HDD by stefan @ 2021-10-01
The Canvio Gaming 4TB offers good performance for an external 2.5’’ 5400RPM drive and is silent during operation as well. The amount of storage should be plenty for a big game collection and while not getting the same access times as on an SSD model, the product can sustain high speed transfer rates for longer versus cheap-QLC based solutions.
At first we would like to thank Toshiba Corporation for offering a sample of their Canvio Gaming 4TB Portable HDD for testing and reviewing.
“Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation and its affiliates (Toshiba) supply a wide range of innovative hard disk drive (HDD) products to meet the varied demands of the diversified storage marketplace. Products include high capacity power-efficient storage for Cloud Data Centers, capacity and performance HDDs for Enterprise IT, client HDDs for PC/Desktop, and specialty drives for Surveillance, NAS systems, set-top box video, gaming and external storage. Toshiba aims to continue to advance HDD technologies and innovation to meet and exceed customer requirements across a broad spectrum of storage market segments.”
More games. More Wins.
More game time means more victories. With the Canvio Gaming portable hard drive, you won’t have to worry about deleting games to make room for the hottest new release. The sleek, lightweight design allows you to hold up to 100 games in an easy to carry lightweight casing. Offering up to 4TB of storage capacity for your data, your gaming library has room to grow.
Play More. Worry Less.
Spend more time conquering levels and less time scrambling to make room for the hottest new game drops. The 4TB model can hold up to 100 titles so you don’t have to pick and choose - go ahead and expand your game library.
Game On
Under the hood, this portable hard drive is specially designed to meet your gaming needs. The Canvio Gaming features a firmware-customized “Always-On” mode that is ready to respond to your next gameplay so you can spend more time winning.
Your Gaming Companion
Keep a massive game library at your fingertips. The Canvio Gaming can store up to 100 games. Take your game achievements and avatars on the road to compete with your friends Simply plug in the Canvio Gaming drive into your compatible gaming console and you are ready to play your favorite games in your collection.
Built for Gamers
Transfer your score to the next generation of gaming. The Canvio Gaming enables you to run your favorite games on the latest compatible consoles, so you can pick up where you left off.
Store with Style
The sleek black finish stylishly complements your Xbox, PlayStation, and other compatible gaming consoles, so you can play with style.
Interface: USB 3.2 Gen 1 (USB 2.0 compatible)
Max. transfer rate: ~ 5.0 Gbit/s
File system: exFAT
Power: USB bus power (max. 900mA)
System requirements
Formatted exFAT for:
- Playstation/Xbox
- Windows® 10, Windows ® 8.1
- macOS v11.5 / v11.2, v10.15, macOS v10.14, macOS v10.13
One free port of USB Type-A
Warranty: 2 years
Enclosure: sleek black finish
Dimensions: 4 TB - 80 x 111 x 19.5
Weight (approx.): 4 TB - 210g
As you may know, games are continuing to grow on any platform as they become more realistic and compact systems/laptops do not always come with enough storage to accommodate lots of titles offline. Some devices cannot be upgraded in terms of storage and the only option is to attach additional external storage; you can go the external SSD route which is the more expensive option or opt-in for a cost-effective HDD-based solution. You must also take into account that there are on the market quite a bit of QLC-based SSD solutions, but these tend to become slow as a crawl if the pseudo-SLC cache has been filled up and the drive will need some time to recover.
One of the HDD-based solutions which does not break the bank to acquire is the Toshiba Canvio Gaming, with capacities ranging from 1TB and up to 4TB. These are plug-and-play, do not need extra drivers to function and come partitioned as exFAT, for compatibility on a large range of devices.
The drive is shipped inside a small cardboard enclosure, which comes with a photo of the product, the total capacity but also some features listed as icons in the lower area:
Some more info is provided on the sides as well:
Toshiba claims that we can store 25+ games per TB, but this is just an estimation:
After removing the top packaging layer, we will end up with a plain cardboard enclosure and some documentation:
The said documentation offers information regarding Safety Instructions, Regulatory Information but also how to contact the support areas:
Both Canvio Gaming and the USB 3.2 Gen1 cable are carefully packed inside:
The data cable comes with an USB Type-A connector on the computer/console side:
The connector which goes to the Canvio Gaming drive is Micro-B:
Even if we are dealing with a 4TB 2.5’’ drive enclosure for the Canvio Gaming, the overall assembly is quite compact, only the height differs; the top area is covered by a dark grey metallized paint, but also houses the Toshiba logo:
The thickness has increased a bit from 13.5mm (1TB, 2TB) to 19.5mm:
In one of the corners, we do have the activity LED, which shows when the drive is active but also when data is transferred:
The USB port on the drive is also located nearby:
The bottom area of the plastic housing comes with a central sticker, offering information such as the power rating, the manufacturing date, the internal code name but also the product serial number:
Here is how the activity LED does look like while the drive is operating:
The testbench was composed from the following hardware:
CPU: Intel I5 9700K Retail
CPU Cooler: Deepcool Captain 240 EX RGB AIO
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming
RAM: Patriot Memory Viper RGB Series DDR4
Video: KFA2 GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6GB
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
SSD: OCZ Vector 150
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
When powered on for the first time, we will see that the Canvio Gaming 4TB has been formatted exFAT, but we will re-format it NTFS for testing purposes:
With the help of AIDA64, we will be able to extract some more information about the drive, which is a Toshiba MQ04UBB400, with a platter rotation speed of 5400RPM:
On the drive we will find the manual in electronic PDF format:
The Canvio Gaming 4TB offers good performance for an external 2.5’’ 5400RPM drive and is silent during operation as well. The amount of storage should be plenty for a big game collection and while not getting the same access times as on an SSD model, the product can sustain high speed transfer rates for longer versus cheap-QLC based solutions.
Even if this one is marketed as a Gaming product, it retains the sleek, professional look as the Canvio Flex and did we mention that for 4TB of storage we will only have to pay 85 Euros? The drive is not limited to gaming use, but we can also go ahead and use the Canvio Gaming for storing our multimedia content such as 4K HDR videos and stream via Plex.
We would like to thank again to Toshiba Corporation for making this review possible!