its simple casing. Each of these options offers a lot of space, which is an excellent amount for those who want to keep a large selection of knowledge or restart the zone machine again.
The distinctive feature of this product range is that it has environmentally friendly ambitions, {those} a healthy proportion of this product is made from recycled materials.
Is shopping for Extremely Contact a real contribution to saving the planet, or is it just another commodity for the sake of showcasing diminishing assets?
Design & Construction
- 30% recycled by weight
- The included cable is USB-C only
Seagate has stepped out of its strategy to make Extremely Contact as basic and simple as possible. From the surface, it is a two-color plastic block with a USB-C port and an LED lamp for exercise at one end. It's available in Pebble and Cloud White grey, and these colors have pure spots like a thin granite finish.
In line with Seagate's promotional materials, "this drive includes at least 30% of the post-consumer recycled supplies by weight for green backup."
The packaging is 100% recycled, and printed on the field is a notice declaring that 30% of the drive is made of restored aluminum and plastic. The amount of 30% depends entirely on weight. After that, it weighs 267 grams, and includes about 80 grams of recycled metal and plastic.
That doesn't sound like much, however, Seagate should make 100,000 of those, which may represent 8,000 metric tons of recycled content material, which is no small feat. The difficulty here is that the opposite 70%, which makes drives and chips and distributes them across the planet, probably outweighs what Seagate does with recycling.
The computing business has a very bad environmental profile, and any attempt to deal with these shortcomings should be welcomed
As with most external drives, the case cannot be opened, and as a result of this fact, the amount of recycling that Seagate is willing to embrace has clear limits. Our evaluation template was manufactured and assembled in Thailand and dated in 2023.
However, regardless, those behind Extremely Contact have made additional liability with assets the main goal of this product, and if it sells well, this is probably a motivation for additional recycling. The computing business has a very bad environmental profile, and any attempt to deal with these shortcomings should be applauded, even when the results are modest.
The field includes a 50 cm USB-C cable. Good size, but lack of assistance with USB-A ports is a bit troublesome. Didn't Seagate realize that those who use older equipment tend to be more environmental warriors than those with additional modern software with USB-C?
Besides cable, Seagate has a number of paper options that embody a 6-month Mylio Photographys subscription, a 6-month Dropbox backup plan, quick setup information, and some notes regarding the Seagate Toolkit Software and rescue information. Restoration companies. The Toolkit software is mentioned as an additional element in the "Personal Experience" pane.
Mylio and Dropbox are inaccessible globally as a result of restrictions on both of these goods in some regions, such as China.
Specifications & Options
- Normal motor 5400 rpm
- Encryption supported
The Extremely Contact casing has a traditional 2.5-inch heavy-duty motor and CrystalDisk data reveals it's the Seagate Guardian BarraCuda ST5000LM000, a five-dish design with ten heads with a spin speed of 5,400 rpm.
It's a larger mechanism than we usually see in an outboard drive, and the retail value of a cumbersome drive alone is usually greater than the value required for Extremely Contact.
In this design, like many others, the drive uses the SATA to USB interface, and the problem that limits efficiency is the plates and body heads. By connecting via USB 3.2 Gen 1, the efficiency of USB in this context is much greater than the capacity of the drive, making the drive a bottleneck.
Mark Pekavans
One of the good aspects of this product is that it helps with encryption, which is one thing that a lot of cheaper external drive options are missing.
The retail value of a cumbersome drive alone is usually greater than the required value for Extremely Contact
There may be relatively little other to report. It is a cumbersome outboard drive that uses USB, like 1,000,000 or more than we saw earlier.
A person's experience
- Great Seagate Toolkit
- Free backup and restore options
Most likely the ideal aspect of this product, apart from the recycling angle, is that Seagate engineers have thought deeply about this product, those who might use it. And what they want.
On the drive there are some functions designed for Windows, Mac and Android clients and include the Seagate Toolkit logo title. We've seen tools like this with many goods with external drives, and therefore they usually make the shopper spend money on one thing higher. However, this is not the case here, because the performance provided is exactly what most homeowners need to get the most out of this {device}.
Mark Pekavans
It offers 4 features: safe, backup, restore, and mirror. As you probably guessed, secure performance allows locking and unlocking drives with built-in encryption. However, using this assumes that you can run an unlocker on the drive for all the gadgets you tend to join.
