Toshiba HDTC605EK3A1 500GB Stor.E Canvio USB 3.0 2.5 Inch External Hard Drive - Black

Can't fault it yet
The enclosure seems well made. The top and base are glossy plastic and round the edge is a 'hard' plastic to protect from drops. It feels pretty solid and fits in the 'Caselogic Small Hard Drive Case' (available on Amazon) nicely, it is on the small side as 1tb drives go. There is an activity light on the unit which is white. The usb 3 port seems robust, I know some portable drives have problems with these connections breaking loose but I can't foresee any problems with this one. There are four small rubber feet on the bottom of the enclosure, the supplied usb 3 cable is approx 30cm.

I don't have access to usb 3 ports to test but it was fast over usb 2, up to 30 mb/s read/write on Windows 7. The drive has an excellent power save mode, it will spin down within 3 or 4 minutes of inactivity which is useful if you are running on battery on your laptop for example. The drive does not seem to drain too much power (I have heard of some 1tb portable drives requiring the power from...

Toshiba HDTC605EK3A1 500GB Stor.E Canvio USB 3.0 2.5 Inch External Hard Drive - Black

Be careful with the backup software!
I recently bought two of these and I have no complaints about the way the drives themselves work. They are very quiet and also not very heavy. However I made the mistake of stopping using my previous backup software and started using the software which was preinstalled on the drives. It seemed simple and efficient and when I checked what had copied over it seemed all there. It was only a while back, when I needed to retrieve some files, that I realised that on one drive everything had been copied apart from all the Photoshop files, presumably because they did not have an extension recognized by the backup programme; on another drive, where I had copied all of the content of "My documents" from another computer, I discovered that while certain folders had been copied over, not all the subfolders they contained had been copied - this time it was certainly not an issue of extension, as all the subfolders contained very similar basic files in Word. I contacted the manufacturesr of the...

Toshiba HDTC605EK3A1 500GB Stor.E Canvio USB 3.0 2.5 Inch External Hard Drive - Black

Good, but not perfect
I got one of these Toshiba 1TB 2.5" USB hard drives after I filled the old Toshiba 250GB 1.8" USB drive which I bought in 2009. I've been using it for about a year now and haven't had any problems. It has a decent amount of storage at a sensible price, it's quiet, and it's reasonably small and light so it's not too much of a problem to put it in your pocket or bag when you travel. It's not super speedy but it's quick enough (I get about 30MB/s on USB2 and 50MB/s on USB3). I haven't had any issues powering it from any of the computers I have attached it to (some hard drives try to take more power than a standard USB socket can provide). I do have a few niggles, though...

1. The supplied USB cable doesn't seem to attach to the drive very securely. I have seen it disconnect from the computer when I have moved the drive. The cable is also a little bit too short (it's around a foot long) if your computer is under the desk or in a large tower case.

2. The...

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