Toshiba 250GB external USB hard drive review

When is enough storage enough?

16 January 2007 0:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

With more of us wanting to store even more information that ever before, hard drives are getting bigger and bigger.

Toshiba's latest offering is an external hard drive that comes with 250GB of storage allowing you, according to Tosh, to store around 4400 hours of MP3 music or 100,000 jpeg photos - that's 10 a day for 27 years.

It might be a far cry from my first hard drive, which was a massive 45MB and cost £350 but the Toshiba drive is more than just any hard drive.

Wanting to be more, the rather square boring looking Toshiba 250GB external USB hard drive is a near silent square box around the size of a hard back novel that can be stood either horizontally or vertically.

For those wanting to know the tech specs - the drive sports a 7200rpm drive speed with an 8MB cache and a transfer rate of 480Mbps via the included USB2.0 cable. It's disappointing that there is no Firewire connection but the USB2.0 connection does do the job.

In our tests on both an Apple Mac and a PC, the connection was very quick with files transferring virtually instantly.

As an added protection user of both operating systems can choose to use Toshiba's security drive lock. The application means that even if someone does snatch your drive they won't be able to get access to the drive.

As we aren't security experts we're not sure how easy it would be to break given the urge to do so, however as the drive wouldn't appear on our system until we signed in, as a consumer we would say its probably safe enough for most users.

Luckily you can disable the feature if you can't be bothered to sign in every time.

For those keen to use the drive as a backup solution the hard drive also comes with a PushButton backup system similar to that found on Maxtor drives.

Press the glowing blue button on the front of the device and the PC software that comes in the box will spring into action and start backing up your hard drive. The software isn't the most technically advanced, however it will do the job. Mac users however don't get anything.

Verdict

The Toshiba 250GB external USB hard drive does what it says on the tin. It offers a near silent fast hard drive with plenty of space to backup your files.

Better still it comes with some nifty features like the PushButton backup and the password security to prevent unauthorised access, oh, and it's cheap too.

Score

Review Recap

Made by: Toshiba
Price as reviewed: £90
The good: Near silent operation, security features, PushButton backup option for PC
The bad: Software PC only, no Firewire
Quick verdict: The Toshiba 250GB external USB hard drive does what it says on the tin
Score