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The cable ends in a standard USB port —bear this in mind if you have a new laptop that only has USB-C connectors. Software and compatibility
However, it does offer decent performance for a 5400rpm 2.5in spinning platter hard drive. When transferring large files it writes at 122MB/s. Transferring 10GB of data will take around a minute and a half. Reformatting it for Mac use only takes a minute or so using OS X’s Disk Utility, but this point is worth considering for those buying for someone with limited tech chops. Toshiba makes a version of its Premium model pre-formatted for Mac use.If you are in the market for an affordable, large capacity portable external hard drive with a long warranty and a Type-C connector (useful for connecting to a smartphone or tablet), the Canvio Flex fits the bill. It is keenly priced, reasonably built and performs as expected. Our only slight concern is the fact that it uses a Micro-B USB port for which there is no real need. If you want amazing file-juggling performance, the Toshiba Canvio Advance is not the drive to buy. Even a budget SSD will be much faster. 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
As with a lot of portable drives, the Toshiba Canvio Advance’s cable isn’t that long either. It measures around 45cm from the end of one terminal to another. There’s limited scope to hide this drive. And as it uses an old-style microUSB 3.0 port on the drive itself, it’s unlikely many will have a suitable spare lying around. This looks nice enough, but may not be wanted if the Toshiba Canvio Advance will spend its life under a TV with the rest of your home entertainment gear, rather than living plugged into a desktop or laptop. The Toshiba Canvio Advance comes ready to plug into a Windows computer. That means it’s formatted to the NTFS file system, which makes the drive read-only if used with a Mac.Spinning platter hard drives are impacted quite dramatically when transferring lots of smaller files, though. It takes 271 seconds to copy over the 23GB, 5376-file Steam install of Alien: Isolation, for example. This gives it an average of around 85MB/s. When it comes to sheer performance, the Canvio Flex performed in line with the rest of the competition, including the older Toshiba Canvio drives. It reached about 150MBps on average, on read/write speeds across our suite of benchmarks which is more than decent but still around a third compared to the slowest external solid state drives.
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. We’d love to have seen Toshiba use a USB Type-C connector here, but every cent counts at the lower-end of the market.
Making something new out of a very mature technology
Toshiba is so confident of the drive’s low-noise, low vibration operation there are no rubber feet on the bottom, just plain plastic. At one point during testing the drive did cause a buzzing noise, but this was only because it wasn’t properly seated. Unlike an SSD, spinning platter hard drives should really be used flat and not be moved about as they are whirring away. The main difference between the two Toshiba drives – other than the price and the design – boils down to the bundled applications. If you need much faster speeds, you’ll haver to stump up for a 2.5in SSD. But for the price of a 2TB Toshiba Canvio Advance you’ll only get a ~250GB SSD. 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).
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