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Researchers are using drones to study the Amazon rainforest’s health

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Every plant emits a different volatile organic compound (VOC) signature, or fingerprint, which can change based on factors like drought or flood. By monitoring these signals, scientists can study how forest ecosystems adapt to stressors. Despite that valuable info, the Amazon’s VOCs were previously monitored by just a handful of towers built in one type of ecosystem. The data was limited and biased, and biosphere emissions models assumed nearby ecosystems had the same VOC emissions.

Since 2017, researchers from Harvard, Amazonas State University (UEA) and the Amazonas State Research Support Foundation (FAPEAM) have been working on a drone-based system to map the VOCs emitted in different ecosystems in central Amazonia.

Their research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, proves that different ecosystems have different VOC signatures. Next, the team plans to sample more ecosystems in water-logged valleys along rivers. They’ll use a boat as a launching platform, and hope to test a three-drone fleet.

“This research highlights how little we understood forest heterogeneity,” said Harvard professor Scot Martin. “But drone-assisted technologies can help us understand and quantify VOC emissions in different, nearby ecosystems in order to better represent them in climate and air quality model simulations.”

Advancements in drone technology could make research like this more common. Already, Boeing is working on a solar-powered drone that will gather climate data and atmospheric research, and of course, we’ve seen drones put to use surveying farms and crops.

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Apple might have disabled bilateral wireless charging on its new iPhones

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Ahead of Tuesday’s launch, bilateral charging was one of the things that seemed a sure addition to the iPhone’s feature list. Both Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, two of the most accurate sources of pre-release Apple information, said the new iPhones would include the feature. Then, just days before the event, both reversed course.

While it’s possible Apple could enable the feature in the future (if, in fact, it’s there), it seems unlikely. Alongside the iPhone 11, there were rumors Apple planned to announce a Tile-like tracker called Apple Tags on Tuesday. We didn’t get Apple Tags on Tuesday, but, at least in that case, there’s information on the company’s website that suggests they’re on their way. There’s nothing like that for reverse charging.

While mostly a vanity feature on Android phones like the Galaxy S10, bilateral charging has potential utility on the iPhone. Unlike USB-C, Apple’s Lightning port doesn’t support reverse charging, meaning you can’t plug another device into the iPhone to charge it. Additionally, a lot of iPhone users own an Apple Watch and AirPods, and would likely appreciate a way to charge them in a pinch. We probably won’t have to wait long to see if there’s truth to the rumor. Next week, we should find out if the iPhone 11 has the hardware once groups like iFixit start taking apart the phone.



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YouTube stops counting ad views in its top music charts

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As Rolling Stone observed, the outgoing system effectively let companies pay to climb the charts. YouTube’s TrueView ads let marketers play shortened versions of videos that would count as views if you either watched for long enough or interacted with them. This let artists and labels game the system by purchasing enough ads to help a song rise to the top. Indian rapper Badshah managed to outperform K-pop megastars BTS through ads, Bloomberg added, while Blackpink, Taylor Swift and others also benefited from the approach.

The move won’t necessarily lead to fewer music video ads. The promos still translate to greater exposure. However, it could force the industry to stagger those ads and think about longer-term success instead of bombarding users for a short period to artificially inflate views and claim a temporary victory. YouTube didn’t have much choice as it is. As long as ads counted toward views, the credibility of its charts was tarnished. This theoretically ensures that chart toppers earn their positions through genuine demand.

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Five Nights At Freddy’s will soon terrify you in augmented reality

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Five Nights at Freddy’s AR: Special Delivery, the first FNAF AR game, is in development by Illumix. You can try to survive when it arrives on iOS and Android this fall.

Meanwhile, creator Scott Cawthon offered some updates on a number of other FNAF projects. The movie adaptation is on track for a 2021 release. He also said he’s working with Clickteam on HD versions of the original games for Android, iOS, Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Most of them will be available next year. In addition, Cawthon is working on a AAA title, and plans to divulge more details next week.



