Formatted NTFS for Microsoft® Windows® 11, 10, 8.1 8.1, | Requires reformatting for macOS v12, v11.5, v10.15 With over 50 years of experience in hard drive technology and unrivaled quality standards, Toshiba portable hard drives provide a reliable and secure place for your files, wherever you go 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).

Toshiba Canvio Basics 2TB Portable USB 3.0 HDD Review Toshiba Canvio Basics 2TB Portable USB 3.0 HDD Review

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. The drive we’re looking at today is the Toshiba Canvio Basics, which as the name suggests, keeps things basic. You get an excellent portable drive without all the extra bells and whistles which can increase the price. If you don’t need extra drop protection, water resistance, or dust protection, then why should you pay for it? There are many situations where those things are unnecessary. 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). 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.CPU with 750 MHz or faster, 10MB system hard disk space, 256MB system memory, one free port of USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 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.

Toshiba HDTB320EK3AA 2 TB Canvio Basics USB 3.0 Portable

Compatibility may vary depending on user's hardware configuration and operating system. Reformatting required for use with Mac® or other operating systems. The main difference between the two Toshiba drives – other than the price and the design – boils down to the bundled applications. Toshiba made your life easy when you’re getting a Canvio Basics portable drive. The drive is ready to use right out of the box. It comes pre-formatted with an NTFS file system, and it is properly aligned. It is also compatible with the HFS+ file system for Mac OS, but that will require a re-format. Included on the drive is the manual in PDF format, should you need that. While we didn’t look inside, the benchtest numbers suggest that Toshiba may have installed a 2 TB disk based on the Toshiba MQ01ABD100 disk that’s used by iStorage, for example. 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.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 rear side doesn’t have a lot more than the fact that it’s as easy to use as connecting it and dragging files onto the drive. 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