You can read more GadgetGuy storage news and reviews here. We add a few points for Toshiba quality and the SMR drive. Ratingīoth the Toshiba Canvio Flex and Canvio Gaming meet the parameters for external USB hard disks. Remember, external hard disks are mainly for storage – backup and restore. Premium Toshiba quality at competitive prices. Gamers will use this mainly for storage, with typically 25 games per TB.
Native PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S games cannot run from external drives.
Older PS4/XB1 games will install and run. Gaming is essentially the same disk, but with always-on enabled, there is no spin-up or down delay, so it is always available. Once its cache fills, the random/read-write speeds drop off, so it is not for large files – use a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps), USB-4 (20Gbps) or Thunderbolt 3/4 (40Gbps) SSD for that. It is particularly good for sequential read/write of smaller files – typical of documents, music, and images.
It may save your life if you get hit by ransomware. Unable to test due to a lack of Lighting to micro-B connector Ideal useįlex is for backup. Sequential read/write 115/123MBps and random read/write.
Thunderbolt 3 can produce different results but its similar to the Surface Pro & test OPPO Find X3 Pro (USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 – 64MB file test) We can’t explain the differences as both drives are exFAT Microsoft Surface Go USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 (4Mbps) Tests – 1TB model Microsoft Surface Pro 7 – USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps)
You can use it with Android OTG (usually limited to 1 or 2TB but can be 4TB if it has a USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 interface) or iOS (iPhone or iPad) 13 or later (4TB) Toshiba Canvio Flex and Gaming specifications ItemĨ0 x 111 x 13.5 x 149g (1 and 2TB) 80 x 111 x 19.5 x 210g (4TB) They also have shock sensors to protect the platters.īeing SATA 3 over USB means you don’t need drivers. The result is that a Toshiba SMR can be up to 100% faster for media serving applications than a standard hard disk. It also has a separate Media Cache that sorts the data (command queueing). To make this process more efficient, the drive has a DRAM buffer (128MiB/134MB on the 1/2TB versions) to maximise the interface data transfer speed. They use SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) overwriting part of the previously written track analogous to the overlapping shingling of a roof. The 1 and 2TB 5400rpm drives are single-platter, single/dual-sided, and the 4TB is a dual-platter, dual-sided. Toshiba MQ04 Serie s hard disks (1TB tested) The drives have a cache to maximise throughput, but the USB interface is the bottleneck – common to any external drive. But the fact is that USB is half-duplex, meaning that you will achieve <50% of the theoretical interface speed. The enclosures have a micro-B, USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 interface capable of 5Gbps (625MBps), and the drives are SATA 3/6 capable of 6Gbps (750Mbps). Toshiba Canvio Gaming uses the same internal hard drives (Toshiba MQ04 Series) but can be formatted for PlayStation or Xbox and has an always-on feature. Toshiba Canvio Flex is for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Chrome – any USB equipped device. I mean, where can you get 4TB for under $150 (4 cents per GB) with Toshiba quality and warranty?
Toshiba Canvio is about maximum bang-for-buck with Toshiba quality thrown in. You can have high-capacity at low cost (HDD) or low-capacity at high-cost (SSD) – not both.
Thank you.Now when it comes to external storage, there is a maxim.
I rebooted in Safe Mode and Computer Management showed the external drive as partitioned and working normally, but the format info for that drive was blank.Īm I missing something? I have connected the external drive to a different laptop also with Windows XP, but the same error message occurrs after Windows goes through the format process.Īny assistance would be most welcome. Other issues: Overusage, formatting errors, formation of bad sectors and other related issues causes loss of data from Toshiba external hard drive These data loss consequences might occur without your permission and make you forcefully lose or erase essential data from Toshiba external hard drives. My Computer recognises the external drive is still there but gives no other details about that drive. The data seems to be all gone after Windows went through the format process, but an error message popped up at the end of the process to say Windows couldn't complete the process. It worked ok for several years until I decided to format it to remove all the data so I could use all the space on it for storage. This external hard drive is 37GB and I'm using it as storage for Backup from my laptop. I did a search on this problem in all forums and there is a lot of advice about it, but I still can't fix the problem.