No frills in features or looks is hardly surprising for a product dubbed Basics. Like Tesco Value – or more aptly Sainsbury's cheap-food line – Toshiba's Stor.E Basics is an unashamedly simple product that's been trimmed to keep down price. And looking like good value too at just £100 for 2000 GB. Take a look at Group test: what's the best portable hard drive?
Current competition includes the WD My Passport for around £120 and Buffalo Ministation at £150. Visit: The 7 best tablets with expandable memory.
The Toshiba Stor.E Basics is also available in 320, 500, 750, 1000, and 1500 GB capacities. See Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk External Drive.
Not that you need much from a portable hard disk other than a durable box to keep lots of data. Toshiba doesn't even bother with the usual backup or encryption software that every drive maker tends to bundle, and almost no-one bothers using.
The case is matt black plastic, and quite tough feeling. On one end is a micro-USB 3.0 port – and that's about it.
We tested the Stor.E first with Black Magic Speed Test, where it could sustain write speeds of around 61 MB/s and read speeds of 95 MB/s.
QuickBench showed both sequential read and writes could peak at around 110 MB/s. Small file random reads and writes, averaged from files 4 kB to 1024 kB, were well down at just 15 and 4.5 MB/s respectively.
Those snail-like random read/write speeds won't be an issue for most people's need for an external drive though, to offload and backup music and video files.
