T
oshiba’s 320GB portable drive is so
plain it doesn’t even have a real
name. It’s just the Toshiba 320GB USB
2.0 Portable External Hard Drive, which
doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well as
Western Digital’s My Passport Elite, the
Toshiba 320’s primary competition in terms
of size, speed, and software (see our review
of the Elite at http://tinyurl.com/3emu9z).
The USB-only Toshiba 320 posted the
slowest real-world read speeds of any drive
we’ve tested. However, these lapses repre-
sent only a four percent difference in real-
world performance when compared to the
fastest non-proprietary drive we’ve tested,
Western Digital’s My Passport Elite. Four
percent is four percent, but it’s not enough to
make a significant difference.
Fortunately, the Toshiba 320’s poor
read speeds were ameliorated by quick
write speeds—the second-fastest we’ve
seen from our write benchmark. It’s a great
accomplishment considering that the write-
speed victor, Buffalo’s DriveStation Combo 4
(reviewed September 2008), uses a propri-
etary TurboUSB utility to squeak even more
speed out of its connection.
Portable USB storage devices tendto post similar read and write speeds in
our benchmark tests, so we use the drives’
included software as a way to further
distinguish between them. We dinged the
My Passport Elite for offering too many
redundant software options, including no
less than three backup and synchronization
programs. Toshiba’s drive solves this issue by
including only two programs.
NTI Shadow 3 is a simple application
for backing up your fi les. It comes with both
synchronization and scheduled-backup op-
tions. That’s it. The other piece of soft ware,
NTI Ripper, attempts to fi ll a void that iTunes
already fi lled long ago. Turning CD tracks into
digital audio fi les lost
its complexity fi veyears ago—and that’s being generous.
As a drive, the Toshiba 320 is competi-
tive. As a backup solution, it ignores some of
the more exciting possibilities in the storage
space, such as file encryption. Somewhere
between the software-bloated My Passport
Elite and stripped down Toshiba 320 lies the
perfect backup/storage device. We’ll keep
searching for it. –D A V I D M U R P H YToshiba 320GB Portable Drive
A solid, albeit undistinguished, storage solution
VERDICT$180, http://www.toshiba.com7
Fast write speeds;
easy-to-use backup
software.Slow read speeds;
lacks an encryption
program.AMOEBATOSHIBA 320GB PORTABLE DRIVESUBPOENAToshiba’s middle-of-the-
road drive would benefi t
from additional backup and
synchronization features.http://www.maximumpc.com|OCT 08 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| 89
Toshiba 320GB WD My Passport Elite Buffalo DriveStation Combo 4 (TurboUSB)
HD Tach Burst (MB/s) 35.2 36.2 WNR
HD Tach Rdm. Access (ms) 17.8 17.0 16.4
HD Tach Avg. Read (MB/s) 31.7 33.9 41.7
HD Tach Avg. Write (MB/s) 34.3 32.0 41.1
PCMark05 Overall 3,161 3,288 3,833
Best scores are bolded. HD Tach version 3.0.1.0 used.BENCHMARKS