Toshiba Stor.E Steel S USB3 500GB review

Toshiba’s sleek looking Stor.E Steel S portable hard disk is, as its name suggests, machined out of stainless steel. It certainly looks stylish and there’s a leather case, so you can protect this external hard drive from scratches and unsightly fingerprints.

The disk inside is one of Toshiba’s own 2.5in, with an 8MB cache and spinning at 5,400RPM. It achieved large file write speeds of 62.6MB/s and read speeds of 71.8MB/s, which make it one of the slower USB3 disks we’ve seen. Small file speeds weren’t much better, managing 18MB/s writes and 34.8MB/s reads.

Toshiba bundles copies of Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials and Kwik media with each Steel edition – the former is a straightforward, if a little basic, backup manager that lets you assign files, folders or entire hard disks to be monitored for changes, meaning you’ll always have the latest version saved to removable storage for when you have to leave the house or office. Kwik media is a library and organiser for all your multimedia files, which can edit, then upload photos to Facebook and send videos to YouTube.

At roughly 16p per gigabyte, you’re mostly paying for the killer looks rather than outright performance. Toshiba also includes one year of data recovery cover, which could be useful if you carry really important data, but if you use the effective backup software bundled with the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 500GB, you could save money and still be protected.