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 List Price: $89.99 Sale Price: $75.00 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days 
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Toshiba Canvio Basics hard drives are an easy and simple portable digital storage solution. With a compact and sleek design, traveling with your digital files is a breeze. It's also ready to go out of the box with no software to install. Just connect it to the USB port on your computer and you are good to go.
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Perhaps the best deal available: lowest price + flawless performanceNice portable hard drive!Easy & Speedy to Use
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While nothing stored electronically is foolproof, I decided to give this unit a try in an attempt to save precious files. A year ago I lost 200+ restored photos, taken well over a century ago, that required hundreds of hours to “renew.” My experience with the Toshiba Canvio 2.0 Portible External Hard Drive–purchased on Amazon–was much better than expected. For starters, files transferred to it load much quicker than other backup units formally used. The transfer process is all but instantaneous; the photo-files being transferred are usually 35-38 megs each. Based on my experience, I bought two more of these external drives, and plan to buy more. The beauty is they are small enough to carry in a shirt pocket and exceed the storage capacity of a cigar-box full of flash-drives–at a TINY fraction of the cost. I’ve had two not-inexpensive flash-drives fail–and they load much slower.
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I’m very happy with this product, especially given how much storage it provides for the cost. I used it primarily to conduct a Windows File Transfer when I got a new laptop and it worked great. It successfully copied my old hard drive (about 32 GB, which included thousands of MP3s, photos and Microsoft Office documents) in just a few hours. I also used it to move several thousand pictures from one computer to another for a family member. My new laptop offers 289 GB of storage, so I now use this device to serve as a back-up of my entire laptop hard drive.
My only caveat is that there is not actually 320 GB of storage. I’m not sure why they advertise it as such, but this hard drive, brand new and opened, offered less…. I think 290 GB total. I can’t complain since it still provides enough space to back up the entire hard drive on my laptop, but if I had been banking on having the full 320 GB, I might be a bit peeved.
All in all, though, this is a fantastic value and is very compact. It is roughly the size of my Android cell phone, so it takes up very little physical space as well. Definitely a worthwhile investment!
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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.