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How to crack your half-forgotten crypto password

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Cryptocurrency security relies on hashing algorithms that transform a traditional password, such as “banana$123,” into a unique string of numbers and letters, called a hash. To get specific, Ethereum wallets use a password-based key derivation function, meaning users input a unique password they can (theoretically) remember, and in return, they receive a key that serves as a unique, secure authorization code. The idea is that it’s impossible to reverse-engineer the hash to unlock a user’s base password, though a handful of algorithms have been compromised over the years, including MD5 and SHA1. However, as Dougherty’s clients have discovered, Ethereum’s security system is tight.

“With Ethereum, because it’s decentralized, you actually do all this on your own computer and it doesn’t even touch the internet,” Dougherty told Engadget. “You say, I’m creating a wallet with the password ‘banana’, and it turns into this mess of a key. And because there’s no company interface, there’s no one that can help you reset that password if you forget it. So the only way to fix that problem, I guess, is to find clever ways to try using that same hash to try and reproduce the complicated output.”

Expandpass

Essentially, you go phishing. In a phishing attack, a hacker attempts to gather information about someone without their consent, commonly through compromised email links and official-looking forms. Ethereum’s security protocols may be solid on a technical level, but they can’t stop someone from figuring out a password simply by asking the owner what it is, or tricking them into dropping clues.

Only, Dougherty isn’t tricking anyone. People come to him and willingly answer personal questions about their password habits. Do they usually capitalize letters or change some to numbers? Do they use their birth year, a favorite location or special symbols?

“Maybe, instead of choosing your favorite city, you chose your favorite movie or an actor or your name, or something like that,” Dougherty said. “Over email I just repeatedly ask the person and help massage it out of them where it’s not clicking, to break down why the things that they think their password might be, are.”

Dougherty then uses a mix of the password-cracking software hashcat and a program he built, called expandpass, which runs through varying, controlled permutations of specific words and symbols, but on a massive scale. On GitHub, he describes expandpass as, “useful for cracking passwords you kinda-remember.”

These programs are free and publicly available, but most folks don’t have the hardware or the programming expertise to put them to use. Dougherty happens to have the practical knowledge, and his rig is significant: It’s running a 1080 Ti graphics card with a 16-core CPU and 64GB of memory. Still, it can take months to crack a password.

Crypto currency Ethereum logo is seen on an android mobile

If he’s successful, the client pays him. In Ethereum, of course. Sometimes, however, Dougherty cuts a project off after a few months, before finding the proper password, and he and the client go their separate ways. He doesn’t call this failing.

“There is no fail state, right?” he said. “I could keep trying indefinitely on anything. It’s more of a give-up state where it’s no longer worth my time or their time to keep iterating on this, to keep my cracking rig running. Because it does consume power. So, there’s an interesting negotiation that takes place.”

Dougherty got his start in cryptocurrency cracking in 2017, after reading a Reddit post from someone who wanted to brute force their way into their own Ethereum wallet. The Redditor remembered part of their password and generally what it looked like, handing Dougherty a puzzle perfectly suited to his interpersonal coding skills. He and five other programmers ended up racing to crack this user’s password. Dougherty won.

“I successfully unlocked that guy’s password, and then straight from that post I started getting, ‘Well wait, hey, could you try to help me with that?'” Dougherty said. “Things organically grew from there.”

Cryptocurrency looks a little less complicated from the perspective of a phisher. From this lens, it doesn’t matter how robust the technical protocols are, when humans are much more predictable. Dougherty has encountered a handful of common, inherently human crypto-password quirks that are also potential security risks. For one, a lot of people use words that pertain to the actual function of the password, like “Ethereum” or “wallet.”

Expandpass

“I’d say 90 percent and up use their birth year or the last two digits of their birth year,” Dougherty said. “And another funny thing is, there is a demographic of people who use cryptocurrency, so they all tend to be born around the same time. These years are a pretty narrow range, which is like, that’s a security consideration. Knowing just that isn’t sufficient to break in or anything, but it’s a start.”

