Toshiba Canvio Slim II 1TB Portable External Hard Drive, Silver (HDTD210XS3E1) (Personal Computers)

Took a dive and ordered this hard drive right after it was released. I'm very glad I did.PROS:The hard drive itself is constructed very well; it has a very sturdy feeling metal casing that looks very high quality. It is very slim and small in dimensions, roughly the size of a modern smartphone. It also has a neat LED feature that is blue when connected to USB 3.0 ports, and white when connected to USB 2.0 ports. The device draws power from your USB port, so no external power supply is needed. Toshiba also includes a micro USB 3.0 to USB 3.0 cable, so you can immediately plug and play at the high speeds USB 3.0 has to offer.Transfer rates with this device are very quick. I'm seeing write speeds of around 120 MB/sec for copy/paste folder backup. I also did a full system backup (about 165GB) in about 25 minutes.This device also comes with this cool software called pogoplug. It's normally a $30 software package that allows you to use this...Read more

These drives are great, solely because they carry a 3-yr warranty. They work fine on PC/Mac (providing you partition them as needed), have decent power requirements (so they work off a regular USB port) and thanks to the density, rotational speed and (if available on your computer) USB3 connectivity they are surprisingly fast (70 MB/s). We have 30 drives like these at the office, and they fail at the usual rate of external hard drives, no different than any other brand. However, I keep coming back to these because of the 3-yr warranty, which doesn't mean they won't fail, but rather that they will get replaced for free when they do.One last word on hard drives:I've seen reviews on these and other drives speaking to their reliability...they really all are very similar. Magnetic hard drives WILL fail eventually. Whenever you hear people complaining about drives that fail, and citing as the control in their apparent lab experiment their "old Dell/Compaq/HP computer...Read more