Canivo Gaming Portable Storage – Bang for Buck
HDD space is a never-ending problem these days, especially in the era of 100g+ video games. Our computers and consoles are constantly running out of space and the need to do the old hard drive shuffle is very real. As a result, portable HDDs have become a nice and simple solution to solve those space issues. But not all HDDs are created equal and sometimes the performance hit is not worth the effort of buying one. Toshiba has realised this and released the Canivo Gaming range of portable HDDs to make sure you can get the best performance possible on your gaming systems.
The Canivo range comes in three sizes 1TB, 2TB and 4TB, but what is perhaps the most impressive thing is the price. The 4TB retails for $145, that’s a lot of space for that sort of money. Initially, I was worried that the low price point was an indication of a low-quality product, but rest assured this isn’t the case. I have been using a 1TB model for the last couple of weeks and I am very impressed with what I discovered.
First impressions are great. It is a sleek black unit built out of durable plastics that feels like it is up to the task of getting shoved in bags, dropped on desks and slapped into different PCs. Durable is a word that comes to mind, especially when compared to other cheap portable solutions I have used. The whole unit is plug and play and both Windows and my consoles had no issues in detecting the drive. Everything about the unit tells me it is well-built and ready to go.
As for speeds, it is still a mechanical drive so you won’t get speeds to match SSD drives. That being said the performance was certainly good enough for just about everything I threw at it. It played console games (PS4/Xbox One) without issue and in some instances loading the games quicker than the internal drive did. I tested it on both my Xbox Series X and my PS5 and didn’t have a single issue with last-gen games, making it ideal for people with large game collections or Gamepass subscribers. On my PC it was just as impressive, taking me about 15 minutes to copy 200 gigs of data. To put this in perspective, my workhorse Seagate portable HDD takes about 25 minutes to do the same thing.
Of course with a portable HDD, you can’t use it to play PS5 or Xbox Series titles, so if that is all you are playing, the Canivo is probably not for you. But it will handle all your previous gen titles or any PC needs with ease and it will take a beating in doing so. This is probably the best portable HDD I have ever used in terms of bang for buck so it should certainly be at the forefront of your thinking if you are looking to extend your storage for either PC or gaming. The Canivo Gaming HDDs are well built, speedy and come at a great price. What more could you want?
Specifications
Interface – USB 3.2 Gen 1 (USB 2.0 compatible)
Enclosure – Sleek Black Finish
Max. Transfer Rate – 5.0 Gbit/s
File system – exFAT
Power – USB Bus Power (max. 900mA)
System requirements – Formatted exFAT for Playstation / Xbox (Please check the compatibility list.) Windows ® 10, Windows® 8.1, macOS vl0.15 / vl 0.14 / vl 0.13 I One free port of USB Type-A
Warranty – 2 Years.
