Toshiba Canvio Advance 2TB External Hard Drive Review

1. Introduction2. Toshiba Canvio Advance 2TB3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD4. Backup / Restore5. Throughput6. Real Life File Transfers7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

The Canvio Advance range is one of three new drive ranges recently launched by Toshiba (the other two being the Canvio Premium and Basic line-ups) adding to its long-lived Canvio range of external hard drives. The Canvio range is frequently updated to take advantage of the latest hard drive technologies as they appear.

The new drive ranges take advantage of Toshiba's latest 1TB platter technology which not only allows for larger capacity drives in a 2.5in format, but also allows for the Canvio range to get more compact. As an example, Toshiba has got the thickness of the new Advance drive down to 14mm, a reduction of some 5.5mm compared to earlier models. The Advance looks good in its high-gloss finish but the downside of such a finish is that it is a finger print magnet and the drive can soon appear a bit grubby.

To go with the new drives, there are two utilities you can download from Toshiba's website. Toshiba Storage Backup Software makes backing of data as easy as possible. You can choose individual files or folders and set up when you want to the backup to happen. Storage Security Software allows the setting up of a unique password to protect your data.

Like the rest of the new Canvio line-up, the Advantage uses a standard USB3.0 interface, and with a 5,400rpm HDD on board, to be honest, there is not much point adding anything faster.

We found the 2TB Toshiba Canvio Advanced on the Currys PC World website for £89.99 (inc VAT) HERE. It's an overall solid drive, offering a large capacity in a small form-factor, it's just not the fastest external drive we've ever seen.

Pros

• 1TB platter technology.
  
• Pocket sized.
  

Cons

• The provided USB 3.0 cable could be a bit longer for PC use.
  
• Not the fastest external drive.

KitGuru says: You may think in these days of the omnipresent ‘cloud' there would be no market for a pocket-sized drive, especially one that uses a mechanical drive. But there are plenty of people who don't trust cloud services and would rather carry large amounts of data around with them – for those people, Toshiba's Canvio Advanced offers large capacity, if not super-fast transfer rates, at a reasonable cost.

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