Toshiba Canvio Basics 2TB Portable Hard Drive - Black (HDTB320XK3CA)

Product Information

The Toshiba 2TB Canvio USB 3.0 drive performs more sluggishly than recent hard disk drives of similar capacities ( Seagate Wireless 2TB, LaCie Fuel 2TB) but not by a big margin (less than 10% in the PCMark 8 storage benchmark).

As with a lot of portable drives, the Toshiba Canvio Advance’s cable isn’t that long either. It measures around 45cm from the end of one terminal to another. There’s limited scope to hide this drive. And as it uses an old-style microUSB 3.0 port on the drive itself, it’s unlikely many will have a suitable spare lying around. Does it work with game consoles? We tried the Toshiba Canvio Advance with both an Xbox One and PS4. It was successfully recognised by both. However, to use it with a PS4 you’ll need to format it to the FAT32 or exFAT file formats. The Xbox One does the job for you. We’d love to have seen Toshiba use a USB Type-C connector here, but every cent counts at the lower-end of the market. If you need much faster speeds, you’ll haver to stump up for a 2.5in SSD. But for the price of a 2TB Toshiba Canvio Advance you’ll only get a ~250GB SSD.If you are in the market for an affordable, large capacity portable external hard drive with a long warranty and a Type-C connector (useful for connecting to a smartphone or tablet), the Canvio Flex fits the bill. It is keenly priced, reasonably built and performs as expected. Our only slight concern is the fact that it uses a Micro-B USB port for which there is no real need.

However, it does offer decent performance for a 5400rpm 2.5in spinning platter hard drive. When transferring large files it writes at 122MB/s. Transferring 10GB of data will take around a minute and a half.Reformatting it for Mac use only takes a minute or so using OS X’s Disk Utility, but this point is worth considering for those buying for someone with limited tech chops. Toshiba makes a version of its Premium model pre-formatted for Mac use. Toshiba is so confident of the drive’s low-noise, low vibration operation there are no rubber feet on the bottom, just plain plastic. At one point during testing the drive did cause a buzzing noise, but this was only because it wasn’t properly seated. Unlike an SSD, spinning platter hard drives should really be used flat and not be moved about as they are whirring away.