Toshiba 4TB Canvio Basics Portable External Hard Drive,USB
Toshiba 4TB Canvio Basics Portable External Hard Drive,USB 3.2. Gen 1, Black (HDTB440EK3AA)
HIGH TRANSFER SPEEDS
Powered by USB 3.2 Gen 1 technology, these portable hard drives are much faster than – but still compatible with – USB 2.0 devices, allowing for speedy transfer when organising your files.
YOUR DATA IN SAFE HANDS
With over 50 years of experience in hard drive technology and unrivalled quality standards, Toshiba portable hard drives provide a reliable and secure place for your files, wherever you go.
EASY PLUG-AND-PLAY OPERATION
Simple plug-and-play operation. Ready to use with Microsoft Windows and no software installation required. Intuitively drag and drop files to and from your PC or laptop.
 |  |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capacities | 4 TB | 2 TB | 1TB | 4 TB | 2 TB | 1TB | 2 TB | 1TB | 4 TB | 2 TB | 1TB |
| Casing | Elegant Silver Finish | Sleek Black Finish | Aluminium Finish | Matte Finish |
| Colour | silver | black | silver, black | black |
| Windows Compatible | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Mac Compatible | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tablet Compatible | ✓ | |||
| Game console compatible | ✓ | |||
| USB-A cable | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| USB-C cable | ✓ | |||
| Auto-backup software & password protection | ✓ |
| Weight: | 217 g |
| Dimensions: | 7.8 x 10.9 x 1.95 cm; 217.5 Grams |
| Brand: | Toshiba |
| Model: | HDTB440EK3CA |
| Colour: | 4TB |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | Toshiba |
| Dimensions: | 7.8 x 10.9 x 1.95 cm; 217.5 Grams |
Good solid storage on a small form factor, good brand you can trust, and still cheap! What you want more?
I tried several times , but couldn’t connect to my MacBook
Would have preferred USB c but when you have a limited budget you can’t have everything
Bought as backup storage it works well with no issues to date.
Bought it to plug into the TV to record the odd programme and so far so good.
Small size. Connection lead just long enough to place on table from usb port reliable. Does not crash. Fast enough operating speed for accessing stores items
The supplied connector lead is only about 12 inches long. My computer is showing that there is only a total capacity of 3.63 Tb rather then the 4 Tb advertised. However, compared with a much older Samsung 1Tb external harddrive the file transfer of videos and music was very quick. In the few days I have had this drive it works very well.
Transferring media over was very quick, and once it was plugged into the back of her telly, the response rate was as good as anything I’ve used before.
The nice thing is, it’s a nice piece of tech in a very attractive suit. You don’t feel like you need to tuck it out of sight anywhere.
Definitely a recommended purchase.
I had to retire an ageing, and creaky drive.
This my second Tosh — so I know from experience I can rely on it. All I ask is ‘plug and forget’. The format is neat, the self-power saves yet another 12v adaptor, and the capacity is stupendous (I remember being blown away, replacing floppies with a half-gigabyte drive in the early 1990s).
What’s not to like?
Read some reviews, bought this to save programmes (record) from TV, Sony Bravia. Plugged cable in, switched on and after selecting the device on the TV, boom, simple as, we can now record TV programmes, simple to use menu, simple to find recorded items.
Can recommend this as a great storage device, especially if using for recording TV programmes, simple and easy use, ours was virtually plug and play.
I formatted this into NTFS, and its worked without issue.
I take the following precautions, without fail – these will help with ensuring your drive has a long life span:
-I always eject before disconnecting. If you dont do this you’ll corrupt your drive.
-I dont leave the drive connected for long periods if I dont use it (i.e. avoid idle running).
-I only use a direct cable connecting the drive to my Mac. I would avoid using multiconnector cables (where multiple devices are connected using the same cable), as this may cause connection issues and may cause issues with your drive in the long run.
-I handle the drive with care, and never drop or cause other mechanical stress on it. Pack carefully if you transport it.
copied 900GB of online courses in two hours from my 6yr old laptop as I was lacking space, keep in mind its not Toshibas fault if your amazon driver doesn’t get the drive to you in one piece because he’s racing to get more money, drive speed varies between 27-120mbs/sec and drops significantly if you copy low files such as software files. If you don’t want to bang your head against the wall and really need a backup, consider flash burning Acronis software on an 8Gb USB stick and clone your old hard drive/low lifetime remaining SSD on a new drive.
ALWAYS BACKUP TO MORE THAN ONE DEVICE! If your files exist in just one place then they are at risk no matter what the storage system is.
