It feels like an age since a Toshiba external hard drive was available for testing, as the company appears to be winding down the external drive production in favour of consumer home entertainment electronics. Obviously, that's not the case here.
The Canvio Desktop is a part of Toshiba's Store.E range of drives, which offer a cloud backup solution through the included version of NTI Backup Now EZ - which we assume covers the .E part of the title. The drive itself comes in various capacities, from a single terabyte through to an extremely capable 6TB In this instance we managed to get our hands on the 3TB black-and-white model.
This is a USB 3.0 drive enclosure, and it certainly looks good, a bit like one of those posh mint chocolates you get at Christmas time. Only this one measures 129 x 42 x 167mm, which would be a pretty big chocolate even by our standards.
While the drive itself looks okay, the power brick that comes with it is a little bulky and firmly establishes that this is more of a static external backup solution, compared to one or two of the examples we've already had that are happily portable. It's not a problem, of course, but if you do need to take your data from your desktop, you'll have to lug the unwieldy power brick with it.
The included software offers a complete backup and restore solution that will keep both home and business users quite happy. Plus there's the option to back up any data to the NTI Cloud solution. As well as backup, you can password protect files and folders, but it lacks any decent encryption algorithms that most of the other external drives offer out of the box.
Transfers were okay, with the 1GB file being read at a rate of 110MB per second and written at 92MB per second. Again, though, they're hardly the fastest speeds on record but will suffice for daily incremental backup routines or the occasional quick file store.
There's not a huge amount else to consider with the Toshiba Canvio Desktop, to be honest. It's a pretty basic external drive, albeit one that looks reasonably good. The 3TB version costs roughly £74.99, but we're fairly sure you could find one a little cheaper if you take the time to shop around.
All in all, it's an okay drive. We probably wouldn’t bother so much with the NTI Backup Now EZ software but would rather use something of our own to configure and schedule backups. But on the whole it's functional enough and does a good job.