Reviews

Seagate One Touch SSD review: A sharp customer

A tiny SSD that packs a proper performance punch for a modest outlay – if you opt for the 1TB version

by: Darien Graham-Smith

8 Oct 2021

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A photograph of the Seagate One Touch SSD

Gorgeous design
Tiny footprint
Good value

Slightly disappointing random access speeds

Looks aren’t the most important thing when you’re shopping for storage, but they certainly don’t hurt. The One Touch SSD is, in our view, one of the most stylish drives we’ve seen, with a smart white trim, slate-grey finish and fabric side panels that are warm and pleasing to the touch.

It’s also tiny, measuring just 50 x 70mm, and it weighs a mere 74g. You could happily carry it around in a shirt pocket. And when it comes to performance the One Touch SSD punches above its weight, using a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection to achieve very creditable sequential read and write speeds of 910MB/sec and 958MB/sec, respectively. It’s not quite the fastest contender on the market, but when it comes to transferring large files you’ll realistically get the same experience from this drive as from a rival using the same interface.

For random access performance, it’s a slightly different story. While the multithreaded AS SSD tests didn’t expose any particular weaknesses, the One Touch stumbled in the PCMark 10 storage benchmarks, ending up with a data drive score of 598 – the lowest of any SSD we’ve seen recently. We suspect that’s down to thermal throttling, since the small size of the drive affords little in the way of heat dissipation during intensive operations.

The One Touch SSD doesn’t support hardware encryption, but Seagate does provide its own backup software, along with a free one-year subscription to Mylio Create (a service that backs up and organises your photos) and a four-month trial of the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan. Perhaps more valuable is Seagate’s Rescue Data service: if your drive fails within its two-year warranty period, the company’s technicians will do their best to recover your data, something no other manufacturer will attempt.

The price is very fair too: the 1TB One Touch SSD can be had online for £110, equivalent to 12p per gigabyte. At that price you might wonder about moving up to the roomy 2TB model, but sadly that comes in at a much less attractive £305.

Some will be turned off by the One Touch SSD’s uneven performance: if you’re looking for a USB 3.2 Gen 2 drive that can maintain top speeds when the going gets tough, consider the SanDisk Extreme or the WD My Passport SSD. In our view, though, the One Touch is just more likeable than either of those drives, and it also happens to be terrific value.