 "Toshiba Canvio Connect Review")
Portable hard drives have become a commodity these days for anyone who deals with digital data. With capacity having reached a stagnation point, manufacturers are left with looks of the drive and bundled utilities to differentiate their offerings from competition. The USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0 battle is history as most external drives selling in the market these days are USB 3.0 ones. The Toshiba Canvio Connect 1TB drive is a refresh of its older Canvio series of drives, but with a Connect suffix. What does that really do? We will take a look at that soon, but first let’s get done with the design.
Design and build
Toshiba Canvio Connect 1TB
Toshiba Canvio Connect comes in five colours, but we got the glossy black one. It measures 111.7 x 78.7 mm and is 15.2 mm thick. It weighs a light 164 grams. The drive has a plastic build and the glossy surface is a finger-print magnet. There is the Toshiba logo on the front face with an indicator light placed opposite to the logo. On the other side, you have four rounded rubber pads on which you rest the drive. The drive has rounded corners and a matte-black plastic layer runs around the edges. Apart from the USB 3.0 interface, there is no opening around any edge, as the drive is USB-powered. The dimensions of the drive are quite compact and it can easily fit in your jeans’ back-pocket. There is no protective padding around the drive.
Features
The drive’s USB 3.0 interface and indicator light
Toshiba Canvio Connect is a USB 3.0 drive and has a 5400 RPM drive with 8MB of cache memory. The indicator light glows blue when the drive is connected to a USB 3.0 port and white when connected to a USB 2.0 port.
The drive has a glossy front, which is a finger print magnet
As mentioned above, the drive comes with a Connect nomenclature. The Connect feature lets you use the Canvio drive remotely so long as it is attached to an Internet-connected system. It achieves this using the Pogoplug PC utility that comes bundled with the drive. This is a paid utility which you are getting for free with the drive. After installing the Pogoplug PC utility, you will have to register your email ID which can be used across media - PC or mobile devices. On mobile devices, you will need to download the Pogoplug app, which is available on the Google Play Store as well as on Apple App Store.
The interface is pretty straightforward once you login to the utility. You select the folders you want to be able to access remotely and you are set. These folders will then be visible to you when you remotely access the Pogoplug PC utility, either over the web or on the app. Data within these folders can be streamed remotely. Additionally, the Canvio drive also gives you 10GB of free cloud storage space, which is another plus.
Pogoplug PC homepage allows you to select the folders you want to remotely access
Apart from the Pogoplug PC utility, the Canvio also bundles the NTI Backup Now EZ utility that allows you to backup your data on the drive. You can schedule backups as well as assign certain folders on your system that you want to back up everytime you connect the Canvio drive to your system and so on. You can password protect your files as well.
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 OC Formula
RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX
OS drive: Plextor PX-256M2S, 256GB SSD
Source drive: Kingston SSDNow, 120GB SSD
PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Performance
We connected the Toshiba Canvio Connect drive to a USB 3.0 port on the ASRock Z77 OC Formula board. ATTO Benchmark was run using data sizes from 0.5KB to 8192KB with the total length being 256MB and we got scores such as 113.5MB/s for writes and 115.2MB/s for reads. The Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 benchmark gave a slightly higher score of 116.8MB/s for sequential read and 115.8MB/s for sequential write.
ATTO Benchmark
To get an idea of the real-world performance, we transferred two sets of 10GB files – one is a 10GB RAR file and the other is a 10GB assorted file with a variety of data in it. These files are placed in the source drive which is the Kingston SSDNow 120GB. The source drive is just used to transfer data to test real-world performance. To simulate a real-world write test, we transferred files from the Kingston drive to the Toshiba drive. We got 101.38MB/s for sequential file write and 77.83MB/s for assorted file write. After this test, we restarted the system to flush out the RAM data. The next test involved simulating a real-world read operation for which data is transferred from the Toshiba drive to the Kingston drive. We got speeds of 102.4MB/s and 85.44MB/s for read and write respectively. To test the intra-drive transfer, we created two partitions on the Toshiba drive and transferred data between them. For single or sequential file transfers, we got around 23MB/s and 19MB/s for assorted file transfers.
Verdict and price in India
Toshiba Canvio Connect offers a good capacity and decent speeds for a USB 3.0 drive. For those who are on the move but need access to their data, you can access the data remotely either by the Pogoplug PC application or have about 10GB of your data stored in the cloud. With a price point of Rs 5,500 and user available space of 931GB, the drive gives a cost per GB of Rs 5.97, which is good if you take into consideration the extra 10GB cloud storage.
The Pogoplug cloud app
The remote connectivity is one feature that differentiates it from competition. If you are just looking at capacity and are not really concerned with remote connectivity, then there are more affordable 1TB drives in the market from Seagate (Backup Plus 1TB for Rs 4,900), Western Digital (My Passport 1TB for Rs 4,700) or Toshiba’s Canvio Basic (for Rs 4,850).