Luckily, Dougherty is using this knowledge for good. He normally works with Ethereum, but his method should apply the same way across other wallets and half-forgotten-password scenarios. With potentially game-changing cryptocurrencies on the horizon, such as Facebook’s Libra, Dougherty’s services should be in high demand. At least, until Zuckerberg and friends enter the cryptocurrency customer service business themselves.

“The thing that’s particularly rare about it, actually, is that it’s collaborative and consensual,” he said. “Because cryptocurrency is so new, I think that this is the first instance where it’s useful to have a person in my position, where I can work with a client, consensually, to come to these conclusions.”

Images: Phil Dougherty (expandpass); SOPA Images / Getty Images (Ethereum)

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Another AR headset startup closes its doors

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At one point, the Wall Street Journal reported that Daqri had raised as much as $275 million in funding. But according to TechCrunch, investors have caught on to the technical difficulties of creating AR headsets and are less interested in funding AR startups. Earlier this year, the AR headset startup Meta, which had raised $73 million from venture capitalists, sold its assets to an unknown buyer. The startup Osterhout Design Group seemed to be off to a good start and was working with big-name partners, but it quickly burned through $58 million in funding. Last we heard, it was selling off its patents.

Major players like Microsoft and Lenovo have shifted their focus to enterprise customers, and Qualcomm made a headset to remind people that it has an AR chip. Code from iOS 13 confirms that Apple is testing an AR headset, but even Apple has kept quiet about those plans. It’s clear that developing AR hardware isn’t easy, and with two of the leading startups closing their doors, it may be up to bigger companies, like Apple, Micorosoft of Lenovo, to lead the way.

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Adobe Premiere Pro can automatically reframe your videos

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If you were around during the VHS era, you may already be familiar with the process of changing aspect ratios. “Pan and scan” editing was used to convert 16:9 theatrical movie prints into 4:3 home videos. Editors had to move the footage frame by frame to make sure all relevant visuals stayed on-screen. Today, editors have to do the same when creating multiple versions of the same video. For example, an editor’s main task may be to create a 16:9 video to be published on YouTube, but he may have to create a square version of the video for Instagram as well.

“With Auto Reframe, users can simply drag the effect onto the individual clip or clips they wish to reframe and it does the work for them, saving countless hours,” says Adobe. The effect is powered by Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning engine that automates tasks throughout the Creative Cloud software suite. Sensei analyzes each frame of the footage and creates keyframes (basically time-based coordinates) that follow the action and adjust the framing accordingly. This will cut the time it takes to create a new version of a video from hours to minutes. And for editors, who are often freelancers or contractors, time is money.

Auto Reframe will launch on Premiere Pro later this year. Motion graphics templates will also be coming to After Effects, making animated graphics, text and lower third visuals a faster, easier process.

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The best portable hard drive

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Why you should trust us

Wirecutter has researched and recommended hard drives since early 2012, and our PC team has over eight years of combined experience testing hard drives and solid-state drives. I’ve spent the last two years reviewing hard drives and SSDs. We’ve collectively spent nearly 200 hours researching and testing portable hard drives in just the past four years.

Who this is for

If you’re not backing up the important documents and photos on your computer, you should start. Your computer’s internal drive will stop working someday, and unless your data is backed up, it’ll be gone forever. Fortunately, backing up your data is easy and getting started takes only a few minutes: Read our advice and set up a system that will back up your files automatically both to an external hard drive and the cloud. Just backing up to one or the other isn’t enough; having both onsite and cloud backups ensures that your data stays safe from localized threats such as fire, theft, or natural disaster, as well as Internet outages or disruptions to the cloud backup provider. A portable hard drive is a great local backup for a computer you take from your house to the coffee shop, on business trips, or on vacations.

You should consider replacing your backup drives between the third and sixth year of use. If your drive dies and you have a cloud backup, you won’t lose data, but restoring from the cloud will take a very long time. According to statistics from cloud backup service Backblaze, hard drives are most likely to fail either within the first 18 months of use or after three years. About 5 percent of drives fail in the first 18 months of use, and the failure rate lowers to about 1.5 percent for another 18 months. At three years of service, the failure rate jumps to almost 12 percent. At the four year mark, the failure rate is 20 percent. Based on five years of data, Backblaze estimated that more than half of hard drives will last six years.

