Toshiba STORE Steel Series 2.5" 250GB USB Drive Review

USB storage is becoming increasingly popular. We take a look at a drive from Toshiba that comes from their STORE Steel Series range.

Product on Review: Toshiba STORE Steel 2.5″ 250GB
Manufacturer: Toshiba
Street Price: £43.23 At time of review

Mobile Hard Disk Drives have gathered popularity in recent times. In fact it is only in the past few years that things have really picked up and this is due to the size of portable media being introduced. Once upon a time 3.5” solutions were the only available products on the market and carrying this size of device around with you is more of a hindrance than a solution. Such a large device can’t fit in your pocket, is difficult to transport and in some cases may even be heavy. But now we have a new generation of portable media hard disk drives – faster in speed and smaller in size.

The drive we are to look at today comes in at just 2.5” which is small enough to fit into your pocket. What’s more is that, 2.5” isn’t the smallest we can go to in this category of product either. In the last 12 months we have seen devices as small as 1.8” hit the market – the size of a credit card.

The Toshiba drive we are looking at today comes from the STOR.E Steel Series – a sleek, elegant portable stainless steel media solution with a choice of four colours and up to 640GB capacity. The drive we are looking at today has a capacity of 250GB. Before we take a look at this product in depth let’s see what Toshiba have to say about this product line.

Toshiba’s take

A slick, modern and minimalist design for one of the most elegant products in its category, the Store Steel hard drives offer a full range of exclusive and vibrant colours!
Main Features
• 6.35cm / 2.5” mobile HDD with up to 640 GB
• Elegant mirror finish with 4 colors available
• Y-Cable USB 2.0 Hi-Speed

Technical Specifications

Packaging and Bundle

The STORE Steel Series comes in a clear box allowing you to see the showcased product inside, there are some technical details on the reverse side – apart from this the packaging does just that. Getting into the box can be quite tricky as it’s not very clear how to get inside. Removing the outer shell reveals the hard drive on a pivoted stand. Toshiba have done a good job in showing off the STORE Steel Series. This looks like a premium product.

Inside the box there are some other items that we should mention. Inside you get –

• USB Cable
• Leather Pouch
• Instructions Manual
• Warranty Leaflet

The product may be stainless steel but the likelihood is that it will still come into contact with things that may damage it such as fluids or sharp objects – with the STORE having a polished finish you want to keep it clean and well kept, especially if you are planning to transfer important data over. The addition of the leather pouch is therefore a welcome accessory and a very good idea.

Closer look

After peeling off the protective plastic film on either side the STORE looks unbelievably lustrous. If you are after a minimalistic look, then this is it. The only text to be found on this hard drive is the ‘Toshiba’ stamp in the bottom corner.

Being steel in material the STORE is hard wearing and feels cool to handle. As I mentioned in the introduction, this drive oozes portability – it fits into the pocket no problem. Looking at the profile of the drive, it measures just over 1cm which is wafer thin. A typical drive of this class would usually be black and plastic, breaking out of the norm Toshiba have come up with a great solution here I really like the look and feel of this drive.

On the bottom side of the STORE there is a USB socket to connect the drive up to a computer via the provided cable. At the opposite end there is an LED, giving you feedback as to whether the drive has power or not. A nice blue colour illuminates from this LED when connected via USB.

The drive fits perfectly into the leather pouch – worth mentioning is the quality of this leather pouch. It hasn’t been thrown together without any design concept or thought process. It feels like quality.

With our examination now over, it’s time to put the STORE through a few tests to gage its overall performance.

Performance

With portable drives, performance may not be at the forefront of your requirements. Usually people look to design and warranty as important factors rather than execution. Nevertheless we will still run a short range of tests on the Toshiba STORE by means of Lavalys EVEREST Ultimate. Inside EVEREST there are various benchmarking tools, the tool we will use is the Disk Benchmark facility. This allows us to analyse linear read times, random read times and so forth.

System Setup
Processor AMD X6 1055T 2.8GHz
MotherboardASUS M4A89TD PRO AM3
Memory 4GB Mushkin 10666 9-9-9-24 DDR3
Graphics Card MSI 8800GTX 869MB
Hard Disk x2 Samsung SATA-II 300GB

Compared to our SATA HDD the STORE delivers some good USB performance. Most notably the read and linear tests weren’t poles apart and there is some good average read access to be had from the STORE drive. For a USB drive, the STORE delivers some decent performance.

Conclusion

There are a lot of portable drives now on the market, and a large group of manufacturers to choose from. There are only a few I would trust though and Toshiba are one of the companies. Such a market requires manufacturers to pull out all the stops and develop products that are worthy of attention over others and I think the STORE does indeed achieve this.

The STORE looks and feels fantastic, this is one of its best attributes. Preserving such great looks is something you want to be considering, so the inclusion of the leather pouch is a valuable asset – it finishes off the product nicely.

Performance-wise the STORE responds well, EVEREST determined some extremely fast access times for a USB drive. The SATA drive test results for random read and linear weren\’t that far off from the STORE results, so for a USB drive this is at the high end of the scale performance-wise.

The price is the only drawback that I can find with this product is the price. For a similar price you can expect to be able to purchase at least a 500GB drive. But what I can say that this product is excellent quality and performs well, so if you want something a little different, then it’s worth the surplus.

This is without doubt a premium product that is worth of the Vortez Gold Award.

Pros
+ Very stylish
+ Feels good quality
+ A good package
+ Decent performance

Cons
– Priced higher than competing equivalents