Revisiting the Not-So-Distant Past

Where does one start when reviewing gadgets of tech gear past? It's clear the home user market is moving further and further from spinning disk technology to the more robust features, speed, and physical resilience of solid state storage. As the storage costs decrease year over year, it doesn't make financial sense to buy mechanical storage anymore unless you plan to build a large storage array.

Portable storage has always been a volatile space, since it's easily lost (especially in pen drive format) or can get banged up ruin the mechanical components on platter devices. Seagate, at least, has the first scenario covered in case you happen to backup sensitive files to the devices. Let's take a look at the contents:

Packed up inside are some trial software flyers, user manual, hardware encryption key codes leaflet, a tiny 2' MicroUSB 3.0 cable, an 8-pin USB-A to USB-C adapter, and the drive itself. The short-lived MicroUSB 3.0 connector is difficult to find cables for, and it was a short lived connection type, so unless you had some niche hardware and still have an extra cable, you'll be carrying this one around with you everywhere, which can make it difficult to use with a desktop as the wire is so short. The fully pinned USB 3 A to C adapter is a nice inclusion, and gives me full speed when connected to my android device.

The drive itself has a very sleek and premium aesthetic to it, as long as it's face up. The backside is just a standard plastic shell and doesn't look very impressive. You may have noticed the Seagate emblem in the corner of the drive, so that must be the Ultra Touch part of the disk, right? Maybe a biometric or digital switch that can prompt the drive to launch or unlock the hardware encryption...? Nope, it's just a fancy emblem. As far as I can tell, the Ultra Touch just refers to the square of cloth on the top of the housing.

Performance, when compared across benchmarks of similar sized disks, is on-par with industry standard. Oddly enough, on the official webpage, they have a comparison chart against a 1TB portable solid state disk which does this product no favors. The only "winning" factor in the comparison chart is the hardware encryption, while the r/w speed is magnitudes faster, making the device look bad on its own product landing page.

Luckily, since the encryption is hardware based on the disk controller, no speed is lost and I got identical performance when the disk was encrypted or decrypted. Speed on USB 2 devices (Nintendo Switch) was more-or-less maxed out for the protocol bandwidth.

Annoyingly, the software required to do the initial setup of the hardware is a separate download, and I'm pretty sure I saw it install a system service... YUCK. You must not lose the piece of paper the Ultra Touch came with, because it not only contains the first time setup encryption master key, but also the reset code master key. I promptly uploaded a copy to my Google Drive. There were already some executables and links on the disk (pre-formatted as exFAT for multi-system compatibility), so why not just include a copy of the installer on there for offline/DMZ users?

I was worried that any device that wanted to connect to the drive would require this software, but it seems that they carve out an unencrypted partition on the disk that contains a small unlocker executable that then remounts the main partition as R/W after supplying your password. This means you can only use this disk, once encrypted, on a major operating system device (Windows/OSX). Decrypting it is easy enough with the downloaded software to use with other devices (phones, game consoles) but defeats the major selling point of the device in doing so.

So where does this leave the Seagate Ultra Touch? It's hard to find a home for this product in the modern market where it gets trumped in physical reliability and speeds by even the cheapest competitors products. Paying extra for the hardware encryption not only locks your files safely away, but it locks the utility of the device to major OS only usage. I think the only environment left for this little guy is in a public office setting, where it won't take up much room on the desk and can be used to securely back up your corporate encrypted laptop files, then tucked away in the cabinet at the end of the day.