Anyway, I’ve found this to be a very simple storage system. Just plugged it into my PC and use it just like any other drive. It’s quiet, fast and so far I’ve had no problems with any of them I’ve bought or the files I’ve stored on them.
Being so small it’s very easy to transport and the case feels solid and durable, though obviously it’s not a good idea to bang it about. The drive comes with a standard 3.0 USB cable which should be sufficient for most usage.
I’ve not rated the Tech Support option simply because I haven’t needed to use them.
Very happy with my Canvios and I can strongly recommend them.
I have bought four of these Toshiba drives of varying capacities, this latest one being 4TB. I have one that has failed, I used it as a TV backup and it functioned perfectly but I hardly use it so I disconnected it to use as as PC backup instead but Windows or iOS doesn’t recognise it. My guess is that the TV formatted it as an Android device and Windows doesn’t recognise the Android formatting, it doesn’t appear in Explorer so I can’t reformat it as FAT or NTFS so that’s my fault not the disc. I am puzzled by some of the scathing poor reviews of this and other brands like Western Digital and Seagate which have always been good brand names? It leads me to suspect they may be ‘fake’ reviews for whatever purpose maybe to steer people to other products? All I can say is that the Toshiba ones are first class.
I have three of these
Everytime I need more storage and when I search for options they always come up with a great price/customer review ratio so always been inclinde to buy
I would give it 5 stars but I’ve given it four on the basis unsure of longevity of a harddrive I’ve had my first one for about 2-3 years and I can still use it
My second one for about 1-2 years and its working well and this latest I hope will last just as long if not longer
Great bit of ki
A nice high capacity portable drive. It’s built fairly solid and I’ve had no issues with its performance or build quality so far.
My only gripe is that the drive will put itself to sleep after a short while if not used. This is built into the drive and cannot be turned off. It only takes a few seconds for it to spin back up, but it’s frustrating when working from the drive if you have to wait a couple of seconds for video playback to start, etc, and only serves to add more time to the already tedious process of video editing when working from the drive. It also means the drive might go to sleep and interrupt a process if left unattended whilst doing a background process like generating proxies or rendering.
MacOS already has the option to put drives to sleep when not in use, and I’m sure Windows will have a similar option too, so I’m not sure why Toshiba built this into the drive.
Extremely good value for money and very small but the trade off is that I wouldn’t use this for anything other than desk top and certainly wouldn’t like to trust important data to if I was carrying it around in my pocket. I doesn’t inspire me to believe that anything other than total loss would ensue if you walloped this by accident or dropped it. Maybe if you’re a very careful person that never makes a mistake or is in any way a little clumsy from time to time I would trust it to carry non-essential data inside a laptop bag inside another padded bag. As I’m non of these things then I’ll stick to the other ones I use for transit that have a DoD impact rating,
Having said that it really is fast and small and I’ve never had an issue at all but never left my desk top or drawer.
I like to keep my system backups local and completely under my control. The price of these devices means that I can now keep two system backups that could, if necessary, be plugged into a new replacement system if that ever became necessary. Cloud backups are fine as long as you don’t lose internet access. If your system is totally trashed (fire, flood, theft, misadventure etc) you can’t easily access the cloud to get the good stuff back to your new or rebuilt hardware. I reckon I could plug one of my backup devices into a new or rebuilt system and get back to where I was in a few hours. It could also be useful for setting up a new system upgrade. Installing this disk with Win10 was really just a case of plugging it in and looking for it in WIN 10’s “This PC”
This will show you that ease of use, connectivity and user experience is brilliant.
These are fantastic little drives and i use all mine as a back up to all my valuable digital photos and videos.
Let me tell you for all functions and value on these are about the best you can get for your money and are very reliable to boot.
ONE THING… The latest one i got was the 4TB. All others have rubber feet so when i am swapping around and using these to backup, this is the only one that DOESNT have rubber feet ? Why ? This mean it easily slides around on anything but rough surfaces. Its a minor gripe but it has to be said. Hence 4 Stars and not 5.
Otherwise fantastic little drives !
Decent build quality. Trusted brand in the hard disk industry. Respectable 2 year warranty.
Effortless and quick setup with no glitches (Windows 7).
Transfer speeds on USB 3 as fast as expected.
Nice, subtle blue light is especially useful — stays on when connected, blinks during activity, and goes off when safely removed via operating system before physical disconnection.
512GB meets my data backup needs. (Also, safer having two small disks rather than one large disk, because if there is a device failure there is a second device for rescue. It all depends on how much you value your data, I suppose.)
Cable is decent quality at 43cm long, which is neat and for me is preferable to a longer, flimsier cable for this type of application.
