Home > Consumer Reviews > Toshiba 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive HDDR320E04XW (Vivid White)

Got the 320 GB HDD for Christmas, at the same time my daughter got a 32 GB SanDisk thumbdrive. I kidded her how I could store ten times as many movies or songs as she could. I plugged the unit into my PC and it automatically initiated the "Backup Now EZ" software. It took a long time for the software to load and then the back-up was equally as slow (with no tracking utility to tell you how much longer the back-up would take). The next morning I wanted to manually copy key files to the drive, but it took more than five minutes using MyComputer just to see the drive. It was even worse copying files to it (transfer rates were like 50 KB/sec or worse). I tried the drive on my laptop, it was just as slow. I called Toshiba tech support and they said slow transfer speeds are a good sign the drive is defective. So I'm returing it. But I'm reluctant to buy another, because it didn't look like the drive would operate like a thumbdrive (my daughter poked fun at me that she had already backed every key file on her laptop to her new thumbdrive). The worst part is I can't delete any files or reformat the drive, so I'm having to return it my personal files on it.

Data corruption and disk read error has caused a loss of years of data on what was supposed to be a portable and secure storage device.

It is cheaply made and flimsy at best and the unexpected error message took me by suprise. When I purchased mine there were no bad reviews now more and more are popping up.

I do NOT reccomend this product - try to find something with more structure and reliability. I'm going back to mini flash drives.

I got this product as a gift from one of my friends who had some toshiba coupon or something. At first, I was in a opinion that seagate, WD ruled the external drives market and this cannot be good, but I was wrong.

Appearance : Super cool, Almost the same size as WD, but very LIGHT!!

Compatibility : Works well on my mac [OSX 10.5 ] as well on windows [Vista] and I got this working on a linux machine as well. [a ubuntu based linux]

Speed of transfer : Not as fast as WD passport[320Gb] but close enough. Write speed is a bit slow.

Backup/ restore : I'm yet to use these features.

I recommend this product, but it is kind of outdated with 320GB (so is WD). The 500 GB is $20 extra, but still pricey. - [...]

Have been using this drive for almost a month now. It can't match the transfer speed of an eSATA drive (no USB drive can), but it runs cool, quiet, and error-free. It is a great little drive for the money.

I purchased 4 of these 500GB drives. They are light and powered from the USB port. Since this drive does not need an external power supply you can never burn it by connecting to an incorrect power supply.