Customer Reviews

Toshiba Canvio Basics Portable Hard Drive 320 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive E05A032BAU2XK Black

5 star:		(225)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

I spent too much time reading reviews, so I hope this one is useful for you all:

- Lowest price I found.

- Conected it to my laptop and it recognized it immediately, no installations whatsoever. Works perfect with just a simple USB cable. Real 'plug n play'. No lies from the manufacturer.

- Data transfer seems very fast.

- Very small. Nice finish. Actually, looks like an iPhone. Very light.

How am I using it? Made 3 partitions, 2 NTFS and 1 FAT, to do some Wii-related stuff. If it performed perfect with all that mess I did to it, then it will work perfect to you.

I purchased this portable hard drive when it was on sale during Amazon's Black Friday week. We weren't sure what to expect b/c the price was so low, but we were pleasantly surprised when it arrived. It's as simple as simple gets. Plug it into your USB port and drag and drop file. It's not loaded with any backup software, but we weren't looking for any. We copied all the data off our laptop (music, pictures, etc) in under an hour. It's not something that we'll use on a daily basis so I can't rate how well it takes abuse. Love that it's nice and small and super easy to use. Very happy with this hard drive! Perfect for extra storage!

I am very happy with this item. I had been holding off buying one until I had come across one that I liked at a decent price and this was it. All you have to do is plug it into your laptop/PC and wait a few minutes while it installs drivers, etc. Copying data to it is as easy as copying to a 'thumb' drive. It took less than two minutes for me to transfer over 50gb of data.

I just opened my hard drive and plugged it into my macbook pro. It was instantly recognized but for some reason I couldn't put files on it. A few minutes of research later and I figured out why..

Toshiba uses a formatting style that is completely compatible with windows, but macs can only read what is on the disk not write new data.

It is an easy fix however. On your mac find the application called "Disk Utility"

Click on the toshiba hard drive, then click partition.

Choose the ExFAT partition style for complete mac/windows compatibility, or you can use Mac Os Extended (journaled) for a very secure mac read/write only option.

Hope this helps

I purchased this drive only a month ago, and it has already failed. I understand that this sometimes happens with hard drives, so I wasn't tremendously worried until I contacted Toshiba support. They claimed to no longer support their external hard drives, and that they'd contracted out to another company for warranty service. That company claims that the Canvio Basics line never existed, and refuses to support them. Caveat emptor!

The product was delivered very quickly. It operates as described - seems to be an easy plug and play. It acts as a "memory stick" - just drag and drop any files or folders and it quickly transfers the files. I transferred all of my music and photos in under 15 minutes. Wow, I was impressed.

This is not a fancy hard drive with poor back-up software. It is a basic portable hard drive with a lot of memory space, easy to use, and it's small and light.

I would recommend this product for anyone who needs storage at a great price that is easy to use, easy to carry, and is quiet.

I needed a little external HDD to use as my backup drive. I needed space to not only backup my system drive but also keep an image of it too. My laptop has a 320GB drive. This 500GB Toshiba had plenty of room to store compressed backup and system images. It is quiet, came with a short USB cable, and has a solitary white activity LED. While black plastic is fairly common, it looks sleek. The darn thing is slim enough to put in a pocket. It was the right size, right quality, and right price. A really great value.

Maybe I have a lemon. This drive failed after 2 months of almost non-use! I will see if Toshiba will repair or replace the unit. Very disappointing purchase. If you are picky about saving your information (LOL), look elsewhere!

My old backup drive is the size of a very fat hardcover book and requires a heavy "brick" powerpack. So, the tiny size of the 320gb Toshiba Canvio was a bit of a shock...just a bit bigger than an Apple Iphone...it would slip easily into your jeans pocket. And, no power "brick"...just a 20 inch USB cord that will also slip into a pocket.

I got the Canvio as a backup drive for my netbook computer, and the Canvio easily fits into a small pocket in the carrying case of my netbook. The Canvio came with a thick booklet that LOOKED like an instruction manual. It contained only the warranty and product "warnings" in a variety of languages. There were NO instructions in the box. On the box it states that the drive is already formatted for Windows computers...and by implication, Apple owners may have some work to do...but no details were offered for Apple owners.

I connected the Canvio to my Window 7 netbook, which quickly recognized it and installed the necessary software. The Canvio was already formatted and ready to use. I began copying 60gb of files from my netbook to the Canvio. It was copying the files at a rate of about 1gb per minute, about what I expected given the slow USB ports of my netbook.

Unfortunately, I had set my netbook to go into "sleep mode" after 30 minutes of inactivity. Windows 7 somehow treats backing up files to a outside drive as inactivity, so the netbook went to sleep half-way through the job. And, after I woke the netbook up, it refused to continue copying the files from mid-point through the files. So, I started again from the beginning. Oddly, Windows did not recognize that half the files had already been copied, and began to re-copy files that had already been moved to the Canvio.

So, I turned off the power-saving features of the netbook to ensure that ALL of the files would be copied. The problems I encountered are the fault of Windows 7, rather than the Canvio. If the Canvio HAD an instructions manual, that manual should have told me to turn off the power-saving features of my netbook before beginning the backup process.

I also copied some files from an ancient Windows XP desktop. Those files were copied at a slower rate of about half a gig per minute, so copying 10gb of files took about 20 minutes. I am guessing that with a 2011 model Windows 7 desktop with high speed USB ports the Canvio would work at a significantly faster speed.

Working in a 75 degree room, the Canvio got VERY warm to the touch during the one hour backup process. It has no air vents, and its rubber feet are only 1/16th inch tall, so no air circulates under the Canvio to cool it. Therefore, it may be a good precaution to use it in a cool room with good air circulation if a project will take an hour or two.

A lot of folks worry..."what if I back up my most important data to a backup drive, and then the backup drive fails?" At the very low price of the Canvio, an affordable solution is to buy two of them. Put your most valuable data on two Canvios and if one of them fails, your data is still safe.

I started running out of space on my older 500GB Maxtor External drive, so I decided to get another drive with the same capacity but smaller form factor (a portable model basically). I originally intended to use it on my Desktop, but when I saw how short the USB cable was I decided to switch it with my WD Passport (which I use with my laptop for karaoke).

I looked at the Canvio because it looked pretty good specs-wise, and the price was hard to beat. The Drive works just fine, no hiccups or glitches when I transferred 70GB worth of files. It's a fairly reliable drive during actual performance so far. My biggest complaint is that it's a bit slow (and i'm not speaking about the actual rotation speed, which is 4500rpm). When I start my laptop, it takes quite a bit of time for the drive to be recognized, which means that if I start my karaoke program, it appears as if the files are all gone (they're still in the drive btw). Also, I sometimes get prompted to format the drive, which is weird since the drive is formatted, and the files are accessible. I'm not sure what causes that.

I've decided to relegate the Canvio to back up duties from here on in.