Toshiba Canvio Connect II 3TB review: Price
You also get a choice of colours: red, white, gold, black or blue.
Toshiba Canvio Connect II 3TB review: Features and design
There’s little you can do with a 2.5in hard disk in terms of design, but the Canvio isn’t ugly. The glossy plastic casing has a slightly domed top and an activity LED in the corner. On one end is a microUSB 3.0 connector, and a standard USB cable is provided.
It’s not amazingly light at 230g, and it’s unlikely to fit in your pocket, measuring 109x78x19.5mm. But it’s still eminently portable – just take care of it as it won’t appreciate being dropped: mechanical hard drives are precision-made devices which are fragile.
Toshiba is generous with software, bundling NTI Backup Now EZ and Pogoplug PC. The latter lets you access the contents of the drive remotely, but only if the PC it’s connected to is left turned on. Really, if you want remote access, you’re better off buying a proper NAS drive.
Still, you get 10GB of cloud storage with Pogoplug, so there are benefits. The drive is formatted with NTFS, but the handy Tuxera software allows you to connect the drive to your Mac without reformatting it. Also see: Best NAS drives.
Toshiba Canvio Connect II 3TB review: Performance
Thanks to a USB 3 interface, the Canvio can stretch its legs. It’s nowhere near as quick as an SSD, but we saw 131MB/s when reading large files and 135MB/s when writing them in CrystalDiskMark’s sequential tests. This is reasonably good for a 5400rpm hard drive. For small 4KB files, performance falls off a cliff and the Connect II could only manage half a megabyte when reading and 1.2MB/s when writing such files. Also see: How to build a PC. It’s a minor point, but you can hear the drive spinning so bear in mind that it’s not silent like an SSD.