If you frequently move between different locations and need a drive to keep in your bag and use to back up photos and other data while you’re traveling, you should get a portable external drive like the ones we recommend in this guide. But if you spend most of your time working from one desk, a desktop external drive is the better choice. They’re less expensive per terabyte and a bit faster than portable drives, but desktop external hard drives are bigger and heavier than portable ones and require an additional power adapter. And although one bump can still lead to failure, portable hard drives are designed to withstand a little more abuse than desktop hard drives. If you can afford to pay around three times more for a smaller, lighter, more durable and much faster portable drive with hardware encryption, we recommend a portable solid-state drive.

How we picked

Ideally, a portable hard drive is something you don’t notice much. It should sit on your desk, quietly storing and backing up your data. And if you want to throw it in your bag (carefully), that shouldn’t be a problem. These are the features you should look for in a portable hard drive, in rough order of importance:

  • Reliability: Although reliability is the most important factor for any storage device, solid information on reliability can be hard to come by. Only three companies still manufacture hard drives—Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba—and all of them make reliable hard drives. But all hard drives die. While the vast majority of drives from these manufacturers will be fine until you upgrade to a faster, more spacious drive in a few years, it’s still possible to buy a bad egg that will die too soon.
  • Build quality: Your portable hard drive should be able to withstand normal wear and tear from being handled and thrown into your bag often. Rugged portable drives are bulkier and more expensive than the portable drives we recommend for most people. (You can read more about rugged drives in the Competition section.)
  • Physical size and weight: The smaller and lighter, the better. Your portable hard drive should also draw all the power it needs from the USB port, no power adapter necessary.
  • Speed: Even though portable hard drives are generally slower than their desktop brethren, speed is still important. You’re more likely to use a portable drive to transfer large files between different computers, so a faster drive will save you time. We considered only those drives with USB 3.0 connections. Anything faster isn’t necessary for hard drives, because they’re limited by disk speed, not the USB interface.
  • Price: We found that most people buy 2 TB and 4 TB drives by looking at Amazon reviews for our top picks. While a higher-capacity drive is more cost-effective per terabyte, 4 TB portable hard drives cost nearly twice as expensive as 2 TB drives and supply more storage than most people need. Since many portable drives nowadays have similar performance, lower-cost options are better.
  • Capacity: We recommend getting the largest capacity you can afford right now because you’ll amass more data over time and larger drives generally have a better price-per-terabyte value. We focused on 2 TB drives because of their balance of value and total cost. We also have a 4 TB pick for people who need more portable storage and don’t mind the larger size.
  • Warranty and customer service: A good warranty is important in case you get a lemon. While the majority of portable hard drives we tested have two-year warranties, a couple have three-year warranties. Responsive customer service is important, too, in case you have trouble backing up your data.
  • Backup software: While backup software is a nice perk, you can find lots of free alternatives and other great options for online backup services. If you don’t need the extra features provided by the software, it’s not worth the time and effort to set it up on every computer you use. Dragging and dropping files works just fine for manual backups, and your OS’s built-in backup utility suffices for automatic ones.

How we tested

For our 2018 update, we narrowed down our list of contenders by price and capacity and tested six 2 TB models and one 4 TB model. For each portable hard drive, we ran HD Tune Pro, a benchmarking program that tests sequential transfer speeds and random access time across the entire disk. You can read a more in-depth explanation of the program at the HD Tune website. We also timed the file transfer of a 45.5 GB rip of a Blu-ray movie from start to finish, running each transfer three times and determining the average to rule out performance hiccups. Finally, we timed how long it took each external hard drive to back up 38.5 GB to Time Machine on a 2016 MacBook Pro.

To spot any widespread reliability issues, we read through Amazon reviews for each of the drives we tested and counted the number of reported drive failures. This method has shortcomings. For one, people are more likely to post a review when they have a problem. Also, because of the limited information available in some reviews, it can be hard to differentiate between hardware failures and software issues or user errors that could cause problems with a drive. But this approach is the best we have for now.

