Toshiba 500GB USB HDDR500E03E external hard drive review

Full Review

Let's face is storage is boring. Toshiba, however, is hoping to change that with a funky looking external hard drive adding some "zip" into your file saving habits. Is it all show though?

Coming in a monochrome "frost white" colour scheme - snazzy - the drive's cover is made from plastic rather than metal, is incredibly glossy like the gadget it wants to be, and well, simple in its design.

If we were a design website I am sure we would be able to wax lyrically about the smooth lines, the "frost white" detailing that represents the movement of data in the transient world that we live in, but we aren't, so in reality all we are going to say is that it looks good.

Button-less, status light-less, the only break from the glossy design is the small USB slot on the back so you can connect it to your computer via a USB 2.0 cable.

Power is provided by the same USB 2.0 cable saving the need for an additional power supply and behind that glossy exterior, the Toshiba HDD packs half a terabyte of mobile storage. It boasts out-of-the-box operation for both PC and Mac, which it achieves, and will give you space for roughly 131,000 MP3 music files or 142,000 digital photos on the go in a very light package.

Transfer speeds are as good as you would expect for a drive of this nature and it's no slouch when it comes to transferring content, probably done to the fact it has an 8MB buffer size. We were able to transfer a 2.4GB file from our internal hard drive to the Toshiba drive in 1 minute 20 seconds.

The drive comes with an internal shock sensor and ramp loading technology to help protect your drive. We dropped it a number of times onto a hard surface from waist height and it still worked, however with the plastic case we wouldn't recommend you do this if you can avoid it. It's not a rugged drive, nor is it pitched as that.

Verdict

Simple and effective the Toshiba 500GB hard drive does the job that it sets out to do, while looking funky. In our tests using it in a public space, amazingly we did get "that looks cool" comments, something we weren't expecting.

However that funky "monochrome" design will add a premium to the final bill, a £50 premium, which to us seems a bit steep as it's merely a paint job.

If you are just after a storage solution then this is one drive that's a bit pricey. However if you're willing to "jazz it up" a little this is more attractive than most offerings out there.

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