Seagate Ultra Compact review

We see the word Ultra fairly frequently on this website, often tied to graphics cards or other exciting pieces of PC hardware and used to denote improved performance. Here, it’s attached to something as prosaic as a USB SSD, and represents a reduction in something: size.

The Ultra Compact is small. There are standard USB flash drives out there that are similar in dimensions, but this is a whole 1 TB (2 TB is also available) of fast storage crammed into something the size of a pack of gum, a small folding pocket knife, or three and a half (maybe four) almonds laid end to end if you prefer non-metric measurements. There's a lanyard loop at one end if you fancy wearing it around your neck as an avant garde fashion accessory. They’re all the rage in Paris.

It’s a metal-cased drive that comes with a two-part rubber prophylactic to give it a bit of protection, though the lanyard loop and the ridged top of the chassis are always poking through the top. The latter is probably there as a bit of a heatsink, and as the Ultra Compact comes with a claimed 3 m drop resistance and IP54 ingress resistance (which means you can get it a bit wet and dusty, but if you bury it in the sand at the bottom of the ocean it’s probably going to stop working).

The rubber sheath isn’t really there to protect it from being smashed on the tiles but rather to make it a bit sticky so that it doesn’t slide off the desk too easily (it really loves dust as a result), and to stop fluff from jamming up the USB-C port. It’s also to protect important things from the drive—unlike the Wii Remote, which sported a similar optional boingy coating to save innocent TV screens from the Wii Sports trebuchet effect, this has some hard edges that could potentially scratch up your phone if you’re unwise enough to put them in the same pocket together.

And that should be USB plug, not port. Unlike many other portable SSDs, the Seagate Ultra Compact doesn’t arrive with a dinky USB cable in the box that you’ll immediately dump in favour of a longer one that will actually reach round the back of your PC. It instead plugs straight into a USB-C port in the same fashion as a million USB flash drives. This has two effects: it makes it more portable, and it makes it more convenient, as you don’t have to worry about carrying the cable with you, and you can easily plug it straight into your PC, phone or iPad for a bit of file-transferral fun,while USB-C’s rotational symmetry means you don’t even have to worry about getting it the right way around. The downside is that it sticks straight out, without the extra flexibility the cable brings. So instead of hanging down behind your PC it might brush up against the wall, or emerge from the top of your Steam Deck like a silvery middle finger aimed at whoever’s sitting across from you.

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Seagate claims a 1,000 MB/s transfer rate from the drive’s USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface, and much of the time that’s what we get, at least in terms of short, sequential writes—the Ultra Compact is unusual among external SSDs in that it writes faster than it reads. At writing, it beats the Crucial X9 and even the Sandisk Desk Drive in the USB 3.2 Gen 2 stakes, though naturally it can’t keep up with Gen 2x2 devices. When random reads and writes were tested, the little Seagate could only beat the X6 at reading, but stormed ahead of almost everything else we’ve tested when writing, so much so that repeat tests were ordered from the testing assistants to check that it wasn’t a random weird result.

The read speeds, so important for load times if you’re using it to offload your game library, aren’t too bad, though it’s decidedly mid-table compared to speedier drives such as the X9.

In the gaming tests, which involve more Final Fantasy XIV than any sane person should ever be exposed to, this slower read speed is exposed in the slightly longer load times when running from the Ultra Compact drive. It’s not lagging particularly far behind, and running Dawnbreaker on integrated graphics is going to be a far larger bottleneck, but if minimising load times is important the Seagate drive is not going to do this as well as other drives.

But this feels like nit-picking for a drive that’s so small and convenient. And we can add that it does all this without raising its temperature above 47° while wearing its rubber sheath—which is a very good thing for a drive you’re going to grab directly with your hand when you want to remove it, instead of pulling out an interstitial cable. The PC Gamer testing lab and whole foods emporium wasn’t particularly cold on the morning of testing, so the exposed ridged section of the casing must have been dumping heat effectively, as the plastic-cased X6 hit 69° in testing.

The Seagate Ultra Compact SSD takes the whole concept of the USB flash drive and makes it better. It’s metal, it’s not fragile, it’s capacitous, cool-running and fast. As a dump for the lesser-used parts of your Steam library, there are perhaps other drives that make more sense, as they can sit more comfortably alongside your PC rather than sticking out at 90°, but for an amiable companion to a portable PC, and something that you can sling in a bag without having to check that you’ve got all the bits, it’s an easy recommendation.

Best SSD for gaming 2025

👉Check out our full guide👈

1. Best overall: WD_Black SN7100

2. Best budget: Lexar NM790

3. Best PCIe 5.0: WD_Black SN8100

4. Best 4 TB: TeamGroup MP44

5. Best 8 TB: WD_Black SN850X

6. Best M.2 2230: Lexar Play 2230

7. Best for PS5: Silicon Power XS70

8. Best SATA: Crucial MX500