We also looked at Backblaze’s hard drive reliability ratings from 2017, which are based on more than 90,000 drives used in its cloud backup servers. Backup servers are a very different environment than a box on your desk—bare drives in servers are accessed more often and are subject to more vibrations and more heat; drives in enclosures have more potential points of failure between the USB connector and the USB-to-SATA logic board. The hard drives Backblaze uses are desktop hard drives, not portable hard drives, with some drives pulled from external enclosures. Even so, the Backblaze study is the largest, most recent sample of hard drive failures we have access to, and it’s always a fascinating read.

Our pick: 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim

Portable hard drive

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

The 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is the best portable hard drive for most people because it’s reliable. It’s lighter and smaller than most of the other hard drives we tested, was consistently faster than most of the competition in our tests, and is one of the least expensive drives per terabyte we tested. The Slim also comes with handy backup software.

The Slim has been one of our picks since April 2014 because it continues to be the most reliable drive (based on the largest sample of Amazon reviews) while still providing fast performance. In May 2018, we recorded 249 failure reports out of 2,701 user reviews for the 2 TB model, giving the Slim a 9-percent reported failure rate—that’s pretty good for a drive that’s been around for four years, since drive failure rates start going up after three. During our years of testing, we’ve found that reported failure rates below 10 percent aren’t cause for concern.

Portable hard drive

The Slim (top) is much thinner than most of the other drives we tested, like the WD Elements Portable (bottom). Photo: Rozette Rago

Multiple Wirecutter staffers have been using the Seagate Backup Plus Slim for all kinds of things with few to no issues. Lead editor Kimber Streams has been using the drive “to store and transfer personal files, work photos, and test data for about four years,” and has “never used the included software or the app,” but notes that “the drive still works great!” Staff writer Thorin Klosowski has been using the drive with a PlayStation 4 for about a year to store games and data, “and it’s ticking along just fine, even though the PS4 has a knack for requiring a database rebuild if you don’t power it down right.” And senior staff writer Joel Santo Domingo has been using the drive for Time Machine backups and other data storage for two years. He writes, “it’s fast enough to use on a day-to-day basis, and in that time, I’ve yet to fill it up.”

Portable hard drive

The Slim (bottom) is just barely thicker than the thinnest drive we’ve tested, the Ultra Slim (top). Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim is one of the thinnest and lightest portable hard drives we tested. It’s less than half an inch thick—0.48 inches, to be exact—and it weighs just 5.6 ounces, making it easy to throw into a bag when you’re on the go. It’s 4.47 inches long and 2.99 inches wide. Most drives we tested were similarly speedy but were much thicker, which is why the Slim is our pick over anything else. The only 2 TB drive that’s lighter and thinner than the Slim is the Ultra Slim, which we discuss more in the Competition section.

Portable hard drive

The Toshiba models had the fastest speeds in our Blu-ray transfer test, but the Seagate Backup Plus, our pick, was not far behind. Shorter bars indicate better performance.

The Slim was roughly as fast as the competition at reading and writing Blu-ray video, and it was even faster in our Time Machine testing. It was firmly in the middle of the pack for our Blu-ray testing, reading and writing our files in 6 minutes and 33 seconds, and it measured as one of the fastest portable hard drives we tested with Time Machine, writing 38.5 GB to our MacBook Pro in 24 minutes and 9 seconds.

Portable hard drive

The 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim was one of the fastest portable hard drives we tested at creating a backup with Time Machine. Shorter bars indicate better performance.

In HD Tune write testing, the Slim was the fastest portable hard drive we tested, measuring 86.4 MB/s, although its margin of victory fell within the margin of error of our measurements of other portable hard drives’ speeds. Its HD Tune read speed, 88.1 MB/s, was one of the fastest speeds we tested.

Portable hard drive

The 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim gave us the best combination of HD Tune read and write speeds. The Toshiba models we tested had faster read speeds, but their write speeds were low and their performance inconsistent. Longer bars indicate better performance.

