Toshiba Canvio Premium 4TB Review – Portable 2.5-inch hard drive

Toshiba has a variety of Canvio portable hard drives, I reviewed the Canvio Basics 2TB back in 2018 and the Canvio Advance earlier this year.

Specification

The Canvia Premium sits at the top of the pack and includes a premium aluminium case which does look sleek and smart.

As with the other models, this still uses a mechanical drive, so even though it has USB 3.0 the limiting performance factor will be the drive itself.

• 2.5″ external hard drive
• Aluminium finish
• SuperSpeed USB 3.0
• USB-powered
• Auto-backup software
• Password protection software
• Type-C adapter (Type-A to -C)
• Soft pouch included

Pricing

UK availability is not the best, on the drive is listed on Amazon, but it is not on Prime, so you will be stuck with a £6.99 delivery charge on top of the £142.93 asking price, for a total of £149.94.

In comparison, the Toshiba Canvio Basics 4TB is significantly cheaper at just £87.96, and the Toshiba Canvio Advance 4TB is a little over £103.

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Differences

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With the performance expected to be identical, you may be wondering what makes this worth 45% more than its counterpart, the Canvio Advance.

This model has an aluminium finish vs the glossy piano finish of the advanced.

This has a Type-C adapter (Type-A to -C) adaptor whereas the advanced does not.

Both come with auto-backup software and password protection software.

This has a three-year warranty whereas the advanced has a 2-year warranty

Performance

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This uses a mechanical drive, so the results are similar to the previous reviews, as expected.

Read speeds are slightly higher, write speeds are slightly lower. It is small enough that it could be multiple variables causing this. 4kiB Q8T8 perform quite a bit better in the write results and this appears to reflect in the real world usage too.

In real-world tests, for large files write and read speeds settled to about 130MB/s so around 6MB/s faster than the Advanced model

For small file transfers, the drive ended up performing much better than originally expected. When transferring the uploads folder of a WordPress directory the low end of the speeds was around 3MB/s, and it frequently hit 14MB/s.

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Overall

While the hard drive itself is excellent, it is a little difficult to recommend this over the Canvio Advance, which is almost identical but 30% cheaper. Performance is fractionally better, in particular if you are doing huge numbers of small file transfers you may find this preferable.

The two other main differences are the type-C adapter, and three vs two-year warranty. While these are nice additions, I don’t feel they are worth over £45. You can buy Type-C adaptors for around £5 on Amazon, so that leaves you paying £40 for a warranty.

For a company buying the device, the price difference may be less of a concern and the improved warranty could be advantageous, especially if the drive has heavy usage.

For your average consumer, you will be better off with the Advanced model, or in my opinion, better yet, just get the basic and use your own backup and encryption software.