We have a quick review of a wonderful external hard drive from Toshiba. This is the Toshiba Canvio Gaming 4TB Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive that had originally released last year (2020). This one is targeted for gamers, but good all-around for professionals, backups, and normal everyday needs as well. We’ve actually been using this drive since around the tail-end of last year and I noticed we never had anything written about it. So here it goes!
Design
The design of this model is simple, including an all-plastic body. There is nothing unique as it blends in with most external 2.5-inch models in the market. You get to pick from black, white, green, or red when it comes to drive color. The one we have been using here is the black model. They are also available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities.
It features a USB 3.0 connection and comes with its own special cable. Cable length is around average, just over a foot and a half.
Performance
As mentioned, it connects to your system via USB 3.0 like many of your typical external models. So you don’t get the added benefits of 3.1, but you do still get a decent average when it comes to speed. Not something you’d want to use for high-speed video capture or anything else that requires a faster transfer. However, if you were looking for that, you’d be shopping for an SSD anyway.
We’ve been using it for a little over 9 months now and the average data speeds have remained the same. Typically, you’ll get around 100-110MB/s, sometimes getting bursts up to 130-140MB/s. You might see it cross the line a little further from time to time, but not often. Pretty average for a decent USB 3.0 model.
Performance is one of the reasons why I felt this one needed a little mention. External drives get pretty abused around here with the amount of data that is constantly being moved between computers and devices but here and on the road. It’s always a good sign when a drive is still working just fine almost a year later. Well, minus a few months. No errors have been reported and still working as hard as it did when it was first out of the box.
4TB is also perfect when it comes to travel as you can take just about anything with you. From the content you are working on, an archive of images taken from an event, or some movies to keep you entertained while traveling. It is also the perfect capacity for adding onto an Xbox One gaming system (any model beyond that and I’d recommend using an SSD, of course).
There has been some chatter with a slightly higher failure rate (all brands/models experience some kind of failure rate–there is no escaping this). This is more so a percentage of bad units entering the market vs all of the drives having a higher failure rate in general. We can only speak from our own experience though. We treat our devices well and would never report on anything that has been dropped or physically abused in any other way. I say this since it can be hard to tell the full backstory behind some of the consumer reviews you find floating around out there. I had a friend back in college that dropped his drive a few weeks after buying it and sent it back to Amazon claiming it was defective. It was quite dishonest and people do that all the time sadly.
That being said, the percentage of reported failures is still quite low, which is why we continue to hold our confidence in the model. If anything changes in our own experience with the drive, we will make sure to come back to update this with what we learned.
Our Conclusion
The final score is based on our own experience with this model. It is limited to the one drive we have here since the rest of the models floating around cover other brands. For some reason, this is the only Toshiba we have on-site. That being said, this drive has been amazing. It has put up with a lot of abuse when it comes to usage. Transfering many TB’s of information back and forth between systems and devices here and at other locations.
The transfer speed isn’t the fastest, but this is mostly a limitation of the connection being used than anything else. We don’t find too many USB 3.0 drives that push much faster until you start using options like WD’s WD_Black series (which typically comes with a higher price tag).
(it’s also on sale on Amazon at the time of writing this — Buttons/links available below)
Specifications:
- Capacity1: up to 4TB
- Interface: USB 3.0
- HDD Format: exFAT
- Size(mm):
- 1TB/2TB: 80(W) x 111(L) x 13.S(H) mm
- 4TB: 80(W) x 111(L) x 19.5(H) mm
- Color: Black
- Weight (g):
- 1TB/2TB: 149
- 4TB: 210
Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.
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