Customer Reviews

Toshiba E05A050PAU2ER_C Store Art3 2.5Inch Red 500GB

5 star:		(96)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

This is a review for the Toshiba E05A064PAU2EW_C Store Art3 2.5" White 640GB as opposed to all the other sizes that seem to be bundled into the same review.
The item worked straight out of the box. The supplied Mini-USB cable connected straight up to my PC, and the drive was recognised immediately. No issues when swapping between my Works Lenovo and home Toshiba Satellite.
It's smaller and thinner than the Freecom one I have at work, and I prefer the mini USB to the hard wired connector in the Freecom drive. Easily slips into a pocket and is very portable. Disappointing it didn't come with even the most basic of protective cases, but I knew that before I got it.
The white case is easy to keep clean, although it does seem to attract dust, possibly due to static.
A white LED flashes when the drive is active, and stays on when it's not doing anything, so you know it's still connected.
It feels solid and robust, and there is a rubber buffer around the perimeter that should give some protection.
I haven't had it long enough to comment on reliability (which is the big drawback in these reviews perhaps) but I'm very happy with how it's worked out so far.

Like all drives, make sure you use 'safely remove hardware' before disconnecting from the USB

Edit: January 2012 - still working fine with no issues. I use it mainly for backing up files off my Laptop, on a weekly basis, and storage of photos.

Edit: December 2012 - still working fine with no issues. Still almost as good as new. A few minor scratches on the surface, but it's never had any kind of protective cover. I have increased rating to 5* because it has been pretty much perfect.

Love this little drive, solidly built and offers good protection for mobile applications. The added benefits with these types of mobile drives is that you don't need to mess around with external power supplies and the footprint is much smaller so the added expense is worth it.

From factory they are pre-formatted to NTFS. Two year warranty also for added peace of mind.

The only criticism is that it should be supplied with a case to minimise the top/bottom covers getting scratched etc.

I've been using Toshiba drives for quite sometime now and never had one fail. Much more reliable than Seagate/Western Digital in my experience.

What a great bit of tech.
I wanted a 1TB drive and was about to order a WD passport (I am a big WD drive fan) and was wary of this Tosh - only because I was happy with WD.
As I went to order there seemed to be quite a price premium for a WD, more than I was comfortable with, so I ordered one of these.
It's fab... Fast, quiet, up and running immediately. What more do you want - apart from maybe another one!
So did I, so I bought another PDQ - AND £20 cheaper than the first!
Now got two, and that's twice as good.
If you are at the stage of thinking about it - just buy it. It really is "Better than you think..."

Let me start by saying that I am not a typical computer user - we buy lots of hard drives for data imaging and analysis - we thrash hard drives to death and buy a lot of internal hard drives each month.

We regularly use portable hard drives for on-site work, connect them and thrash them constantly for hours on end. We've been through dozens of different makes and models before we found these Toshiba drives. They are great - extremely fast compared to other 2.5" drives with USB interfaces, and so far we haven't had a bad one. We currently have about thirty of these drives, and all work absolutely fine - as long as Toshiba keep manufacturing them, these are the only portable drives we will buy.

Sure, I know portable hard drives aren't the most sexy product on the market, but if you need reliable portable storage, these are the drives to get.

I always do lots of homework when purchasing any item, read reviews, check reliability, etc. My last Hard Drive stopped working almost as soon as it started. I never bothered to look into it. I thought 'well, it's all one there, all my photos and music should a disaster ever strike so it doesn't matter if its not updating any more.' How wrong was I! When my pc broke down, it was as good as useless. It had all the info on, but no way of extracting it. This little model is superb. Set to back up everything daily at 7pm and so easy to use, just plug and go. So much better than my last purchase (which was a Maxstor - and not cheap either!!) This one is cheaper, better and seems reliable. Took absolutely ages to transfer all the info first time. I started it at 3pm and it was only 3/4 of the way through by 9am the next day, but it took its time and did it excellently! No complaints whatsoever. Its smaller than I thought it would be. Its neat and matches my decor! I love it. Would recommend to anyone who knows very little about pcs but just wants something to plug in and get on with it. Five stars from me.

For the price, this device is amazing. 1TB of storage for less than £100 including delivery. I bought a couple of these from Amazon, and they are both perfect. They come with some included software (on the drives) for backing up your computer, but I simply deleted this as I use the windows 7 backup facility. The drive is plug and play, Windows 7 finding the appropriate drivers quickly and installing the same. The drive requires no external power supply (it uses the power derived from the USB port), so the drive is ideal for a laptop on the move. There are no doubt faster drives, but this is fast enough (e.g. to stream HD content) and for the price is hard to match.

When purchased in January 2012, the drive was being sold by Amazon at around the same price as about 6 months previously, although there was a period between when prices increased by 100-150% due to flooding in the Far East where they are are manufactured.

The Stor.E drives are plastic encased 2.5 inch units with a pattern of some sort printed on the top surface, the pattern varying with the different capacities on offer. They are also available in several colours so that it may be possible to roughly match one with your laptops. At present, 1TB is the highest capacity available, although the pricing differences between the sizes is rather slight, which makes this unit at the price currently offered excellent value. The plastic case has a rubberised band about 1/2 inch wide around its edge which should provide some impact protection should it be dropped small distances onto a carpeted floor, not that dropping hard drives is recommended.

