I've had another Toshiba external HDD for a number of years now, and it's always done a great job for me. However, the projects I've been working on lately have encouraged me to get a bigger, faster hard drive. After looking at a few different options including the WD My Passport Ultra 1TB (2014 & 2015 models), I decided to try another Toshiba and I am glad that I did.
The main reasons I chose the Toshiba over the others are the Internal Shock Sensor and Ramp-Loading Technology, and it didn't hurt that the Toshiba was less expensive.
Although Ramp-Loading has been around for a while, and I presume the other drives use this technology, none of the other drives I looked at would state anything about it. Ramp-Loading simply means that when the drive isn't doing anything, the read/write mechanism parks away from the disks to minimize the possibility of scratching.
The Internal Shock Sensor was more important to me, since arguably the worst damage to hard drives occurs when you drop it while it is reading or writing. This shock sensor is able to tell if the hard drive may be falling or moving too much and quickly stops whatever it is doing to move the read/write heads away from the disks, potentially protecting the drive from a huge risk.
The details of the drive suggest a transfer rate of up to 5Gb/s, but this is just the theoretical limit of USB 3.0. In reality, hard drives do not come close to that performance. That being said, this Toshiba drive is still very quick. Through testing I have found an upper limit of about 117MB/s in terms of read speed (which is just over 900Mb/s), and I cannot imagine any other external hard drive on USB 3.0 to perform much faster.
In terms of design, the Canvio Basics drive is very simple as the name implies, and it's nifty that the access light is white when used with USB 2.0 and blue with USB 3.0. Though Toshiba calls it a "smudge-resistant design", it looks a little cheap, but I very satisfied with how solid it feels.
| RAM | 1 TB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Portable |
