Toshiba offers an interesting selection in
its box of digital delights
Given some of the distinctive and stylish
things that both Western Digital and Seagate have done with external drive
boxes, I was initially disappointed with the Toshiba Stor.E Canvio. This is a
white and black plastic box with Toshiba on it, which bears an uncanny
resemblance to a chocolate box with a dark/milk selection.
Toshiba
Stor.E. Canvio 1TB
That slightly unfair comparison does ignore
the numerous vents and slots designed to cool the contents, though it is
minimal in many other respects.
One notable omission is the on/off power
button, though Toshiba has put feet on two sides so at least you do have a
choice of how you orientate it.
Inside is a 1TB Toshiba 3.5" hard
drive, which is where it will stay, as this enclosure was never designed to be
end user dismantled, unfortunately.
Given that plenty of people make a plastic
box with a hard drive inside, I was beginning to wonder why anyone would buy
this, and then I connected it up and started to develop a whole new
perspective.
The first welcome extra is that the drive
comes pre-installed with NTI Backup Now EZ, a simple but an effective backup
tool, which costs about $23 if you buy it online.
Where most software you get with external
drives does a simple duplication of the My Documents folder as standard, this
one can back up the system entirely, along with a file and folder backup
option, and even a cloud backup. That last choice does assume you have a cloud
to use, but you have the option if that's the case.
Inside
is a 1TB Toshiba 3.5" hard drive, which is where it will stay, as this
enclosure was never designed to be end user dismantled, unfortunately.
The caveat to the bundled version of EZ
Backup Toshiba supply is that it will only save to this drive, and not network
locations or other storage mechanisms. It does, however, warn you when you're
running out of space and it can encrypt the backups if you like security
protection that goes beyond the boundaries of your physical PC.
This inclusion wasn't the only positive
part of the Canvio story; other aspects impressed.
Under testing, this drive is very quick
indeed, possibly the fastest external drive I've tested that wasn't an SSD.
Using the HD Tune Pro 5.0 File Benchmark, I clocked this unit with a read speed
of around 150MB/s and curiously writing was another 5MB/s faster than that. I
haven't been able to find out what the physical drive is in here, but I suspect
that it's one of the firm's latest 7200rpm mechanisms.
The main caveat is that you can buy the
software Toshiba provides with the Canvio and a competing drive cheaper than
this, which undermines its proposal a little.
That leaves the performance on offer as the
best selling point of this solution, as it's remarkably fast. I generally liked
the software and the speed, but Toshiba needs to make its desktop Stor.E range
visually more pleasing and more attractively priced if it's to succeed in what
is a very competitive market. mm Mark Pickavance
A fast external drive for those with
a USB 3.0 port
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Details
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Price:
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$138
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Manufacturer:
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Toshiba
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Website:
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www.toshiba-multimedia.com/
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Required spec:
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Windows XP or later, Mac OS X Tiger or
later, one free USB port. Mac users will need to reformat the drive
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Quality:
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8
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Value:
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7
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Overall:
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7
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