Its corners are slightly rounded with two glossy sides and a white LED on the front that lights up when the drive is on. Getting it to work requires a free USB port (USB 3.0 preferably). Hard drives may be relatively slow, but they still have their place. And unlike old hard drives, the Toshiba Canvio Advance’s read/write noise is barely noticeable, particularly if there’s a laptop/desktop/console fan whirring away nearby.

Does it work with game consoles? We tried the Toshiba Canvio Advance with both an Xbox One and PS4. It was successfully recognised by both. However, to use it with a PS4 you’ll need to format it to the FAT32 or exFAT file formats. The Xbox One does the job for you. When it comes to sheer performance, the Canvio Flex performed in line with the rest of the competition, including the older Toshiba Canvio drives. It reached about 150MBps on average, on read/write speeds across our suite of benchmarks which is more than decent but still around a third compared to the slowest external solid state drives. Despite costing more to build, external drives sell for cheaper because manufacturers such as Toshiba and Seagate are ready to sacrifice margins for sales volume. The main difference between the two Toshiba drives – other than the price and the design – boils down to the bundled applications. That compares poorly with the Samsung SpinPoint M9T drive, released this year that has a higher platter density (three 667GB platters), four times the cache size (32MB) and is way thinner (9.5mm versus 15mm). As a side note, not surprisingly, Toshiba's bare drive costs about 25% more than its external version. VerdictReformatting it for Mac use only takes a minute or so using OS X’s Disk Utility, but this point is worth considering for those buying for someone with limited tech chops. Toshiba makes a version of its Premium model pre-formatted for Mac use.

The cable ends in a standard USB port —bear this in mind if you have a new laptop that only has USB-C connectors. Software and compatibility Write speeds level out at 141MB/s, which again is the norm for a 5400rpm drive. You’ll see slightly better results from a larger 7200rpm desktop drive, but we do mean slight. We’re talking about read/write speeds around 150MB/s. If you need much faster speeds, you’ll haver to stump up for a 2.5in SSD. But for the price of a 2TB Toshiba Canvio Advance you’ll only get a ~250GB SSD. This looks nice enough, but may not be wanted if the Toshiba Canvio Advance will spend its life under a TV with the rest of your home entertainment gear, rather than living plugged into a desktop or laptop. We’d love to have seen Toshiba use a USB Type-C connector here, but every cent counts at the lower-end of the market.Spinning platter hard drives are impacted quite dramatically when transferring lots of smaller files, though. It takes 271 seconds to copy over the 23GB, 5376-file Steam install of Alien: Isolation, for example. This gives it an average of around 85MB/s. If you want amazing file-juggling performance, the Toshiba Canvio Advance is not the drive to buy. Even a budget SSD will be much faster. The Toshiba Canvio Advance comes ready to plug into a Windows computer. That means it’s formatted to the NTFS file system, which makes the drive read-only if used with a Mac.