Toshiba Canvio Advance
The mind-boggling prices come with inevitable drawbacks, but there’s still a place for the Canvio
SCORE
PRICE 2TB, £47 (£56 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324tosh1
READ SPEED 143MB/ SEC
WRITE SPEED 140MB/ SEC
Your eyes do not deceive you: the Canvio Advance offers two full terabytes of personal storage for just £56, equivalent to 3p per gigabyte. If that’s somehow not enough space, the 4TB model can be yours for £90, or 2p/GB.
So how have these incredible prices been achieved? While most modern external drives are based on SSD technology, Toshiba has stuck with the traditional spinning disk design, allowing it to offer huge drives at much lower cost.
Needless to say, there are tradeoffs. The main one is performance. The speeds above are around a sixth of what we would expect to see from a USB-attached SSD; benchmark the Canvio Advance against one of the latest PCI Express Gen4 NVMe drives and you’re looking at a 40-fold difference in bandwidth.
What’s more, those sequential read and write figures represent the very best performance the Canvio Advance has to offer. As with all mechanical drives, it drops off sharply in random-access operations, as the drive head shuttles back and forth between physical locations on the disk. AS SSD measured an access time of 17ms for the Canvio Advance, before any data could be read or written; for comparison, this month’s slowest SSD (the Samsung T7 Touch) took just 0.3ms to access the desired memory cell.
The consequence is distinctly 20th-century levels of performance. In the multithreaded random-access benchmark, it achieved an overall read rate of roughly 400KB/sec; for comparison, the T7 Touch cruised through the same test at 252MB/sec. The PCMark 10 storage benchmark gave the drive dismal ratings, with a data disk score of just 326.
The other downside of mechanical disks is their bulk. Although barely bigger than a regular 2.5in SATA drive, the Canvio Advance still feels chunky compared to diminutive SSD rivals from the likes of Seagate and Toshiba. At 144g, it’s heavier too – but let’s not overstate the issue. It’s still perfectly small and light enough to fit happily in your laptop bag.
Clearly, the Canvio Advance isn’t right for everyone. For live data, an SSD – any SSD – will give you a vastly smoother experience. Yet there are roles where performance is a lower priority than capacity, such as overnight backups, or mass retention of historic archives. The Canvio Advance is tailor-made for that type of job and we can’t sniff at that.