Toshiba Canvio Connect II review

Toshiba’s Canvio external hard disks are typically no-nonsense affairs that focus on value for money rather than outright performance or designer looks. The Canvio Connect II is no exception, but that’s not to say it’s ugly; the glossy plastic finish and circular activity LED are delightfully minimal, and the whole thing is rather compact considering it houses a 2.5in mechanical hard disk. With just a USB3 connector on one end and a short, 45cm USB3 cable in the box, this external hard drive is also incredibly simple.

Throughout our testing, the Canvio Connect II was remarkably consistent. We normally expect to see some deviation when transferring small files compared to larger files, but in this case the results were very similar – indicating the disk is the limiting factor, reaching its speed limit before the USB3 interface can be saturated with data.

There were minor deviations, but with small files writing at 112.1MB/s and reading at 97.7MB/s, compared to large files writing at 112.5MB/s and reading at 103.2MB/s, you shouldn’t be left waiting long to transfer data to or from the disk – regardless of size. Our massive files typically max out mechanical hard disks, and this remained the case here, with write speeds averaging 112.4/s and read speeds averaging 108.7MB/s.

Toshiba generously bundles backup and remote access software on the disk, with NTI Backup Now EZ for creating duplicates of your files and Pogoplug to access those files from anywhere over the internet, as long as the PC your disk is connected to is switched on. You also get 10GB of cloud storage as part of the PogoPlug deal, which is nice, but we’d suggest avoiding Symbaloo; it’s effectively a third party bookmark manager that doesn’t do anything that Chrome or Internet Explorer don’t do already. The Tuxera NTFS driver for Mac is a welcome addition for OS X users, too, letting you use the disk without needing to reformat it to a Mac-specific file system.

With excellent read and write speeds, a comprehensive software package and a reasonable price for the 2TB model reviewed here, the Canvio Connect II is a superb portable hard disk. It looks the part, regardless of the colour you opt for, and easily slips in a pocket, meaning you can always have all your files with you when you’re on the move. It’s well deserving of our Best Buy award.