Rounded corners a plus point. Minor gripe (hence not 5 stars) is the lack of a protective pouch.
Very quiet.
Will be used for taking regular backups and not to be always connected, so expect durability and reliability not to be an issue, but it is too soon to tell.
I was looking for really big space as my laptop has been having a lot of issues lately and i wanted to back-up everything in one place (especially my university work). I wanted something durable that could last me for years. I’ve found it! and i don’t have to look any further! This is a really nice External Hard Drive, it’s really sturdy and nice, and surprising how light this thing is considering how much space it holds (I bought the 4TB)!
It’s really easy to use, you just plug it in, and you can drag and drop or copy and paste your things over! I highly recommend purchasing this! Plus, 4TB is going to last me a very long time, i don’t see myself using that much space anytime soon, so it’s definitely getting its money worth out of it.
It came packaged really well! I’ve added an image to this review to show that and it also comes with its own 3.0 USB cable. It is indeed quite short, but this isn’t a problem for me as I need it at home more than out and about, it’s perfect length for being stationary/having it next to your computer/whatever you’re using it on. I haven’t taken it out anywhere yet (portable wise), but it’s quite small so no doubt it could fit in a small bag/deep pockets!
The delivery was extremely speedy as well – it arrived 4-5 days earlier than it was meant to! It looks exactly like the pictures shown and has a lovely blue light when connected to your device, it flashes when things are being transferred, which i think is great.
Overall, I am extremely happy with my purchase and I definitely recommend buying. Thank you Toshiba for such a wonderful product!
Some competing drives come with NTFS drivers for Mac, but this one doesn’t. Indeed on the box it states reformatting is required for use with macOS. Reformatting is a good idea anyway if you are only using Macs, to enable encryption. The technical specs on the Amazon product page are a bit askew: RAM size 4TB, Hard Drive Size 4GB. The drive I have is 4TB, which after formatting with APFS – most suitable for Mojave – yields 3.6TB of usable space. That is quite a sizeable difference from 4TB, but more or less what one expects from manufacturers. But it does tend to grate after all these years of the one million byte megabyte fantasy.
I am wondering about the age of the drive, or whether it has been tested with later versions of macOS, as the box is marked macOS v10.12, 10.11, and 10.10. macOS 10.12 is quite old now. macOS v10.13 was released 18 months ago, and that is not on the box.
The drive itself is almost silent and has very reasonable transfer rates for a USB drive. It comes with a 2 year limited warranty, but no information on whether you need to register at the time of purchase. I have emailed Toshiba to find out.
The drive arrives well packaged in heavy bubble ‘tubes’ – like ordinary bubble wrap but in the form of long bubbles.
Overall it’s a good purchase.
Still using this drive and has been reliable and a great buy from Amazon. Recently after receiving a VIP code for a PlayStation 5 I sold my PlayStation 4 and now on the latest gen. I hooked everything up the same but this time you want to plug the Toshiba hard drive to the back of the PlayStation 5 as it has x2 USB 3.0 ports. I’ve copied some games to it and it’s still been fine and have been running PlayStation 4 games on it such as Wolfenstein Alt Collection, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1 & 2, Serious Sam etc and has worked flawlessly.
This drive will also store your PlayStation 5 games on it but won’t be able to run them as it’s not a SSD so not compatible for that but for storage and being able to run those PlayStation 4 Disc and Digital games it’s still a top gem.
At the end of the day it’s an external hard drive and like any other 3.0 with a usb they will work for Playstation or Xbox. If they have their own format tool which they do you won’t have any problems. The first thing that comes up once you’ve connected it and powered on the console a message saying “Not Compatable”. Well it actually is it’s just that it’s not formatted and more like it’s been pre formatted to NTFS which is what windows use. Once you have formatted it, it takes literally seconds that’s it.
Once you go to your system settings scroll down to Devices, USB Storage Devices, External USB 3.0 Toshiba. There it will ask you to format to an extended storage.
Please note, once you have done this the preferred drive will be the external one, I’d suggest to use the internal hard drive for main storage as it will be more cooled from the fan inside the console.
If you have say The Last Of Us which is about 50GB move that over to the external drive as there isn’t anymore updates for that game now. While on the subject keep games like Red Dead Redemption 2 on the main drive I only say as with new games your going to get a lot of updates like still Grand Theft Auto 5 and running the external drive constantly with the updates ploughing at it every day or so wouldn’t be good for it.
I haven’t tried any of the games running off it yet but from what I read online they run faster apparently.
I would recommend a 4TB hard drive as after the format with the systems own volume putting its own data on your left with about 3.5TB