Seagate DJI Fly Drive 2TB Review

TweakTown's Rating: 84%

The Bottom Line

Seagate is off to a great start with the Fly Drive offering everything needed for backing up and transfering important drone data in the field.

Seagate is very proactive with much of their storage lineup, taking every opportunity to expand it into every niche available. Over the last few years, we have seen the Backup lineup move into gaming with the Xbox and PS4 game drives and today it moves into the UAV space with the Fly Drive.

The Fly Drive is built from the ground up to be a portable solution for those on the go with their DJI drone. That said this solution offers connectivity via USB-C along with a UHS-II microSD reader placed on the side. A single capacity of 2TB is being offered at this point secured in a plastic enclosure similar to the Backup Plus and Game Drive lineups. To take things further, Seagate has placed a protective bumper around this drive to dress it up and add more durability to a drive that is destined to a rough life.

Compatibility includes both Windows and macOS but does require you to have an available USB-C port. This product also comes with a two-month membership to Adobe Premiere Pro CC. MSRP of the 2TB Seagate Fly Drive is $149.99 with a one-year warranty.

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Packaging holds capacity at the top right with an image of the drive below. To the left we have a few requirements for the drive and below the mention of the Adobe software.

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The back uses a few more languages to show this drive supports 60+ hours of drone footage.

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Included in the package we have a USB-C cable, paperwork and the drive.

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The enclosure is the same as past Game Drive and Backup plus models we have reviewed. This time we have DJI branding at the top right and Seagate at the bottom right.

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The edge of the drive houses the UHS-II microSD port for allowing quicker transfer of 4K video content.

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The top of the drive gives access to the USB-C connection.

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Here we have the drive as part of my Spark travel kit.

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CDM gave us 140 MB/s read and 132 MB/s write out of the internal hard drive.

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For the SD card testing, I had an ADATA Premier card handy that was able to pull in 99 MB/s read and 57 MB/s write. Of course, the reader itself can handle much more being UHS-II capable.

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Moving real data to the Fly Drive we first started with Photos, they were transferred in 236 seconds. Video was the quickest at 125 seconds and music came in at 132 seconds.

The Seagate Fly Drive shares its durability characteristics with the Backup Plus and Game Drive lineup, as they are all mechanical drive platforms from the same family. Seagate has added a second layer with the protective boot on the Fly Drive which should certainly aide in longer life for the drive. The inclusion of a USB-C only design has made this product more of a niche item but I am happy to report that while a C to A cable is not included in the packaging, the drive does work with them.

Performance is on par with expectations of a portable hard drive. I reached 140 MB/s read and 132 MB/s write-in CDM while moving real data we saw 125 seconds for 15GB of flight video and 236 seconds for 15GB of photos. With that I do feel the Fly Drive would benefit from a solid state drive seeing as the UHS-II reader is capable of 250 MB/s+ making the drive itself its own bottleneck.

The Fly Drive is a great start for Seagate in the drone storage market. It allows an easier flow of data from your drone to your computer without bringing all sorts of dongles and adapter along for the ride. It too gives you ample capacity at 2TB to have a second backup of your flight recordings which is mandatory in today's market.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Prime Z370 (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: Intel Core i3 8350K (buy from Amazon)
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 32GB 4x8GB DDR4 3200 (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i (buy from Amazon)
• Case: Corsair Air 540 (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Samsung 960 EVO 250GB (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: Corsair RM850x (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)
• Wi-Fi NIC: ASUS PCE-AC88 (buy from Amazon)
• 10Gbe NIC: ASUS XG-C100C (buy from Amazon)
• Thunderbolt 3: ASUS Thunderbolt EX3 (buy from Amazon)