Toshiba Canvio Flex

Like the Advance, the Flex offers attention-grabbing prices – with the same set of downsides

SCORE

PRICE 4TB, £75 (£90 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324tosh1

READ SPEED 143MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 138MB/ SEC

Toshiba’s Canvio Flex offers a huge amount of storage for an amazing price – but it achieves that by using slow mechanical disk technology. It’s a similar proposition to the Canvio Advance ( see p85), and both drives offer a purported maximum transfer rate of 625MB/sec over a 5Gbits/sec USB connection.

In practice, we found neither drive was capable of attaining a quarter of that speed – and they struggled with the punishing random-access tests, thrashing and stuttering to the point that some solid-state rivals were a thousand times faster. Clearly these drives are best suited to lightweight or non-performance-critical duties.

There are a few differences between the Flex and the Advance: the Flex comes with the exFAT file system, so it will work on Windows, macOS and other platforms out of the box. That’s not much of a distinction, though – if need be, you can reformat the Advance to match in 30 seconds.

The Flex is also slightly larger and more boxy. To our eyes it looks cheap, but it does benefit from a clear, decent-sized activity LED. Software support is meaner: Toshiba’s backup and password-protection utilities won’t work with unsupported drives, and the Flex doesn’t qualify.

At the time of writing, the 4TB Canvio Flex is slightly cheaper, on a per-gigabyte basis, than the corresponding Advance, but that’s reversed for smaller variants, with the 2TB Flex costing £9 more than the Advance. If a basic mechanical drive suits your needs, the decision might boil down to how much space you need.