Consumer Reviews

I had an older Seagate 300GB external drive that I loaded up and rather than deal with sorting out what was on it, deleting old files, etc, I decided to purchase another drive. I looked a a number of the larger sizes and somehow came across this one on Amazon. I read a number of reviews of other brands and this particular drive is the one most were happy with, so on the strength of the reviews I ordered one. I had to reformat it but that took maybe less than a minute. In the process I lost the software that came with it, but so what. I didn’t keep track of it but it backed up about 36GB in less than a half hour.

The nice thing about this drive is its incredible functionality. You can’t get that with these mammoth Iomega, Seagate, and WD drives that are huge and only 350GB greater in capacity. This to me is like a new world, of security also because if I had to I could just grab this thing and go. The cable that comes with it is short and that might be a drawback for some persons, but it worked out well for me as I have a USB hub on my desk.

This is one of those things that once you get it you say to yourself “This is exactly what I wanted and needed” even though in advance of getting it you really didn’t have a clue how cool and functional this can be.

There are lots of these things around but I am convinced I made a great decision. I have had Toshiba drives in the past and never had a failure. You can’t go wrong with this drive unless you are truly in need of a 1TB or more and that is a different matter. Then you are stuck with conventional drives. I just love this thing. Thank all of you for your great and encouraging reviews!

In the one month that I have had this drive, it has proven an excellent, reliable, unobtrusive, and aesthetically pleasing package. The true disc space is actually 465GB though.

The packaging it comes in is, as expected, a frustration-laden exercise in extraction.

If you are not interested in the backup software, installation takes some 15 seconds. After you plug-in the drive, using the mini-USB cable that comes along with, my laptop (running Windows Server 2003), recognized the hardware, and soon it was ready for use.

- Copying files is straightforward.
- The drive operation is silent; you cannot hear the drives spinning. You can feel them spinning only if you hold up the drive in your hand.
- It draws power from your computer’s USB port, which is what makes the drive portable, and easily carry-able in your laptop case. Or even your pocket. It is that light.
- It has two rubber pads at the bottom to protect it from unnecessary shocks.
- A small blue light indicates when it is connected and running.
- The drive is small, and very, very light. You may well make the mistake of thinking it is a solid-state drive. Which it is not.

The cons?
Only one, and that too sort of general:
As has been the norm with hard drive manufacturers since the 1990s, they insist that 500GB is not 5,368,709,120 bytes, which it technically is (5 times 2 raised to the power of 30, or 5×2^30 bytes), but rather 5 billion bytes (5,000,000,000), or in this drive’s case, 500,105,216,000 bytes, which is actually 465.76 GB. In the days when discs were super expensive (in 1996, an upgrade from a 2GB to a 4GB hard drive would set you back by $200 or more – $100/GB, compared with 20 cents/GB today), it probably made marketing sense to cut corners this way, but in 2009, when a 500GB portable hard drive is available for under $100, and a 1TB external hard drive for under $100, it is simply inexcusable. Not particularly Toshiba’s fault alone, but they are going along with this scam.

Overall, I think is one of the best portable drives available on the market. Real value for money, till the 1TB portable HD comes along for the same price, and so on.

I was looking for a good portable external hard-drive for sometime (only online and not only at Amazon.com). Eventually, I basically slimmed my options down to wanting a Toshiba. User specs seemed about the best to me and recommendations were all good. I found different variations from various sellers. Amazon had the latest and newest version, which appears to be the one I am writing the review for, at a lesser price than what the other vendors were selling out-dated-models of 500Gd Toshiba hard-drives for. That I liked. Be careful not to buy the old models from on-line sellers, they usually do not specify between the older models and the latest released models. Service was very prompt too, and shipping was handled well.

I really don’t know a lot about hard drives, space, or even computers. The drive itself works well. The instillation process was confusing if one does not understand the difference or benefits between using the drive as a FAT32 or NTFS. Even without formatting it to NTFS apparently it still can be used FAT32 on Windows. Sometimes when I plug unrelated external storage units into my computer, like my 1Gb Flash disk, the BackUp Now EZ software attempts to use them to backup my computer. Maybe, their is an easy way to make the software function only with the external storage units that I select, that I simply have not yet discovered.

I purchased the Caselogic brand hard-drive case that Amazon recommend along with the drive. The drive does fit with some extra room. The small elastic type material strap inside the case keeps the drive from moving. After looking at the drive I am happy I bought a case. I would recommend that anyone who does travel, to get a case for it.

I consider it a good investment made and money well spent.

I have half a dozen Toshiba portable drives and some of them have served me well for several years. They are reliable and fast — with the 500GB portable drive I get about 20MB/s read and write speeds (tested on two recent HP laptops, one with Intel and the other with AMD both running Vista), which is half of USB 2.0 high-speed’s theoretical max throughput. The drives can be used with the PS3 and Macs out-of-box, but for best results with XP/Vista/Win7 you can convert it to NTFS without reformatting or losing existing data via a DOS command: convert g: /fs:ntfs [where g: is the drive letter, or you can use a volume name like "tosh_500g" if your drive is already named tosh_500g].

Because this drive (like other portable drives) does not use a separate power line — it draws power directly from the USB port — your computer must have a powered USB port to use this. Almost all recent desktops and laptops have this feature, but if you experience any problem, it may be due to an insufficiently powered USB port (or USB hub), so try another port or another computer.

In addition to being a fast 5,400RPM drive, this Toshiba includes some valuable features:

- Backup software that backs up system files in addition to regular files and folders (great for system recovery!)
- Password-protect your data through encryption
- Drive space alert lets you know when free space is running low
- Toshiba’s famous shock-absorbing technology, also used in iPods.

BTW, this drive is also a great value because at present a 320GB Seagate portable drive costs over [...], plus tax.