Toshiba Canvio portable 1 TB hard drive

March 30th, 2010

Toshiba have just launched the Canvio range of portable hard drives with a 1TB big boy rounding out the selections. The other capacities are 500, 640 and 750 GB. The Canvio units are aimed at consumers looking for a backup hard drive and come preloaded with NTI BackupNow EZ software and have a handy anti-slip rubberized side grip. Here are the numbers on the portable hard drives

* Interface: USB 2.0 with up to 480Mb/s2 transfer rate
* 5400RPM spin speed
* Cache Buffer: 8MB
* 3.1” W x 4.7” D x 0.65” H
* 6.3 oz
* Talks nicely with Windows® XP, Vista and 7
* A re-format allows the units to also talk nicely with Mac OS® X Tiger®, Leopard® or Snow Leopard™

The supplied NTI Backup Now EZ software has a few interesting features including a facility that finds media files and automatically backs them up or it can be set up to keep a full copy of your PC, provides secure backups with a 256-bit encrypted password and has a customizable backup schedule.

The price tags are pretty reasonable too with the 1TB unit marked at $190, whilst the smaller drives rock in at 750GB - $150, 640GB - $140 and 500GB - $120.