SSD prices keep falling, yet when you need terabytes on the cheap, helium-filled dreams give way to old-school platters. Toshiba’s Canvio Basics 4TB dangles a headline price of about £97 in the UK – that’s roughly 2.4 p per gigabyte at the time of writing. Bargain? Possibly. Let’s crack it open (figuratively – the enclosure’s fused shut) and find out.
Specs at a glance
- Capacity: 4 TB (NTFS-formatted)
- Interface: USB 3.2 Gen 1 Micro-B (backward-compatible with USB 2.0)
- Drive inside: Toshiba MQ04UBB400, 5400 RPM, 128 MB cache, drive-managed SMR
- Dimensions: 109 × 78 × 19.5 mm; Weight: 217 g
- Max theoretical bus bandwidth: 5 Gbit/s (625 MB/s) – the mechanics are the real bottleneck
- Warranty: 2-year limite
- Box contents: 50 cm Type-A–to–Micro-B cable, pre-loaded PDF manual
Design & build – matte black minimalism
If tech design were a coffee order, the Canvio Basics would be “just a filter, cheers.” Matte black ABS, soft-touch but fingerprint-friendly, with a lone white activity LED. No rubber feet, no fancy heat fins, no USB-C love – just the ageing Micro-B port we all secretly hate but still have cables for. At 19.5 mm thick it’s chunkier than 1 TB brethren, though still jeans-pocketable if you fancy square hips.
Setup – plug-and-(mostly-)play
Windows 10/11 spots the NTFS partition instantly; a quick re-label and you’re hoarding media in under a minute. macOS users will need to nuke the NTFS and re-format to APFS or exFAT – par for the course. There’s no bundled backup, encryption or flashy dashboard; Toshiba figures you can grab free File History or Time Machine yourself.
Performance – adequate, not athletic
CrystalDiskMark numbers are good: 146 MB/s sequential reads and 154 MB/s. Large-file copies (a 10 GB 4K Blu-ray rip) took about 80 seconds in their testing – respectable for a 2.5-incher spinning at 5400 RPM. Random small-file writes dip sharply once the modest cache fills, a side-effect of the shingled (SMR) recording method – fine for backups, less so for Lightroom catalogs or Steam library shuffling.
Thermals were mild in long transfers (mid-30s °C in an open office) and noise sat at whisper-quiet 24 dB. Vibration through a wooden desk is minimal; a rubber mat kills it entirely.
Gaming & console use
Xbox Series X/S and PS5 will treat the Canvio as cold storage only – you can archive next-gen titles but must copy them back to internal NVMe before playing. PS4, Xbox One and Switch handle games direct from the drive just fine, albeit with HDD-class load times.
Price & competition
At £97-£110, Toshiba undercuts WD’s 4 TB My Passport (around £115) and Seagate’s One Touch (circa £105). Pay £30 more and you can snag a 4 TB SATA SSD enclosure – triple the speed, but not bus-powered and nowhere near as cheap per gig. If you simply need a vault, the Toshiba is the frugal pick.
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