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim’s sturdy plastic case doesn’t flex or creak under pressure like many other drives do. It also stands up well to light scratches from keys—only the glossy black sides dinged up in our tests. Although our pick will hold up well to normal bag friction, it isn’t rated to survive any significant shocks.

We recommend the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim because it’s less expensive per terabyte than the 1 TB model and it’s the highest capacity option the Slim has. (If you need more space, consider the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable.) Even if you have only a terabyte of data right now, your needs will expand over the drive’s lifespan, and having room to grow is better than buying multiple drives and spending more in the long run. The Backup Plus Slim was on the cheaper end of the portable hard drives we tested; while the WD My Passport and WD Elements cost about the same, everything else cost at least $2.50 more per TB.

Portable hard drive

Seagate’s software allows you to back up your PC, mobile devices, and social media.

The user-friendly Seagate Dashboard interface lets you back up your PC, mobile devices, and social media, or it can restore from an existing backup. The Seagate Mobile Backup app for iOS and Android also backs up contacts, messages, photos, and other data from your smartphone to your hard drive via Wi-Fi or your phone’s data connection as long as the drive is plugged into a computer running the Dashboard software.

Portable hard drive

Seagate’s mobile app can also back up data from your smartphone.

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim hasn’t been reviewed recently, but CNET and StorageReview both praised its performance and value when the drive was released in 2014. It has a 4.1-star rating on Amazon out of 15,892 reviews—a larger pool of reviews than any other portable hard drive we’ve tested.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

As PCSTATS notes, the Backup Plus Slim’s USB port wobbles up and down when pressure is applied to the cable more than with other drives. Always disconnect the cable before stashing the drive in a drawer or bag. The USB connection is the weakest point in the external drive, and if you break the port, you won’t be able to access your data until you find a new enclosure.

Portable hard drive

The Backup Plus Slim’s USB connection can be wobbly, so be sure to unplug the cord before transporting the drive. Photo: Daniela Gorny

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim comes with a two-year warranty—Western Digital, Seagate’s biggest competitor, usually provides three-year warranties—and our perusal of Amazon reviews turned up more complaints about Seagate’s customer service than about WD’s. However, a two-year warranty should be sufficient, and several drives we’ve tested have only one-year warranties, so we don’t think this is a dealbreaker.

Seagate also sells two- and three-year data recovery plans, but we’ve seen several reviewers complain about long waits and a lack of communication from Seagate customer service. Instead, we recommend taking 15 minutes to set up an automatic backup that sends your files to an external drive and encrypted cloud storage without any regular action from you. Data recovery plans never guarantee success, and a thorough backup system is the only way to prevent data loss.

Our pick doesn’t have encryption to protect your data from prying eyes. While the option to encrypt would be nice, it isn’t a dealbreaker for most people. If you really need encryption, use an encryption utility like Veracrypt (or Bitlocker) or consider a portable solid-state drive.

More storage, less portability: 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable

Portable hard drive

Photo: Daniela Gorny

If you care more about price and storage space than size, you should get the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable. It costs less per terabyte than the 2 TB Backup Plus Slim, and it was about as fast when reading and writing HD Tune transfer tests. The 4 TB model was slower in our other tests though, and it’s much thicker and heavier than the Slim. (But don’t buy the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast by mistake. We don’t recommend that drive, because with two 2 TB drives inside, it has higher potential to fail.)

Seagate sells a 5 TB model that’s the same dimensions and weight as the 4 TB version, and we found the larger capacity to be about 5 percent faster in our 2016 tests. It’s about the same price per terabyte right now, so you should buy it if you need the extra space in a portable drive. But if you want the fastest, most cost-effective drive and don’t care about portability, take a look at our desktop hard drive pick instead. It’s cheaper per terabyte and faster than the Backup Plus Portable, though it requires an AC adapter.

Portable hard drive

The Backup Plus Portable (bottom) is thicker and heavier than the Backup Plus Slim (top). Photo: Daniela Gorny

The 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable was nearly as reliable as our top pick: We found a 10-percent failure rate out of 1,477 Amazon reviews. It costs around $40 more than the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim, making it considerably cheaper per terabyte, too.

