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.