Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Hard drives may be relatively slow, but they still have their place. And unlike old hard drives, the Toshiba Canvio Advance’s read/write noise is barely noticeable, particularly if there’s a laptop/desktop/console fan whirring away nearby. We also ran a test by copying a 2.3GB folder filled with photos, videos and documents to the drive and measuring the time it took to copy. The Canvio Basics drive we tested hovered around 140 megabytes per second throughout the transfer, resulting in a time of only 16.61 seconds, which is impressive.
Additionally, there are several SSD-based external devices that can provide faster speeds, and the advent of cheaper NVME enclosures means that achievable speeds from these devices outstrip that of the Canvio Basics. As they are Solid State Disks too, they come with less risk when being transported than the spinning disk. That compares poorly with the Samsung SpinPoint M9T drive, released this year that has a higher platter density (three 667GB platters), four times the cache size (32MB) and is way thinner (9.5mm versus 15mm). As a side note, not surprisingly, Toshiba's bare drive costs about 25% more than its external version. Verdict 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.
Popular in External Storages
The Elements drives are the best point of comparison because they essentially look the same as the Canvio Basics drives. The Toshiba drives have a flat top, while the Western Digital drives are curved, but, for the most part, they’re the same. Likewise, you get a USB micro type B to type A cable in the box.
Write speeds level out at 141MB/s, which again is the norm for a 5400rpm drive. You’ll see slightly better results from a larger 7200rpm desktop drive, but we do mean slight. We’re talking about read/write speeds around 150MB/s. 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. Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and file size.Its corners are slightly rounded with two glossy sides and a white LED on the front that lights up when the drive is on. Getting it to work requires a free USB port (USB 3.0 preferably). Compatibility may vary depending on user's hardware configuration and operating system. Reformatting required for use with Mac® or other operating systems. Because it’s a limited warranty, there are many stipulations contained within. In short, if Toshiba can justify any misuse on your part that caused the drive to fail, your warranty request won’t be honored. Plus, missing items, such as the included USB cable, won’t be replaced under the warranty.
One Gigabyte (1GB) means 10 9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes and One Terabyte (1TB) means 10 12 = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes using powers of 10. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 2 30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB = 2 40 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system and other factors. Actual formatted capacity may vary. The drive that Toshiba used is likely to be the MQ01ABB200 which was launched in 2013; it is a 15mm model that has four 500GB platters, a 5,400RPM rotational speed, 8MB buffer and an average seek time of 12ms/22ms in read/write. If you want amazing file-juggling performance, the Toshiba Canvio Advance is not the drive to buy. Even a budget SSD will be much faster. Most of us ‘tech-heads’ already have a setup including Cloud storage and External storage for events and travelling; it goes with the territory. With the advent of more working-from-home opportunities, it stands to reason that many others are looking to extend their local storage too. The Toshiba Canvio Basics 2TB is exactly what it says on the tin; a basic 2TB external hard drive.
Spinning platter hard drives are impacted quite dramatically when transferring lots of smaller files, though. It takes 271 seconds to copy over the 23GB, 5376-file Steam install of Alien: Isolation, for example. This gives it an average of around 85MB/s. Gbit/s is the interface transfer rate per the specifications of the Universal Serial Bus 3.0. Actual transfer rate will vary depending on your system configuration and other factors. 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). We started with CrystalDiskMark. We used a 4GB test file and ran five sequences of tests, measuring sequential read and write speeds, as well as random read and write speeds. Sequential speeds were excellent, faster than Western Digital Elements by a significant margin, but the random speed suffered.
Great Deal 
New Comment