Toshiba 500GB USB HDDR500E03E external hard drive

Review Date 5 June 2009
Manufacturer Toshiba
Price as reviewed £120
Latest price £77.99

Let’s face is storage is boring. Toshiba, however, is hoping to change that with a funky looking external hard drive adding some “zip” into your file saving habits. Is it all show though?

Coming in a monochrome “frost white” colour scheme – snazzy – the drive’s cover is made from plastic rather than metal, is incredibly glossy like the gadget it wants to be, and well, simple in its design.

If we were a design website I am sure we would be able to wax lyrically about the smooth lines, the “frost white” detailing that represents the movement of data in the transient world that we live in, but we aren’t, so in reality all we are going to say is that it looks good.

Button-less, status light-less, the only break from the glossy design is the small USB slot on the back so you can connect it to your computer via a USB 2.0 cable.

Power is provided by the same USB 2.0 cable saving the need for an additional power supply and behind that glossy exterior, the Toshiba HDD packs half a terabyte of mobile storage. It boasts out-of-the-box operation for both PC and Mac, which it achieves, and will give you space for roughly 131,000 MP3 music files or 142,000 digital photos on the go in a very light package.

Transfer speeds are as good as you would expect for a drive of this nature and it’s no slouch when it comes to transferring content, probably done to the fact it has an 8MB buffer size. We were able to transfer a 2.4GB file from our internal hard drive to the Toshiba drive in 1 minute 20 seconds.

The drive comes with an internal shock sensor and ramp loading technology to help protect your drive. We dropped it a number of times onto a hard surface from waist height and it still worked, however with the plastic case we wouldn’t recommend you do this if you can avoid it. It’s not a rugged drive, nor is it pitched as that.

This entry was published on June 5, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under Computers, Handhelds, Storage. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

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