Review: Seagate Central

During CES this past January, we had the chance to sit down at the Seagate presentation off the grounds of CES to see what they had in store for us moving forward. We’ve already had the privilege of giving the Seagate Wireless Plus a shot and we were nothing but loving it. The biggest part about these two Seagate devices is the personal cloud and media streaming abilities. Personally, the WD MyBook Live I received at CES 2012 was my go to Cloud storage of choice. I could access files from a mobile app as well as stream music and videos straight to a myriad of devices. It wasn’t until we got a live demonstration at CES 2013 of Seagate’s newest offerings that we decided to look elsewhere for our personal cloud storage.

For the past few weeks I’ve dedicated my entire mobile life to the Seagate Central, as well as my home life. I was going to move away from all other Cloud services and strictly store to the Seagate Central. I would make my local iMac back up directly to the Central and keep everything I access on this device. Let me start this review off by saying this was one of the greatest and seriously most useful reviews I’ve ever done, and it is hard not to recommend the Seagate Central to anyone out there…

Design

SeagateCentralGS2The Seagate Central pretty much looks like almost every other external drive you might have sitting on your desk. The color scheme mimics that of the Seagate Wireless Plus that we reviewed back in February, but to be honest I love the way this drive looks on my black-top desk. I have had it sitting next to my MyBook Live (previously my Time Machine drive of choice) but have since removed that drive altogether from my setup. It’s sleek design meshes well with the aesthetics of my iMac-esque personal computing feng shui.

A small Seagate logo is slapped on the front of the 8.5″ wide device. At only 1.7″ tall and 5.7″ deep, the Central weighs in at just over 2 lbs. It doesn’t take up a lot of space but definitely makes its presences known. The vents for the drive are on top and are covered by a mesh that resembles a speaker. The back has nothing more than three adapter ports: USB, Ethernet and the power cable. The only indicator light on the unit is a small LED on the top that lets you know everything is working properly.

The Central comes in 3 difference drive sizes; 2TB ($169), 3TB($189) or 4TB($229). Size and weight do not change with the different builds.

Setup

The Seagate Central was a since to set up and pretty much just works when you take it out of the box. Nothing more than connecting the cables and waiting for the device to show up in Finder or Computer(for you Windoze people). The device’s name is easy to recognize, as it has Seagate in the title, but that is easy to change in the settings which can be accessed via a shortcut url in the Public folder of the drive.

These settings house everything for the device, such as setting up Users, restoring the device as well as connecting Facebook to connect the content you share, by automatically archiving to the Seagate Central. This means any videos or photos you upload to Facebook will automatically download to the Central, without any fuss on your part.

You’ll also use these settings to set up any mobile/remote users that will have access to the drive, which is where the Seagate Remote Access app comes in handy, if you recall from our Wireless Plus review. Setting up the Central to work with Time Machine is as easy as it has always been, not much to mention here.

Performance

Performance is as awesome as you’d expect. Seagate gives us many different ways to access our content. We have iTunes sharing, remote access via Seagate’s mobile apps,(iOS, Android and Samsung’s Smart Hub available on TVs and Blu-ray players) as well as DLNA certified devices. DLNA access is probably the way I accessed most of my content locally. I currently use Playback on my iMac to access videos through my Xbox 360, but since I originally acquired the app, it has been sub par at best. Dragging and dropping content to the Seagate takes only a few seconds and gives me direct access from my Xbox. Playback always has issues connecting where the Seagate Central hasn’t given me one issue.

SeagateCentralGS1Streaming was a breeze, no issues whatsoever, both for local and over the internet via the mobile app. Backups seemed to be a bit slower, but to be fair, anything over the network that isn’t directly connected has always shown slower than other drives. On average it seemed I got around 35 Mbps of write speed, so that made my 1TB of backup take a while. But it was slightly faster than what the WD MyBook Live gave me prior to the Central.

All cloud access was as simple as loading the app and accessing your content. Of course you need to set up the user prior, but that is easier than signing up for a Dropbox account. The app is the same as it was when we reviewed the Wireless Plus, so new to touch on there.

Conclusion

After a few weeks of only using the Seagate Central for all local backups, local streaming to my Xbox, and network streaming to my iPad and iPhone, I have to say that Seagate has created a solution that gets rid of many pieces of hardware and software. I no longer have to worry about my content spread across different hardware and software. This is odd for me, as if you know me you will know that redundancy is me, and I am redundant. I normally will have at least 5 backups of my pictures and other important files. Normally it is just so I can access anything anywhere, but that takes multiple steps, the Seagate Central gets rid of all that and helps calm me down and makes me realize it really isn’t necessary.

I won’t get rid of some auto back up services like Dolly Drive for very important things, but Seagate has actually made me put away two other external drives, and almost stop using a majority of the Cloud services I currently subscribe to. That says a lot for this device and what Seagate has created with their mobile app.

You can access any of your content, from anywhere – this is a huge selling point. I’ve always been a supporter of personal cloud storage since really being aware of it from Western Digital, I am more so now because of how fluid it really is. The app works better than what WD has to offer, which is saying a lot, and the overall design is sexier and fits almost anywhere in your house. If you hook it up to your Samsung TV and use it with Smart Hub, it looks better than any other media server you can pick up. Roku really holds nothing to how sleek this looks against any flat screen TV.

The 2TB model has served me incredibly for everything I do. I can completely back up my iMac and have a TB worth of space left to roam the clouds freely. Starting at $169, there really isn’t one reason that comes to mind that should keep you from picking up a Seagate Central. Currently you can even head over to Best Buy dot com and save yourself $10.

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