14 DAY TRIAL // Portable hard drives are for today's personal computers what USB flash drives were to the PCs of five to 10 years ago. Which is to say, they are popular enough that all makers of magnetic storage units worth their salt have a branded series of such items.
Of course, right now there's only Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba, all of whom, especially the first two, have lots of different customers.
Then again, despite its rather distant third spot on the HDD industry, Toshiba is no less active than the others.
Case in point, Toshiba has officially introduced the Canvio Slim II portable hard disk drive series.
It is made of ultraportable hard disk drives of up to 1 TB in capacity, although that choice of words may be misleading.
After all, there are really just two drives available, one of 500 GB priced at $114.99 / €86 – 114.99 and one of 1 TB at $149.99 / €112 – 149.99.
Toshiba says the Canvio Slim II Portable HDD is “ideal for customers that carry an Ultrabook or other super-mobile PC.”
We suppose that owners of the ASUS VivoBook S551 would, indeed, find the Canvio useful, but the same can be said about any USB-connected storage drive, especially when USB 3.0 is used.
Toshiba isn't without its surprises though. One of them is the Canvio Slim II's ability to grant “instant access to important files - whether at home or away.”
When linked to a web-connected PC, the HDD lets owners access everything on it from anywhere, at home or at work, or wherever else.
Frequently used files are even duplicated in the cloud (10 GB cloud storage space provided with each Canvio Slim II), making sharing easier.
What's more, Canvio Slim II can back up files straight from tablets, smartphones or other iOS or Android devices (an app needs to be installed though).
Toshiba Canvio Slim II is housed inside a black or silver aluminum case and it is formatted NTFS for Windows PC. A NTFS driver for Mac is included in the bundle.
