Toshiba Canvio Flex 4TB Portable Hard Drive, Warm Silver

The Toshiba Canvio Gaming 4TB is the eighth of the nine 4TB external drives in this guide, and it is the most expensive of the lot at £169.94 — £80.03 more than the £89.91 drive at the bottom of the list. It is also the clearest example of the problem this guide keeps running into. The product name calls it a "Portable 2.5'' External Hard Drive". The spec table on the same Amazon page gives its hard disk form factor as "3.5 Inches". A 3.5-inch desktop drive and a 2.5-inch portable are not the same object, and only one of those two fields can describe what arrives in the box.

The read speed figure is the second number that does not hold together. The listing states 445 Bytes Per Second, on a drive it also gives as 5 Gigabits Per Second over USB and 5400 RPM. Eight bits make a byte, so 445 of them per second is roughly 3.5 kilobits per second — nowhere near a usable figure for a 4TB drive, and the same page quotes media speed at 100 MB/s. What does survive is the capacity and the gaming features: 4TB, an "Always-On" firmware mode, shock sensors, and compatibility with most PlayStation, Xbox and PC consoles, with the Sony PlayStation 5 named specifically. Toshiba also claims the 4TB model holds up to 100 titles, though the asterisked note explaining what an "average game" is trails off in the listing itself. Everything on this page comes from that Amazon listing — we have not tested the drive.