 "Toshiba Canvio 1 TB: Tough Terabyte")
Hard drive capacities are on the rise and only a few days back, we tested the Seagate Momentus 750GB , an internal hard drive for notebooks. Today, we’re looking at something all of us could use, an external portable hard drive.
A terabyte of portable space at your disposal
This Toshiba Canvio 1 TB drive is particularly interesting because we don’t normally see too many Toshiba drives in the Indian market, and a one terabyte is a rare sight.
Design and Features
The Toshiba Canvio 1TB is a USB 2.0 compliant drive that has a rough-and-tough shell. I have to say I’m personally not very fond of the design of the drive. Seagate and WD don’t have too many variations in the design of their models, but they are still aesthetically pleasing. Being an external drive, it’s not something that can be completely ignored either. The drive is a tad bulkier than some of the other portable drives. Toshiba has included a long mini-USB cable with the drive.
Test Rig Specifications
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz
Motherboard: GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R
Memory: Corsair Dominator GT 4 GB DDR3 (2 x 2 GB)
Hard drive: WD Velociraptor 300 GB
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6970
PSU: Cooler Master 1000W
Performance
Before we get on straight to the performance, it’s worth mentioning that we noticed some problems while connecting the drive to some of the PCs and laptops in the labs. The drive wouldn’t get detected. We’re not totally sure if this is a problem with the review sample or the PC. We proceeded to set up the drive on our test rig and faced no issues whatsoever with the drive or its performance.
The drive is available in different colours
Our usual data sets of 4GB were used for this test. With USB 2.0, we’ve noticed that the best drives are limited around 33 – 34 MB/s mark. With our set of file copy tests completed, it’s clear that the drive performs pretty well in both the synthetic and real world tests. File transfer speeds while reading random sets of data files was always above 30MB/s. Write speeds for sequential files was around 28.8MB/s, which is still pretty good. Write speeds only dropped to 21.43MB/s while trying to copy 4GB of assorted data to the drive. SiSoft Sandra’s synthetic tests only supported all of the real-world scores. The drive index for the read test was 31.15MB/s and 28.8 while writing data.
Verdict
The Toshiba Canvio with its good performance doesn’t surprise us. Most of the drives we’ve tested in the past come with more or less the same kind of scores. The USB 2.0 speed limitation has never made external portable hard drives an exciting space. The Canvio 1TB unfortunately is no different. The larger capacity and the pricing is what makes or breaks this product. The MRP for the product was stated at Rs. 10,990. The market price on the other hand is around Rs. 8,000, which makes it a slightly expensive product. Some sources state prices to be as low as Rs. 6,500. At Rs. 6,500, it’s an affordable buy if you’re looking just storage space. The price is roughly the same as drives from other manufacturers. However, we would highly recommend making the move to USB 3.0 spec hardware at the earliest. The performance jump from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0 is amazing to say the least.
Our resident Hardware Ninja, Rossi, lives for speed - by uhh riding his bicycle. He's Tech2's utility man, dividing his time between cameras, software and intense bouts of Quake III. He's also a fan of all things obscure, case in point, Live for Speed (sic). Never heard of it? We rest our case. In his spare time he tries to teach our new joinees the tricks of the trade even though the blood sweat and tears, but give him a camera and all things forgotten.