Customer Reviews

Toshiba HDWC130EW3J1 Stor.E Canvio 3TB USB 3.0 3.5 Inch Desktop Hard Drive - Black/White

My first choice had been the Western Digital My Book 2TB, as some of the reviews said it was wonderful. The reviews that said otherwise turned out to be correct (the on-board WD software is useless) so it went back to the shop the following day.

By contrast this Toshiba 3TB drive seems to work fine, so far. I think I would have liked a power on/off switch on the unit, and my package omitted some documentation on initial set-up (hence minus one star); there is a comprehensive PDF on the drive but of course you have to connect it up to get hold of it... But it was reasonably intuitive: plug everything together, switch on, wait for Windows 7 to acknowledge the drive, and then open the one Application file on the drive to get started.

The on-board software offers three concurrent levels of backup - the Cloud (which I don't use), an hourly/regular back-up of any amended files, and a full back-up every week; all of these timings can be modified. There is a visual display under Status Details which shows what has been done at each level, day by day, should you wish to know.

The unit rests on top of my PC, which is a 2TB desktop with 2 x USB3 ports as well as the usual collection of USB2's; back-up via USB3 is very fast. The drive is virtually silent (there is no cooling fan) and you just hear a quiet 'click' on the hour as the drive wakes up (a very discreet blue LED lights up as it does so), backs up and goes back to sleep. It also goes into sleep mode when the PC is shut down and automatically wakes up as I turn on the PC, without any noticeable interference with the boot-up process, but if I want to power-down the Toshiba it has to be at the mains switch. Not a big deal for me but might be for some.

All seems well after a couple of weeks or so. This is my second Toshiba drive; my ageing 500GB unit has given good service but was getting too full to hold a complete Windows back-up run. So now I use the smaller drive just to hold archived photographs (I have lots of these), which also get backed up to the 3TB unit, and then I can clear them from the PC.

From experience so far, I can recommend this drive and it certainly beats Western Digital. I'm in my early 60's and definitely non-geek but I hope this review is helpful.

I bought this because I had a PSU failure on my WHS server which had caused havoc with the data on the server. It took me the best part of 10 days to rebuild my server and one of the lessons I learnt was to have a backup of the server database backup.

I chose this because it had good reviews and was keenly priced.

I plugged it in, my WHS system recognized it and loaded drivers as necessary. I took off the Toshiba software because in the context of how I use it I didn't need it, formatted the drive and backed up my database. It was quick and accurate (I know this because I have subsequently had to use it!).

I am very pleased with this: it looks good, is quiet and it has given me the peace of mind that should I ever have another disaster with my server I will be able to be up and running in a considerable shorter time than previously.

There appears to be a problem with the auto-sleep mode of the drive, if your PC is put into sleep mode (Win7-64bit) - on waking the PC the drive isn't recognised. There is a long discussion regarding this on the Toshiba support site (don't use the part number of the drive as it will not be recognised) with some simple (and complicated) work-arounds:

http://forums.toshiba.com/t5/General-Features/Canvio-sleep-function/td-p/347620

Am trying out one of the simple remedies - if it doesn't work - it's back to Amazon

Tried CrystalDiskInfo - doesn't work

The black and white version of this hard drive has a nice yin and yang-type diagonal divide on it, but sadly only on the back. On the front the divide is in a straight line, which doesn't look quite so interesting or attractive. The casing has little rubber feet on two of its surfaces, meaning the unit can be placed vertically or horizontally.

The drive has a rotational speed of 5,700rpm and a buffer size of 32MB. Combined with USB 3.0, it's more than fast enough for my purposes, which is mainly to act as a location for Time Machine backups on a Mac. The drive comes pre-formatted as NTFS, and reformatting it for Mac took seconds. The only potential issue is that you can't access the materials that come supplied on the drive (the most useful of which are NTI Backup Now EZ for Windows and the user's manual) if you don't have an NTFS driver installed on your Mac.

The device isn't too noisy for a 3.5-inch, mains-powered drive. After a period of inactivity its blue LED flashes and then goes out, indicating the drive has gone to sleep and spun down. This is without the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" option being selected in System Preferences (on a Mac). I quite like this, since the drive is totally silent when asleep, but other people might baulk at surrendering the choice of whether to allow spinning down or not.

Toshiba's Stor.E Canvio is a decent, affordable desktop hard drive. It transfers data quickly and efficiently, it looks quite nice, and its silence while sleeping is (for me) most welcome.

Bought this item as my 2 year old samsung story failed losing 2gb of movies photos & files.was up & running in 5 minutes from opening the box.transfer speed very good as using usb 3
so far no problems in writing to or reading off drive,its very quiet in operation such you need to look at its operating led to make sure its on excellent value!

Fast transfer, no lag,
Will plug and play with USB 2 but I have to switch of my laptop to connect USB 3. If I plug it in to USB 3 it powers up but is not recognized.

Easy to Use, Pure plug and play, well designed as well and fully compatible with Windows platform. I recommend this item for anyone that requires a high capacity USB Desktop external hard drive.

I recently purchased a Toshiba mobile drive from Amazon and I am very happy with it. I needed a bigger 2TB drive to store all my holiday HD film and photographs and chose this one as it looked stylish in the black and white casing and it also had the peace of mind of password encryption to protect my data against unauthorised access with backup software if. The other thing to note it works with both USB2.0 and the new USB3.0. I would recommend this drive to anyone like me that needs a lot of storage space.

Got the 3TB (Black and white) for �76.99 which is at least �10 cheaper than the competition (July 2013).

The drive is very quiet and is only really audible when you first power it up. It is formatted in NTFS and the usable space is 2.72TB.

The 3TB version uses a Toshiba DT01ABA300 3.5" HDD with SATA 3.0, a spindle speed of 5,940 rpm and 32MB of cache. The 2TB model spins at 5,700 rpm, so it is a little slower, so you get something a little extra for your money than just another 1TB of space over the 2TB model. According to the HDD's spec sheet, the power consumption is 5.4w, and 4.2w when idle. (4.2w and 3.3w for the 2TB version)

If your computer is fairly old (mine is about 4 years old), it won't have USB 3.0. I was content to use it with USB 2, but I was curious, being the computer nerd I am, so I bought a PCI-E USB 3.0 card on ebay for less than �8. I'm glad I did as I wasn't expecting it to be much quicker to be honest, but I was wrong! Copying a 2.25GB file using USB 2.0 took 1 minute 21 seconds, while USB 3.0 was a mere 35 seconds!

Overall, getting the 3TB is a no brainer if you need lots of space and you are willing to spend that little extra (about �14) over the 2TB version. The Toshiba Canvio family seems to be great value and they have HDDs with slightly faster spindle speeds compared to most of the competition over the standard 5,400 rpm.

I needed to free up my hard drive, this USB connected hard drive, quickly connects to my system and the data transfer is excellent. I would recommend this, if you need extra hard drive space.