The Backup Plus Portable was a little faster than the Backup Plus Slim in the HD Tune benchmark, achieving results of 101.1 MB/s read and 88.1 MB/s write—13 MB/s and 1.7 MB/s faster, respectively, than the Slim. (Its write speed is not fast enough to separate it from the Slim, though.) The Portable performed respectably in our Blu-ray and Time Machine tests, but the Slim made better time. Both models are fast and reliable, and you should expect to see similar everyday performance from these drives.

Portable hard drive

The Portable’s USB port can wobble like the Backup Plus Slim’s can. Don’t store the drive with the cord attached. Photo: Daniela Gorny

The extra capacity comes with a minor downside: The Portable is larger and heavier than the Slim. Measuring 4.51 by 3.07 by 0.81 inches and weighing 8.6 ounces, the Portable is almost twice as thick and heavy as the Slim. Otherwise the Portable’s build quality is identical to the Slim’s, down to the slightly wobbly USB port.

The Backup Plus Portable comes with the exact same software as the Slim, and you can read our thoughts on that in the section above.

PCMag gave the Portable an Editors’ Choice award in January 2016, and AnandTech called it “one of the most cost-effective and easily portable storage media” in August 2015. The 2 TB and 4 TB Slim models share a review pool on Amazon; they have a 4.1 star rating out of 15,892 reviews.

What about wireless portable hard drives?

We don’t think wireless portable hard drives are useful for most people, but the WD My Passport Wireless Pro 2 TB is our pick for professional photographers on the move. The drive’s SD card slot (a feature other wireless hard drives lack) can automatically copy the contents of a memory card to its internal hard disk, and built-in Wi-Fi makes the images available to devices running iOS, Android, macOS, or Windows. It’s also available in a 3 TB capacity.

What to look forward to

Seagate released new versions of the Backup Plus Slim (STHN2000) and Backup Plus Portable (STHP4000), as well as the all-new Backup Plus Ultra Touch (STHH2000), which includes hardware encryption and a USB-C dongle. The new Plus Slim (STHN2000) and new Plus Portable (STHP4000) both performed slightly better than the current picks in this guide. The new Plus Slim (STHN2000) averaged 5 percent faster in read speeds and 9 percent faster in write speeds than the previous Plus Slim (STDR2000). We had similar results with the 4 TB Plus Portable, with the new Plus Portable (STHP4000) averaging 8 percent faster in read speeds than the old Plus Portable (STDR4000), but the two had nearly identical write speeds.

However, our current picks have far more Amazon reviews at this writing—think thousands compared to tens—which gives us a much better idea of a drive’s failure rate. Until we have more reliability data, we still recommend the older versions. If speed is the most important factor for you, pick up a portable SSD instead.

Toshiba has also released a new Canvio Slim. We have not tested the 2 TB model yet, but it has the same small-review-pool problem as the Seagate models. We’ll take a look at it again once it has more reviews.

The competition

Portable hard drive

A bunch of the portable hard drives that we tested in 2018, including our top picks, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim (front left), and the Seagate Backup Plus Portable (front right). Photo: Rozette Rage

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim was briefly our top pick from November 2016 to late January 2017 because it was the lightest, thinnest, fastest portable hard drive we’d tested, and it had a reported failure rate of just 4.2 percent. Since then, however, the failure rate has gone way up: In early May 2018, we calculated a rate of 18.5 percent based on Amazon reviews. Anything above 10 percent is cause for concern, and we can’t recommend it based on that failure rate.

The 2 TB Western Digital My Passport and 2 TB WD Elements are bigger than the Slim by 0.2 inches wide and nearly 0.4 inches thick, and they’re heftier by around 3 ounces. They were slower in most of our file transfer tests, too, although they were about as fast as our top pick in Time Machine testing.

Like the other WD drives we tested, the 2 TB Easystore was bigger than the Slim. It fell behind the Seagate Backup Plus Slim in HD Tune write tests by about 4 MB/s, and it was a little slower in Blu-ray tests, although its differences fell within normal variability. It was as quick as the Slim in Time Machine testing, too. But it’s only available only at Best Buy, and the price fluctuates more than we’d like.

