seagate 4tb backup plus portable hard drive spin rate

We’d love to have seen Toshiba use a USB Type-C connector here, but every cent counts at the lower-end of the market. Our only slight concern is the fact that it uses a Micro-B USB port for which there is no real need. It is keenly priced, reasonably built and performs as expected. If you are in the market for an affordable, large capacity portable external hard drive with a long warranty and a Type-C connector (useful for connecting to a smartphone or tablet), the Canvio Flex fits the bill. At the time of writing, it was also bundled with a free 10,000mAh battery charger. It comes with a three year warranty, is cheaper than the Canvio Flex (as well as being waterproof) but is also a tad thicker, has a rare (and therefore expensive) type-A to type-A cable. On the other hand, it does come with one-year Rescue Data Recovery Services.Ī third potential candidate is the rugged Silicon Power Armor A60. It comes with a lower warranty and no Type-C cable. If you only want the cheapest portable external hard drive around, then Seagate has the Portable 2TB, which at $54.99 at Amazon at the time of writing, undercuts the Canvio Flex by almost 20 per cent (or $13). That 2TB drive also comes with a 3-year warranty, proprietary backup software but alas, no Type-C cable. Western Digital has the classic MyPassport, which is available for fractionally less from Amazon where dynamically controlled prices means that comparison would only be valid at the price of writing.

Note that you could always buy a Micro-B to Type-C cable. Models that will compete with the Toshiba Canvio Flex will have a longer-than-average warranty as well as a Type-C connector at one end. Still, it can’t hide the fact that traditional hard drive technology has reached a plateau both in terms of throughput, access time and sheer speed, something that doesn’t remove the intrinsic quality of the Canvio Flex. It reached about 150MBps on average, on read/write speeds across our suite of benchmarks which is more than decent but still around a third compared to the slowest external solid state drives.Ī 10GB file was transferred at a respectable 80MBps average transfer rate is one of the fastest we’ve recorded for an external hard disk drive. When it comes to sheer performance, the Canvio Flex performed in line with the rest of the competition, including the older Toshiba Canvio drives. The drive doesn’t come with any utilities like some of its competitors there’s no free backup software, no cloud backup services and no Adobe creative cloud trial (like for Seagate). Here’s how the Toshiba Canvio Flex 2TB performed in our suite of benchmark tests:ĬrystalDiskMark: 145MBps (read) 152MBps (write)Ītto: 144MBps (read, 256mb) 150MBps (write, 256mb)ĪS SSD: 121MBps (seq read) 129MBps (seq write)

Seagate 4tb backup plus portable hard drive spin rate