Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3194 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Toshiba
• Model: PX1396U-3T01
• Released on: 2009-01-19
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .0 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Add extra storage with Toshiba. In a stylish design, Toshiba USB 2.0 External Hard Drives are the perfect storage solution for your digital videos, photos and music files. The 3.5" USB hard drives may be used in a horizontal, or vertical orientation on your desktop. These high speed hard drives, ranging from 160GB to 1TB, provide excellent performance, and with their fanless design, are near-silent in operation. Connecting via USB, they are a great way to backup your files for future recovery, or as a storage solution for large media files such as HD video.

Box Contains

Customer Reviews

First Impressions
Just a quick set of first impressions. The drive arrived this morning. I have a Macbook Pro and a PC running XP. I had read some of the reviews here about formatting issues, so was expecting a day of watching progress bars and tweaking partitions to get it to play ball. Nothing of the sort. Took it out of the box, plugged it into my Mac, worked a charm. Copied a few files across, no problem. NO NEED TO REFORMAT. Literally plug and play. Then plugged it into my PC. Again NO REFORMATTING, plug and play, copied across the files from my Mac then loaded on some from the PC.Transfer speeds are pretty respectable. It looks great. Yes it does have a bright blue LED on the front -- that could get irritating in a dark room, but it's a pretty easy fix (e.g. cover the LED). Oh, and it's remarkably quiet -- no fan noise, and very quiet spin, read, and seek sounds. So all in all, I'm one happy bunny! This is a great bit of kit: for my purposes this works and looks like the perfect 1TB drive. N.B. If something disastrous happens in the near future, I'll update this review. But I doubt it; it feels like it's very well made.

Works with a Mac too
Glad I chose this over the Maxtor 1 TB Basics Desktop USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for the same price because the brushed aluminium case looks great next to my Mac. This case is quite compact and feels solid.

The Amazon product description, Toshiba Europe web site and user manual do not mention Mac compatibility, and even say Windows is required, yet it works fine for me on a Mac Mini. The drive came formatted as FAT32 (PC and Mac) and was recognised by my Mac straight away, then I partitioned and reformatted as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) using Disk Utility.

There is no fan, so it is very quiet and the little power brick outputs a single 12V 2A supply, so hopefully there is less to go wrong than the 5/12V brick (Iomega/Lacie part ACU057A-0512) that just failed on my other 1 TB external drive. I like the proper toggle on/off switch on the back, to be used after unmounting the disk or shutting down the computer. There is also a USB-B socket and a standard coaxial power connector socket on the back. As well as the short USB cable, it came with both a UK 3 pin mains plug and a 2 pin plug. The box says it was made in Slovakia and uses a SATA drive.

The single LED is red at startup then a very bright blue when running and it flickers to indicate disk activity.
It is currently saying it will take 4 hours to transfer my 350GB EyeTV recorded program archive from a firewire external drive to this new Toshiba over USB2.

I've only had it a few hours but so far would highly recommend this drive.

Good solid drive...Does what it says on the tin!
I have just bought the new Toshiba 1TB drive and it seems like a good value for money device. The only complaint I have, is that it was formatted for FAT32 rather than NTFS. However a quick format only took a few seconds to convert it.

I'd also like to say that as well as working with Windows it also works fine with Linux and it's very handy to use RSYNC to copy all the data over from my older 80GB drive.

It's nice that it has a manual switch at the back for switching off and the grey matches my old Toshiba laptop. Data transfer speed on my PC is really limited by the USB2 ports I have, so I can't really give it a fair speed test that said it seems pretty nippy. If I have any reliability problems, I will update this review.