Toshiba Stor.E Essential USB3 500GB review

Built from a combination of metal and plastic, the Stor.E Edition is Toshiba’s more mainstream external hard disk, but that doesn’t mean it feels cheap. The colour combinations are designed to match the Satellite laptop range, with a choice of red, blue, silver or black.

We were a little surprised with this external hard drive‘s performance in our storage benchmarks, considering it has a USB3 interface. Even though the disk inside spins at 5,400RPM, large file writes of 59MB/s and reads of 68.8MB/s are some of the lowest we’ve seen. Small file reads were an average 35.5MB/s, but it scraped a frankly dreadful 6MB/s write score.

It’s not all bad, however. The Stor.E’s redeeming feature is its software bundle. As well as the capable, if slightly simple Nero BackItUp & Burn, you also get a copy of Kwik Media. It’s a combination of photo editing software, a multimedia library and social network upload tool that scans your files for photos and videos. It can edit and upload photos directly to Facebook, or add videos to your YouTube channel. It’s also expandable, but to add features such as DVD playback and iTunes compatibility you’ll have to pay for the Unlimited bolt-on.

Unfortunately, you can get significantly faster disks for the same amount of money, so we can’t recommend this disk at all. Instead, you should buy the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 500GB.