Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive Review

If you are the on the go type and you need to be able to save and back up your data from your notebook PC where ever you are the Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive is a great way to do it. This is one of the most portable external hard drives you will find and the fact that it needs no AC adapter makes it perfect for use outside the office.

Inside the black metal case Toshiba used for the drive is a 2.5” Toshiba notebook hard drive with an 8MB buffer. Using the small notebook drive allows the Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive to be completely USB bus powered when plugged into a USB 2.0 port. You can still use the drive when it is plugged into a USB 1.1 port, but a second included cable is required to give the drive enough power to operate.

Physicals the Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive is very small and only weighs one pound and one ounce. Physically the drive measures in at 0.94” x 3.5” x 5.6” and has runner end caps to help prevent damage to the drive in a fall. NTI Shadow software is included to make data back ups easy.

The software is easy to use and allows you to choose the files or directories you want to backup. You can set the frequency from once a month to having backups done every few minutes to keep you from loosing important works in progress.

For my testing, I connected the drive via a USB 2.0 port and used Sandra Xi to see how well the drive performs. The Sandra XI removable storage benchmark showed a combined index of 10112 operations/minute and an endurance factor of 4.3. The random access time on the file systems benchmark was 9ms and the drive index was 28 MB/s. This is certainly slower than drives like the Seagate FreeAgent Pro, but you will be hard pressed to find a drive anywhere near this portable that performs better.