Features & Specifications
What you notice first about the Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive is how small the drive is. Inside the attractive, black aluminum, case is a 2.5” 200GB Toshiba notebook hard drive HDD. The entire chassis of the drive measures only 0.94” high x 3.5” wide x 5.6” deep and weighs only 17 ounces. The drive also has a 8MB buffer. Other capacities are available including 100GB, 120GB, 160GB and the 200GB unit I am testing here.

Typically, with external hard drives you need to plug them into a USB port to interface with your PC and plug them into the AC outlet to power the drive itself. Toshiba used a very power efficient notebook drive that can draw all of the power it needs directly from the PC USB port. That means all you need to power the drive and interface with the computer is one single USB port.

This makes the drive very easy to use and makes it very portable as well since you don’t have to take other cables with you when you go. Toshiba also packages NTI Shadow software with the drive to allow you to perform several types of data backups. The software is easy to use and set up and once configured you can have your data backed up daily, hourly or by the minute with the interval mode. You can also choose continuous backup, which gives you up-to-the-minute backups of your computer data.

Toshiba made the Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive durable as well with patent-pending shock mounting to help protect your data and the drive in case of a drop or accident. The Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive can work with both USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 ports, but an additional cable is required to power the drive if used on a USB 1.1 port. The USB 1.1 power cable is included with the drive.

Benchmarks
To see how well the Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive performs I connected it via a USB 2.0 port on my computer and used HD Tach and Sandra XI to run some tests on the drive. The first test up was HD Tach.

HD Tach
I ran the quick benchmark on HD Tach and it recorded the following information about the Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive; random access time was 15.4ms, CPU utilization was 3%, and the average read speed was 28.6MB/s.

Sandra XI
Next up was a couple of tests with Sandra XI, the first of which was the removable storage benchmark. This benchmark showed a combined index of 10112 operations/minute for the Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive and an endurance factor of 4.3.

The second Sandra test I ran was the file systems benchmark, which gave a drive index of 28 MB/s and a random access time of 9ms.

Final Thoughts
The Toshiba USB 2.0 200GB External Hard Drive isn’t the fastest external hard drive that you can buy, but it is certainly one of the easiest and most convenient drives to use and live with on a daily basis. The small dimensions and durability of the drive make it an ideal choice for those looking for an external hard drive to take with them for use with a notebook.

The drive is also small enough so it doesn’t take up much space on your desktop if you are the type that just needs more storage for your computer and don’t want to have to open the case up. The software included is easy to use and functions very well; I particularly like the up-to-the-minute backup option, which takes the worry of loosing works in progress out of the equation. The 200GB version I am testing here goes for about $179 online which makes it priced well in addition to performing well.