The 2 TB Toshiba Canvio Premium and 2 TB Toshiba Canvio Advance are both as thin as our top pick, but their speeds were wildly inconsistent in our tests—both gave us some of the best Blu-ray scores and the very worst Time Machine speeds—and we have serious concerns about the drives’ performance.

The Seagate Expansion is a decent choice if you want to expand your gaming console’s storage or don’t need software, but in our tests, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim was faster and costs the same per terabyte. Plus, the Expansion is larger and heavier than the Slim, and it comes with a short one-year warranty.

We haven’t tested the Seagate Game Drive for Xbox, but it’s frequently more expensive than the Seagate Backup Plus Slim, it’s a little bigger on all sides, and it weighs about an ounce heavier, too. It has a 10-percent reported failure rate. We don’t love its bright green color scheme for most people, but we’ll look into testing it for our next update.

Transcend’s 2 TB StoreJet 25M3 is larger, heavier, and more expensive per terabyte than our top pick, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim.

WD’s My Passport X is a gaming-focused drive with a short, one-year warranty and no software. Of all the drives we tested in 2015, it had the slowest HD Tune reads and writes—82.5 MB/s and 77.4 MB/s, respectively—and it’s larger and heavier than our picks.

The Toshiba Canvio Basics has a one-year warranty, no software, and a bulkier design than the Slim.

At the end of 2016, we tested three promising, affordable rugged hard drives: the Silicon Power Armor A80, Silicon Power Armor A65, and Silicon Power Armor A85. All three drives are rated to survive going up to 1 meter (about 3.3 feet) underwater for up to 30 minutes, and rated to survive 26 drops on their various surfaces from 4 feet, but none of them survived these conditions in our real-world testing. We don’t recommend paying extra money for a bulkier, heavier drive that doesn’t protect your information like it says it will. We eliminated 10 other rugged drives in our previous update that lack both water and drop protection, which left us with the G-Technology G-Drive ev ATC, the ioSafe Rugged Portable, and the LaCie Rugged RAID, all of which cost too much for most people.

LaCie’s Rugged Triple and Mini are both too expensive to compete with our top pick, and they lack the water protection necessary to consider them for a rugged option. The LaCie Rugged USB-C fails to qualify for a rugged pick on the same grounds.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commissions.

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US asks Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon for docs in antitrust probe

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Broadly speaking, the subcommittee wants to understand whether Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google engaged in anti-competitive practices and whether the executives at those companies knew what was happening. To that end, many of the document requests are related to past mergers. In the case of Facebook, for instance, the company was asked to share documents in which Mark Zuckerberg may have talked about rivals such as Vine and Snapchat, in addition to information that details the leadup to the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook was also asked to detail its relationship with third-party developers. Meanwhile, the request to Google asks the company to share information related to 24 products and services, including YouTube and Waze. As with all the other requests, the company has been asked to provide emails that detail many of its acquisitions. Each of the four companies was also asked to share records related to “any prior investigation” they may have been subject to.

“This information is key in helping determine whether anticompetitive behavior is occurring, whether our antitrust enforcement agencies should investigate specific issues and whether or not our antitrust laws need improvement to better promote competition in the digital markets,” said Representative Doug Collins (R-GA).

The request comes at a time when all four companies face intense scrutiny. Google, in particular, has been hard hit. On Monday, 50 state attorneys general announced a new antitrust investigation into the search giant, with a focus on the company’s advertising business. One week prior, the Justice Department asked the company for information as part of its broad tech competition review.

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Toyota makes CarPlay and Alexa standard in the 2020 Prius

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The Safety Connect system was previously available in the Prius only in the Limited models. It includes automatic collision detection, roadside assistance, emergency assistance and a stolen vehicle locator. Toyota’s offering the system for free for three years — it typically costs $8/month or $80/year. Meanwhile, the L Eco, LE and XLE Prius variants will include a seven-inch Toyota Audio touchscreen.

Toyota Prius

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