Toshiba Canvio 500 GB USB 2.0 Basics Portable Hard Drive review

Toshiba Canvio Basics hard drives are an easy and simple portable digital storage solution. With a compact and sleek design, traveling with your digital files is a breeze. It’s also ready to go out of the box with no software to install. Just connect it to the USB port on your computer and you are good to go.

- Lowest price I found.
- Conected it to my laptop and it recognized it immediately, no installations whatsoever. Works perfect with just a simple USB cable. Real ‘plug n play’. No lies from the manufacturer.
- Data transfer seems very fast.
- Very small. Nice finish. Actually, looks like an iPhone. Very light.

It is quiet, came with a short USB cable, and has a solitary white activity LED. While black plastic is fairly common, it looks sleek. The darn thing is slim enough to put in a pocket. It was the right size, right quality, and right price. A really great value.

So many external drives are preloaded with backup software and other junk, this one is great as you literally get 500 GB of data and don’t have to deal with the annoying software you might find on similar drives. I use this drive when traveling, it holds my movies and TV shows, I just plug it into my laptop and I have my media library on the go!

 

- portion of user feedback from Amazon.com

* Connection (4.5 stars): This particular drive uses a standard USB 2.0 A to Mini-B cable that can be found around most houses these days. It is the same cable used for most digital cameras, card readers making it accessible in a lot of places. I like this! The cable also functions as the power source for the drive. I did deduct one-half star for two reasons… First, the cord supplied is very short (too short to work with my desktop). This was easily remedied by using one of several other cables I had around the house and relegating the short cord to my laptop case. Secondly, the speed is limited by this connection, but not too badly (see below).

* Plug-N-Play (5 stars for PC, 4.5 stars for Mac): This drive comes formatted in NTFS which means it plays nice with most versions of Windows (including 7). Just plug it in and Windows detects it as a removable drive (just like a flash drive) with no extra software/crapware installed. For Mac users, it needs to be formatted first.

* Performance (4 stars): This drive is built, I think, around a 5400 RPM drive. In my test, it copied anywhere from about 9 MB/sec to bursts of about 20 MB/sec. Not a blazingly fast drive, but not too shabby. My sustained write speed was a around 10-12 MB/sec, which means it takes me around a minute and a half to 2 minutes to copy 1 GB from my computer to this drive. This is comparable with a lot of flash drives (except the Patriot Rage XT which sustains a write speed of 25 MB/sec). As for sound, it is very quiet with no clicking or platter noise that I can detect.

* Durability (5 stars): The drive has an Internal Shock Sensor (for drops) and Ramp Loading Technology (for durability and power consumption), both help keep your data safe. In my 50 GB transfer test, the drive got warm to the touch but not so hot it couldn’t be picked up.

* Warranty (4 stars): The drive comes with a 3 year warranty from Toshiba. Certainly middle of the road, but enough to make me happy

* Design (5 stars): It is a little larger than a smartphone, but not too much. The only external opening is the USB Mini-B slot. It does have a white LED on top that flashes. It has four, little rubber disks on the bottom to keep it from sliding around a lot. The color is black and is very shiny with no other design on it, likely to attract fingerprints. Personally, I like the color, it matches my case and looks very professional. Others will likely complain it’s not red, blue, or even yellow. If you want those colors (or don’t want to lose it in a backpack) get a small, padded carrying case for it.

In the end, I gave this product 5 stars overall because it is what it claims to be. A small, external, portable, easy-to-use, back-up hard drive without an extra power cord. It is not going to be useful for running programs and game, if that’s your need… get another internal hard drive that’s bigger and faster. It doesn’t have an external power source and does use a fairly easy to find cable.

If you want a nice, portable drive… this would to be a good choice.

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