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The Canvio® Desk is a compact yet spacious desktop external hard drive that lets home and office users expand their storage and protect their digital assets with up to five Terabytes (5TB) of capacity while keeping tabletop clutter down.
With the Canvio® Desk, high capacity meets a high level of convenience. These space-saving external storage devices come in sizes ranging up to a "ginormous" five Terabytes (5TB) - enough to keep your growing collection of pictures, music, home movies, video clips and important documents in one easy-to-access device.
You have a lot to store. Good thing the Canvio® Desk doesn't take up much of any tabletop in your home, office, dorm - wherever. Plus, it features a dual-orientation design that makes it an even better fit by letting you place it either long- or short-side-down.
Thanks to plug-and-play functionality, you just connect up the Canvio® Desk and you're ready to go. It's both USB 3.0- and USB 2.0-compatible. And it comes with its own preloaded backup application. You don't need to buy additional hardware or software to start safeguarding your files right away.
Unlike other solutions out there, the Canvio® Desk makes it simple to back up not just files and folders, but your entire system (For Windows®-based PC only) - with preloaded easy-to-use software. Secure your local backup with a password or back up your most important files onto the cloud (Includes free 30-day trial of cloud backup). Schedule automatic future backups. Then stop worrying and keep enjoying your digital world.
Like all Toshiba products, Canvio® Desk external hard drives were designed from the ground up with your needs and imagination in mind, then tested again and again for reliability. You can count on them to perform as advertised - every time. That's why they come with a solid three-year limited warranty.
Interfaces | USB 3.0 (backwards compatible with USB 2.0) |
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Interface Transfer Rate | Up to 5Gbps (USB 3.0) and Up to 480Mbps (USB 2.0) |
Speed | 5700RPM |
Average Seek Time | 10.5ms |
Cache Buffer | 32MB |
Size (L x W x H) | 5 x 1.6 x 6.5 inches (129 x 42 x 167mm) |
Color | Black/Black |
Weight | 2.3lbs (1,040g) Max |
Available Capacity | 2TB, 3TB, 4TB and 5TB |
RoHS Compliant This product is compatible with European Union Directive 2002/95/EC, Restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment (RoHS), which restricts use of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, PBB, and PBDE.
Pros: Works as external drive with XP thru Win 8
Cons: There is a little secret you should know. The internal format is secret. The USB controller in this drive fakes the OS into thinking it is an NTFS drive with 4K sectors. Traditionally drives under the 2.2TB limit use 512 byte sectors. XP can read drives larger than 2TB if they are formatted as 4K sectors. The Controller in this device presents the OS as such. If you have a failure of the cheap controller chip, you might think you can crack the case open and put the drive on a sata dock or put it internal to a desktop PC and recover the files. But you will be wrong. Windows will see the drive as an unformatted partition and two unallocated partition. You can't read them because they have a secret format that only the controller chip knows. With a standard gpt or mbr formatted drive, you would have some hope of maybe using a disk data recovery program to get some of the data off the drive by putting it into a desktop or hooking it to a USB to Sata converter or a docking station. So if you loose the cheapo USB controller chip, or it screws up translation, say due to a power glitch, you loose your data. Or you pay the mfgr to recover it. You can't read it with anything but another Toshiba controller. I confirmed this by removing the internal drive in preparation to upgrade the drive. I put the drive into a Mediasonic multidrive box I use for archives and found it would not read it as a gpt (or even MBR) drive. Useless. I believe a lot of reviews saying they have problems reading the disk or have lost data, are due to the translation of disk format by the USB controller, not actually a failed disk drive.
Overall Review: I would suggest for external drives over 2.2TB, avoiding the Toshiba, Seagate and other mfgr external drives if they advertise XP compatibility. Most certainly there is some translation going on in the controller. Instead buy a device that says it doesn't support drives over 2.2TB unless you use GPT. This means not compatible with stock XP. A good example of a device like this would be the Plugable USB3-SATA-UASP1. This device uses GPT formatting and supports devices up to 6TB. Also I have Mediasonic probox usb3 4 disk housings that support up to 4TB. I can confirm that these work great with Win7 and 8.1 and you can remove the drives and put them into your desktop or swap them between units and the data is readable via the USB interfaces.