For 38 years now Seagate has been recognized as a reliable hard disk manufacturer. Looking at the company’s latest products, it shows no sign of letting up. Seagate DJI Fly Drive is a storage solution for drone operators. In addition to the 2TB storage capacity and integrated micro SD slot, the DJI Fly portable hard drive comes with two-month free subscription to Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC.
DJI Fly Drive was born from the strategic partnership between Seagate and DJI. While Seagate Technology is a world leader in storage solutions, DJI is the world’s leading manufacturer of consumer drones.
Being an IT guy, I know how important is to backup your critical data and an outstanding aerial video is this kind of data. Lets be honest, no storage media is 100% safe, not even the Seagate DJI Fly Drive. I always do at least two copies of my precious data. One on my desktop computer and one on external hard drive.
Over the last 3 years of blogging, I captured during my drone reviews over 1 TB of photos and videos. For example, a 12 MP JPEG photo captured with my DJI drone occupies about 5MB. If you want to work like a pro, you need to shoot in RAW format (uncompressed), which results in 4 times larger files. As lately, 4K has become the new video standard, I expect an exponential growth of the backup space needed hence the Seagate DJI Fly Drive’ 2TB will be filled up by the end of the following year.
Hands-on review of Seagate DJI Fly Drive
Disclosure: I received this DJI Fly Drive as part of a product review collaboration with Seagate. Product specs and quality may vary according to the manufacturer’s reliability, so I cannot guarantee that you will get a drive that performs the same as seen in my review.
At a glance
First, despite its name, the DJI Fly Drive doesn’t fly :).
DJI Fly Drive comes dressed up with a removable silicon protective bumper. The drive measures 122.5 x 85 x 19.7 mm and weighs about 190 grams. While the back of the drive is black, the front part is charcoal gray. DJI logo is present on both the sleeve and drive.
On the top side of the Seagate Fly Drive is located the USB Type-C connector. I like this new standard because it allows reversible plug orientation. Micro SD slot is located on the right side of the drive. Both connector and card slot are accessible with and without the bumper.
A small green LED light on the front panel indicates that the drive is in use. It is tiny and unobtrusive.
Seagate DJI Fly Drive features
- Up to 2TB storage capacity (1.81TB exFat formatted);
- Can store more than 60 hours of aerial footage;
- You can backup 30 pieces of 64GB memory cards;
- Integrated micro SD card reader (UHS-II rated);
- USB 3.1 Type-C interface (compatible with Thunderbolt™ 3 and USB 3.1 computers);
- Silicone protective bumper.
Frankly, from two giants like Seagate and DJI I would have expected a more innovative UAV storage solution. Excepting the built-in micro SD card reader, there are no other differences compared to a “classic” portable hard drive. Here are a couple of features that would make the DJI Fly Drive 2 a perfect drone storage:
- standalone operation (no laptop needed);
- auto copy from micro SD to HDD when the card is loaded (on the fly);
- built-in Li-Po battery for at least 5 hours of usage;
- color OLED display with touch screen;
- playback feature;
- live streaming / DLNA to your TV;
- wireless communication between the drone and the drive (no need to remove the card from the aircraft).
First usage
If you don’t own one of the latest generation of laptops with USB Type-C socket, you will need to additionally purchase a Type-C to Type-A USB 3.x cable. The cable is also required if you want to review the drone footage on your living room TV.
Powering on the DJI Fly Drive, I heard the well-known noise of a classic HDD. We need to wait a few more years for affordable flash-based (SSD) portable drives.
My Windows 10 PC instantly recognized the drive. Under “This PC” I found two new drives, one called “Fly Drive” and one “USB drive” (for card reader). The 1.81TB partition is formatted as exFAT, so no worry about max file size limit.
On the root of the drive there is a file called “Start_Here_Win.exe” which allows Windows users to register their product. MacBook (OS X) owners should look under the “Start_Here_Mac.app” folder.
Speed test
In order to test the transfer speed (read/write) of the DJI Fly drive, I opted to use two popular HDD benchmark tools (ATTO Disk Benchmark and Crystal Disk Mark). Furthermore, I did a third test using copy/paste feature from Windows (it seemed to be the most relevant for real-life usage). At the end of my review, in the “photo gallery” section, you can find a screen capture of all the tests I did.
As test hardware, I used my desktop PC (i5 CPU and 16GB RAM), a 240GB SSD (up to 550MB/s read and 490MB/s write speed) and my DJI Phantom’s SanDisk Extreme XC1 U3 64GB micro SD card (up to up to 90MB/s read speed).
Read test
The 4GB test file was transferred from the DJI Fly Drive to the 240GB SDD with an average speed of 129MB/s. Not even close to a SSD to SSD copy, but very good for a portable USB drive. Same file from the micro SD was transferred to SSD with average speed of 88MB/s. Much faster than through my existing USB3 card reader.
Write test
Copying back the 4GB file from SSD to DJI Fly Drive was made with an average speed of 130 MB/s, which is comparable to the reading speed. As comparison, writing on the micro SD was much slower, only 39MB/s.
Micro SD to DJI FLY Drive speed
Direct copy from the integrated micro SD slot to the Seagate Fly Drive was made with an average speed of 88MB/s. Same speed as in the case of micro SD to SSD transfer. Note: transfer speed through a built-in card reader is widely dependent on the performance of the micro SD card.
Pricing and availability
DJI fans can find more details about this portable drive for drone footage here. Due to its spicy price tag, only the most fanatics will probably pull the trigger for such a drone accessory.
There is SSD version of this drive?
Great, solid drive. speed is decent i like the built-in card reader.
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Drones industry is growing so fast in last few years and it’s amazing for us all – the drone users aka pilots. We get better gear because there is more and more competition in the drone space as well as things like this Seagate DJI Fly Drive that you have reviewed.
Although I agree that the price on it for now is a bit too high compared to other options available to store videos and photos taken with drone and I personally wouldn’t buy it yet, there is definitely a market for things like this as many DJI owners would rather buy a disk with DJI logo on it.
The 2 things I like the most about this drive is the option to put memory card straight into it without any extra hassle and getting two-month free subscription of Adobe Premier Pro CC is also nice. Good job Seagate and DJI and I hope to see more products like this in future (as well as better prices on them).
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