Customer Reviews: Read 67 more reviews...
 portable, bus-driven, inexpensive, compatible March 17, 2008
willie (pineapple park, FL, USA)
42 out of 54 found this review helpful
this drive currently represents the top tier in a new three-drive lineup of portable, bus-driven, inexpensive and compatible USB hard drives from Toshiba... the drives are lightweight and pocketable - perfect for out-of-the-way storage or easy transport of loads of data... each drive comes loaded w/backup software for OS X and, if you unfortunately use it, the OS from the monopoly in Redmond. Linux users will just plug in the drive and go to work (GNU gzip, cp, dd, cpio, Amanda, star, glastree, etc.)... no CD of the backup software is included, so make any copies before repartitioning or reformatting the drive...
in my case, i plugged the unit into my 20" iMac, then clicked to reformat and use the drive as a Time Machine backup unit under OS X 10.5.2 - works great! a small blue led in a top corner of the drive flickers as data is being transferred... the drive is silent and stays cool, despite being a sealed unit (no visible screws, and obviously, no internal drive replacement intentionally possible)....
performance is good, as the interface is USB 2.0 (480Mbps)... (a portable firewire 800 drive [800Mbs] would have been better for my needs, but then i would have spent almost three times as much for a drive of similar capacity and features)...
all in all, i like this drive - it is a bargain for its storage capacity... if i had any complaint, it's that the drive must lay flat, unlike the Maxtor One-touch portable series...
Works with WinXP and Macbook Air May 10, 2008
Ei Fujioka (Durham, NC United States)
27 out of 28 found this review helpful
I bought this item a month ago as a backup storage for a Dell desktop running Windows XP Home and a Macbook Air. It works great for both Win and Mac. No problem getting power from the USB ports of the two machines.
I especially like such portability of this item that I can bring it to my office on weekdays and take backups. It provides enough storage for my office PC and two home computers.
It's shipped with Fat32 and I needed to reformat it with NTFS so that large backup files, say, 40GB, can be saved. For Macbook Air, I spared a partition and formatted it with HFS. I don't keep it connected to one of the two machines as I don't run daily backups. Instead, I connect it to one of them once in a while, say, once in two weeks and run Windows Backup manually. As for the Air, Time Machine is smart enough to start backup automatically when the Air recognizes the drive.
For safety, I also use the bundled NTI Shadow to backup music files and pictures from my digital camera. File based backups are quite simple and convenient and easy to restore in case of emergency. This is one of the reasons I bought this item when you could choose Western Digital's Passport. I read some reviews claiming that the software shipped with Passport doesn't work.
NTI Shadow works fine and as I mentioned above, it's file based backup and I'm 100% sure that the backup files can be restored as I can open them from this drive!
If you use different backup software, you could go for Western Digital's and save a few bucks. But I also liked the design of Toshiba's better than WD's.
In short, I'm very satisfied with this item.
Easy to use, reliable June 6, 2008
DCSenators (Washington, DC)
23 out of 24 found this review helpful
I've been using this for only a few months, but I travel with it frequently, and I've dropped it twice; and still have had no problems at all. I use it with a MacBook and an "old" (~2001) Toshiba laptop with no compatibility issues. I find the speed acceptable, the price was right, and the convenience great.
A note for non-laptop users: the USB cord included with this harddrive is very short (very 6 inches?). This is fantastic on a desk with my laptop and my USB drives right there, but if you have to reach in back of your computer to plug things in, you might want a longer cord. It uses the standard USB cable that seems to come with about 95% of my computer electronics, so you probably already have one.
 Very disapointed. August 8, 2008
H. Yoneda (Rio das Ostras, Brazil)
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
I purchased this portable HDD expecting a good and reliable product trusting on Toshiba brand. After one month of use, basicaly at home, for my surprise, it started to make some cliking noise and stopped transfering data. I always used it carefully and even though Toshiba says it has a shock sensor, I NEVER dropped it.
But the major surprise was to find out that Toshiba site say that it does not have a warranty and that they DON'T EVEN REPLY the e-mails I sent (3) asking a procedure to have it repaired since I can't get the RMA to fix it.
I recommend all you not to consider Toshiba. I used some Western Digital and Seagate HDD for long time and they NEVER failed (although some friends had problems, they had them repaired for free).
 Does not work with many laptops, shows up as unknown device, poor tech support May 20, 2008
mk1 (USA)
15 out of 19 found this review helpful
Bought this hard drive to backup my laptops, did not work with 3 different laptops all had a problem with the power draw and gave an error message. The work around is a powered USB hub, and/or disable the warning notification in the control panel under system, Hardware,Devive Manager, USB hardware, Advanced (click on "Don't tell me about USB errors"), also plugging the laptop computer into wall power seemed to help. Who would know? I also tried all the different updates for the computers. Eventually the drive worked intermittently on one laptop. Called and emailed tech support, useless! The usual solution is blaming everyone else, and that it's not a problem with their drive. Their solution is to send it back under warranty, which is not the issue because the drive worked fine on a desktop computer, so it is a driver issue. When its works, it's OK, but an older 60Gb fire wire/USB hard drive is quicker, and works with every computer I have used it on through the years. My suggestion is that you make sure you can return your drive if it does not work, or maybe consider another mainstream manufacture that supports their hardware. I have heard this same problem reported for some the generic USB powered hard drives. So much for plug and play, good luck with your dice.
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