News - Toshiba unveils 2TB USB powered portable hard drives

[HEXUS]

The Toshiba Canvio 3.0 range provides more than a handful of storage.

Read more.

[Obscurity]

It's powered directly by the USB then? That'd be nice.

[zaph0d]

Pretty nice, but this sort of thing's been around for years just not with that kind of capacity.
There are USB-IDE adaptors available for a couple quid that let you use 2.5" IDE drives with no other power, I've been using one with a 160G drive as a pocket drive for the last 5 years now.

[TooNice]

Western Digital has done this already right? (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Passport-2TB.../dp/B005HMKKH4)

Well, it is handy. Since I mainly use laptops now, most of my recent local backups goes into 2.5" drives. Yeah 3.5" drives are much cheaper per GB, but I don't want a power brick.

[rabbid]

Yeah and there was a 1.5tb around 74.99 recently too
Good for us if more competition now and lower usb3 drive prices

[Funkstar]

So this is 2x 1TB drives in RAID-0 right?

The bigger news would be a 2TB 2.5" drive...

[gagaga]

So this is 2x 1TB drives in RAID-0 right?

The bigger news would be a 2TB 2.5" drive...

Nope, it will be a single drive. The WD passport linked above is a single drive (4 platters, 15mm). You can buy them with sata too - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Caviar-Green...485889&sr=8-30 (just don't try and fit it in a laptop).

[Funkstar]

ah, ok.

I didn't realise 2TB 2.5" drives were around yet. 15mm is pretty thick though...

[CampGareth]

Aw darnit, my laptop only takes 12.5mm drives I guess 1.5TB for a secondary drive will do (240GB SSD primary so I'm not fussed so long as I have somewhere to dump movies)

[MrJim]

With 4 platters, I'm amazed it can be USB powered. USB3 might supply enough power through 1 socket, but I would of thought USB2 might need two sockets for power?

[crossy]

Pretty nice, but this sort of thing's been around for years just not with that kind of capacity. There are USB-IDE adaptors available for a couple quid that let you use 2.5" IDE drives with no other power, I've been using one with a 160G drive as a pocket drive for the last 5 years now.

If you buy a Samsung SSD notebook kit you get a SATA-USB convertor for "free". Got one with a old laptop drive sitting in front of me - not pretty, but nice to have a 320GB "throwaway" storage.

With 4 platters, I'm amazed it can be USB powered. USB3 might supply enough power through 1 socket, but I would of thought USB2 might need two sockets for power?

If it's 2.5" then not necessarily. That said I'm not sure how much "headroom" there is for a large drive on a USB2 socket. E.g. I've got an HP 1TB drive (PC World sale) which works fine with a PC, but use it on a router in NAS mode and it makes the router flaky (although I'll admit that this might be a crappy Linksys router).

What I'd like now though is a large-capacity/cheap SSD. Doesn't have to be super fast, same as an HDD would do, but I could do with something silent and low power for NASing on my router.