Technically, this function is password encryption, however, Extremely Contact helps encrypt the full AES-256 in {hardware}, allowing the operating system to encrypt the drive and providing a way to unlock it elsewhere without the need for other software.
Password unlock security is related to the MySeagate account you have to create, however, this helps you reset the password with your email, should you deprecate what you used to configure it? However, when using {hardware} encryption for all drives, forgetting this password leads to forgetfulness no matter what is saved in Extremely Contact because there is no such thing as a backdoor that means recovering this token.
These are the perfect tools we've seen in a small outboard motor
Backup and mirror are basically identical amenities: a backup that synchronizes between the system and the drive. Backup is a quick and simple technique that puts all areas of basic knowledge of the system to be copied to the drive, and allows replication for certain folders that are probably outside this hierarchy to be copied to the drive. Provide a direct way to replicate log data from one tool to another by configuring mirror mirror instructions through it.
Finally, restore is just an automatic device to pull broken or deleted log data back from a backup.
Overall, these are the ideal tools that we have seen in a small outboard drive, thus raising the level of extreme connectivity above what is often offered (if anything) with external storage.
efficiency
- Efficiency of standard toilets
- Fits incremental backups
When Extremely Contact eco-friendly curtains are pulled back, they reveal a stressful typical driving experience. While technical knowledge is dependable nowadays, it is not the fastest or most energy-efficient storage for those who want to maneuver knowledge to and from a computer quickly.
Mark Pekavans
With discs of this dimension, a rotation speed of 5400 rpm, and 5 heads, the results are predictably common. People who estimate about 150 MB / s per study and write should be in the best playground, although this value represents a disk bite, and because the drive is full, the speed will decrease.
These numbers indicate that if you have to board a plane, get ready or car, and you're ready on this trip to get safe knowledge to handle that flight, you're likely to miss your flight.
If that's a problem, this isn't the product for you, and Seagate has some great One Contact SSDs connected to USB that might switch eight cases that quickly.
It is also useful to note that at this switching speed, it will take 33333 seconds to maneuver all content to and from the Extremely Contact contact, or at least 9.2 hours. After that, it is possible to discuss whether all the contents will be well transferred in one day in both courses.
The greatest thing created for Extremely Contact is the incremental backups that occur over a fairly extended period of time instead of flooding 5TB of information. And as we've already talked about, the program offered by Seagate is a perfect fit for that course.
value
Extremely Contact starts at $79.99/£99.99 for the 2TB model, goes up to $124.99/£139.99 for 4TB, and $139.99/£164.99 for 5TB , making this one of many high-priced external drives – even though it's already running selling for less than these numbers.
You'll be able to discover Seagate's One Touch or Expansion Portable drives at a much lower price, so you're paying on top of the eco-friendly design and easy software program.
Check out our rating of the ideal removable drives for a number of additional options.
rule
Eco-products with added value over less environmentally friendly options will be problematic to advertise. The stressful economics of many shopping for choices usually trump being environmentally pleasant, even when they are ultimately not sustainable decisions. This does not mean that, however, individuals and businesses should have budgets and the additional prices from recycling may exceed these limits.
Mark Pekavans
It stated that the new Extremely Contact HDD hard drive isn't much more expensive than the One Contact range with similar capacities, and by shopping for this product, Seagate may be encouraging to continue recycling more than you might need beforehand.
Aside from the inexperienced credentials, Extremely Contact is a well-thought-out product mixed with the brand-new Seagate Toolkit software dedicated to performing the backup or mirroring tasks that most customers want on a laptop.
This Seagate backup device right with this drive may have a good effect on this company, as others are now likely to scramble to provide one useful thing with their external drives.
It is not fast, and the cable provided only helps USB-C computer systems, however, adapters are low-cost, and they are fast enough to make backups throughout the working day.
In general, the launch value is perhaps barely excessive, but once market forces come into effect, this could be the external to personal hard drive, if it is dedicated to the Seagate toolkit and its ability to gradually save knowledge from the computer.
specifications
- Model Number: STMA5000400
- Capacities: 5TB / 4TB / 2TB
- Capacity checked: 5TB
- Serial efficiency checked (learn/write): 148.42/146.95MB/s
- Connectivity: USB 3.2 Gen 1 (USB3.0) using Kind-C
- Encryption: Password + AES-256 encryption
- Dimensions: 115.3×80×23.1mm (width×height× depth)
- Weight: 267g
- Warranty: 3 years