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Toshiba outs Canvio Slim portable drive: 500GB, $115 and just 9mm thick

Toshiba reaches out to the Ultrabook set with a 9mmthick Canvio Slim portable hard drive

It turns out that if you take an Ultrabook-style 7mm hard drive and put it in a sleek enclosure, you end up with a portable HDD that's barely any bigger, thicker or heavier than a smartphone. Toshiba guessed this might happen, and so it came up with a new addition to its Canvio range: the Canvio Slim, which sports 500GB of PC- and Mac-compatible luggage room, uses a single USB 3.0 connection for data and power, and is encased in either "graphite-black" or silver brushed aluminum. Look for it in stores from October priced around $115, including a three-year warranty.

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Toshiba outs Canvio Slim portable drive: 500GB, $115 and just 9mm thick originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hands-on with G-Technology’s Mac-friendly, USB 3.0-packing G-Drive slim

When we set out to get hands-on with a hard drive, of all things, you can bet we're going to do more than just pick it up and marvel at how lightweight it is. Here at a gdgt event in New York City, we spotted G-Technology's new Mac-friendly USB 3.0 drives on display and immediately got to work running some speed tests on the thinnest of the bunch, the G-Drive slim. Though transfer rates varied, both download and upload speeds tended to hover around 95 MB/s, and that was after ten or so runs in the Blackmagic benchmark. (Next time we'll bring a USB 2.0 cable to test a backward-compatible setup.)

According to a company rep staffing the event, the other drives in the lineup, the G-Drive mini, mobile and mobile USB 3.0, should deliver similar performance. Really, the differences here are in the specs: the G-Drive mobile and mini have FireWire ports, and all three offer more storage (750GB to 1TB, as opposed to 500GB for the slim). Design-wise, all the drives on display here seemed fairly impervious to scratches, and that rubberized band around the edges also makes the devices feel a little less delicate. On that point, you can check out the hands-on photos to see what we're talking about, though you'll just have to take our word on the speed testing.

Zach Honig contributed to this report.

Hands-on with G-Technology's Mac-friendly, USB 3.0-packing G-Drive slim originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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