Toshiba's USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (HDDR320E03X) 320GB offers plenty of room for photos, music, and videos, and its convenient size lets you stow it in a jacket pocket. However, unless you really like its design, we can't recommend this drive because you can find faster models with similar capacities for less.
The small, sleek, lightweight device is not much larger or heavier than an iPod Touch at 16.51mm high, 81.28mm wide, 127mm deep, and weighing just under 227 grams. All of the accessories you need come in the packaging, including a USB cable, backup software, warranty information, and a quick install guide. The only thing we wished it had was a FireWire port. Colour options include Gecko Green, Hot Rod Red, and Carbon Grey, and Toshiba also offers 160GB (AU$149) and 250GB (AU$199) models, in addition to the 320GB (AU$249) version.
As is common with other portable hard drives, this model has an internal shock sensor to help protect your data from low impact drops. Toshiba doesn't specify a height from which the drive could be dropped, so we dropped it from one metre onto a hard surface, plugged the drive back in and it worked fine. NTI Shadow backup software also comes preloaded on the drive. Once installed you can schedule automatic backups that run in the background on systems using Windows 2000, XP, or, Vista and on Macs with OS X 10.3.9 or later.
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On the CNET Labs test bench, the Toshiba had very good read speeds, but horrendous write speeds, as you can see from our test results. Compared with the well-balanced SimpleTech drive, which offers the same amount of storage for the dollar, that performance gap makes it impossible to recommend the Toshiba.
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