Toshiba Canvio Advance (4TB) – Hardware Review
Not that long ago, we took a closer look at Kingston’s and KIOXIA’s line of internal M.2 drives for PC and PS5, and we were quite impressed with the overall performance. Sadly, these drives tend to be a bit pricier. On top of that, we still enjoy having a portable drive for backup purposes. These drives can be used on both our desktop and laptop to transfer files or simply access our extensive music library easily. In comes Toshiba with their Canvio Advance portable HDDs, which offer a lot of storage space at a very fair price. As always, we tend to keep things short and simple for these reviews, and we can already state that we enjoyed working with the Canvio Advance.
Even though it’s just a portable HDD, we loved the design of the Canvio Advance. It reminded us somewhat of a fancy-looking wallet thanks to the textured exterior. The device comes in different colors, so you’ll probably be able to find one that matches your setup or gaming rig. The dimensions are 109mm x 78mm x 19mm, making it a very portable device. It doesn’t take up desk space, and you’ll easily be able to store it in a compartment of a laptop bag when you’re on the go. There are no other real standout features in terms of design, except for a modest indentation in the form of the Toshiba brand name and a small LED light.
For our test, we used CrystalDiskMark, as it remains a very reliable tool for testing drives such as this. The overall performance of Toshiba’s portable drive is great. You’ll get reading speeds that are approximately around 145 MB/s while writing speeds reach 156 MB/s. These are great speeds for an HDD, but of course, are nowhere close to internal SSD drives. In the past, we remarked that the Toshiba drives such as this were also great for playing games, and this is still true to a certain extent. We advise you to check the game’s requirements to see if the game requires an SSD to function smoothly. Even so, we tried booting a few of our Steam games from the drive, and they worked without any issues. Outside of that, you’ll be able to easily transfer your data to the drive, without having to wait too long. In our case, we transferred the files of a few bulkier games to the drive to save some room on our gaming rig. Of course, these drives are great for storing your collection of pictures, raw video footage for YouTube clips, your favorite music, and so on. Out of the 4TB advertised storage space, you’ll be able to use 3.63TB. The hard drive only needs to be plugged into a USB port, and you won’t need an additional power source.
The Canvio Advance also comes with free downloadable software. There’s backup software but also security software. While the first speaks for itself, the second is actually quite interesting. With the security software, you can shield some segments of the drive from other users, and when you hook up your drive on another system, they’ll also need the software to be able to access the protected files. For this, they still require the assigned password of course. We loved the inclusion of this free software, as we could easily combine files for work with private files for home usage.
Conclusion
Toshiba’s Canvio Advance is a great portable HDD to store all your valuable files for private or professional use. We even managed to run a few lighter games from it, and it also served well as a backup for important files and bulky games when we ran out of room on our gaming rig. For a fair price, you’re getting a quality portable drive with a lot of storage space. On top of that, you’ll get free backup and security software to ensure a premium experience.
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[…] recently we took a look at Toshiba’s Canvio Advance (4TB), which proved to be a solid portable HDD that came at an affordable price. We concluded that […]