The drive is USB 2.0 although many laptops now offer USB 3.0 which allows about 4-5 times the transfer speed in practice although it is in theory more than 10 times faster. The drive is self-powered, as is now common, and the lead is fairly short - about 40cm or about 14 inches, which is also normal. If you need it to be longer, you can either replace the lead with a longer one or add a short USB extension cable.

In use, the drive is normally silent and reading and writing speeds are fairly fast, which indicates that the drive may operate at 7200 rpm rather than the more usual 5400. Sensibly, Toshiba supplies the drives pre-formatted with NTFS rather than FAT32 which allows files larger than about 2GB to be stored. However NTFS may present some issues for Mac users, although there are utilities available to resolve the issue. They can also reformat the drive should they wish.

Toshiba hard drives were at one time a standard fitting in almost all laptops as few manufacturers offered 2.5 inch (or smaller units), but many other manufacturers now offer them. They are usually reliable although no hard drive will last forever, and any one unit can, in theory, fail at any time. I had one, now regarded as of limited usability as its capacity is so low by today's norms, which remained in continuous use until very recently when it failed after about 12 years.

The drive is supplied with a small software suite which, should you want or need to use it, provides data encryption of the drive's contents. Should you use the drive to store confidential data whether it be Credit Card and Bank details, for example, or business data or medical records that may cause problems for others should the drive be lost or stolen, that data would not then be readable without knowing the protective password that was used. Personally, this make better sense than the often poor backup solutions sometimes offered that may allow you to backup documents, photos and purchased music but little more.

Overall, a sensible combination of features, size and pricing. Recommended.

I recently had a major hard disk failure on my PC, and lost quite a bit of data as a result, even though I paid over £100 for a computer data recovery service. I've bought this Toshiba StorE so that I can maintain a much more regular backup of all my data, and it's cheaper than the data recovery service too!

It took several hours to do a complete backup last night for the first time, but I'm expecting that future delta backups will go a lot quicker. You can make two kinds of backups - one is a complete copy of the c: drive, and the other is whatever folders you choose to backup. The complete c: drive can be used to completely restore the whole system. I wish I had bought this drive before - it would have saved me a whole weekend re-installing windows and all my applications.

I've bought the hard case (iGadgitz Black Eva Hard Case) so I can safely carry the StorE around with me - it fits well, and is definitely worth getting.

It's early days, but I'm really impressed with this drive.

The thing about hard drives is the big unknown, how long will it last? Well, so far the Tosh has lasted around a month so that's not much use, sorry. My last backup drive was a pricey Lacie which only lasted about 24 months. That was the fifth hard drive which failed on me in about 8 months (both internal and external drives) so I doubt if there is any correlation between failure and brand, it's just the luck of the draw, don't trust any of 'em, backup, backup, backup.

As far as other matters go, the drive is small, looks good (who cares) and is very portable. The backup software supplied does a good job of providing flexible options on what to back up and when and has a very straightforward graphic user interface. I installed the software on both my main PC and my laptop. So if I lose the files on my main PC, I can download them on my laptop and carry on; I've tried it, it works. The software also lets you create a boot CD and backs up user selected files and the whole system. It works swiftly in the background. The drive seems easily fast enough for backup and loading big RAW pictures, although I haven't tried it with video.

The handbook is small, not very detailed and on the drive itself, as is the hardware, so it is necessary to make a copy on your computer hard drive straight away. I didn't and so ran into a spot of bother. The USB cable is very short, about 6 inches, so I extended it with another and fed it via a hub, having initially run the drive direct from the PC socket. It wouldn't run and I didn't have the handbook. I solved the problem by plugging the drive into my laptop and reading the manual from the disk. I was informed that it needs to be in a powered USB socket, so that was the problem, and once I got it connected direct into the computer again, all was well.

The only real problem I have found is that the drive is not supported on the Toshiba site where I intially went for the handbook, even though it states in the quick start guide that it is, Toshiba tell me it's too new!!!?? So sorry but that has cost it one star (would prefer a half to be fair) for inadequate support and not supplying a printed manual.

However, nice simple piece of kit which works straight out of the box and doesn't need a degree in computer science to operate. I should buy it if I were you, it seems like good value at the moment.

I have been using a slightly older version of this drive for some time, be it the 500GB version, and was so impressed with it I decided to purchase the larger 1TB version for another computer I use. Toshiba really seems to be a brand that produces excellent products and seems to have its finger on the trigger as to what people actually want. I have several of their products and not one has failed me. This unit is so pocket size, it is hard to imagine its data capacity is so big, slightly lower in reality than 1TB, actual 931GB, but that is going to last me for some time. The one concept I really like about this drive is that it is just plug it in and go, there is no messing about with having to have a separate power unit as it takes its power from the USB connection, thus this makes it a truly portable device. I use it to back up my computers 1TB drive and then just simply remove it from the machine, thus I can carry all my data with me all of the time. It also comes with back-up software which I use to back up the OS of my computer, however, I back up my data files with a simple copy program such that I can view them on media players and the like, as this leaves then in an unencrypted form.