Toshiba Canvio Advance external hard disk and Debian Linux.

My Western Digital 2 TB “EasyStore” finally crashed after 5 years.

Luckily, I back up things that are important in numerous places, so I lost very little that was ultimately that important, but when I purchased a replacement, the best deal I could find (with my spouse’s 10% Walmart discount and my 5% back in points from the credit card people on Walmart’s website) was a 4 TB Toshiba Canvio Advance.

The review of reliability (as far as drives go) was hard to determine, as the BackBlaze article I was able to gloss over said they appear to be at least as reliable as other major brands, but that they just didn’t have as many to compare. Fair enough. For 2.9 cents per GB, it made sense to try one out. So that’s what I’m using now.

I formatted it to Ext4 for use with Linux, as non-native NTFS volumes require third party userspace drivers, because of all of Microsoft’s nasty patents and if Microsoft’s own repair tools for NTFS can sometimes themselves corrupt NTFS volumes, even though NTFS dates back to 1993, I’m not hopeful for third party tools. You get better reliability and I/O efficiency, and better CPU usage stats, out of native file systems. Period. And while NTFS being compatible with Windows is an argument for NTFS, it’s not that much of one. With Linux having a kernel module for ExFAT now with read/write support and a tools package, you’d probably be better off with that if cross-platform compatibility is going to be a concern.

(The Macs have read/write ExFAT but cannot write NTFS. Toshiba suggested that Mac users reformat it to Horrible File System + extended attributes, not the actual name, but I jest. Anyway, then it wouldn’t work right with Windows or Linux. Though it was nice of them not to just do what hardware vendors normally do. Preformat it for the Mac and add fifty bucks and say it’s the Mac version).

Plus, I think Windows can read Ext4 now, so really, even if I encounter Windows again, meh.

Regardless, while I was formatting the sucker, something odd popped out at me.

Over 100 GB was being reserved on a partition type called “Microsoft Reserved”!

So I trashed the entire partition table before starting over with Ext4. I can’t imagine why you’d need over 100 GB on a hidden partition, but I can’t imagine why it would help me any. The drive seems to work fine without it.

Toshiba has a “compatible with” section on the box, doesn’t mention Linux.

Really, how hard would it have been? I’ve seen hardware at Walmart with the Linux logo on it before and it will say what kernel version or later, or just “Linux” and maybe Tux the penguin. This drive is as compatible with Linux as it is with Toshiba’s Mac instructions (reformat to a native file system). It would be nice for the shout out since they go through all the pains to tell you it works with Vista 8 and Vista 10 and, presumably Vista 11 as well.

(Who knows? I’ve seen hard drives before where they never update a pointless driver that it works fine without and Windows stops working properly because it tries loading something off Windows update that’s incompatible with the current version…. The EasyStore had this issue and I had to claw the driver back out with Device Manager! Most hardware just works with Linux, and there’s none of this crap where you installed all the latest drivers and then Windows Update comes along and stomps them with “Oh here’s something Intel released 18 months ago! You can disable this in the Group Policy Editor after you google the problem! Thanks for letting Windows live rent-free in your head!”)

The performance of most of these external drives, especially on the lower end of the price range, is usually pretty middling, but when you mainly just push files to them as a backup, how much they can store is typically of your highest concern. The goal is basically that you can push the backup and walk away from the machine if it will take a while.

The Toshiba Canvio Advance seems to only want to write at a sustained 30 MB per second if you’re pushing the files from your computer over the USB link to it, and yes I checked to make sure that all of my laptop’s ports say “SuperSpeed” (3.x), and they are. Toshiba advertises what USB 3 _link_ speeds are, not what the drive can actually do. In copying a bunch of files off the drive, I was seeing about 160-170 MB per second sustained read. In burst mode it would go faster. Both of these according to the Nautilus file manager in GNOME.

Benchmarking the disk performance in GNOME Disks (because tests need to be reproducible in order to determine if there’s a problem, how bad it is, and whether you’ve made progress in fixing it), I was able to determine that the supplied cable was at least partially to blame for the slow-ish speeds that people writing product reviews were complaining about.

When I plugged in the Toshiba drive using the cable from my old Western Digital drive that crashed, the read/write benchmarks were consistently faster overall, than with the supplied cable from Toshiba.

It’s still not the fastest thing in the world, but it is just a cheap backup drive, and I feel maybe the performance is adequate for that. Hell, there’s some “USB 3” flash drives that don’t have transfer rates this high.

With the Toshiba-supplied cable, the drive was averaging 29 MB/s write and 148.5 MB/s read with 1 MB samples, over 100 samples, and with the old cable from my WD EasyStore drive, that went to 31.5 and 162.4, respectively. I ran the tests more than once and it was relatively consistent.

With 10 MiB samples, 100 of them, the read average went from 99.4 MB/s and write average of 21.4 MB/s with the Toshiba cable, to 113.4 and 48.2 with the old WD EasyStore’s cable.

My dad, who is an electrical engineer who has several US patents on TV components said this when I asked if the Toshiba cable is crap. “Sounds likely. Cross talk and noise may be causing a lot of retries.”

If you have any other hard drives laying around with the same type of cable, it may be worth testing this out yourself before starting an RMA request or going back to the store.

Another thing I tried was booting up a Linux 5.13 kernel on Ubuntu 21.10 beta to see if any of the USB patches in later kernels (including a series that landed in 5.12 called “Support USB 3.2 multi-lanes”) would have any effect, and they didn’t.

It would seem that for most of these cheap drives, there was a noticeable gain with the USB 3.x link, but the underlying hardware is just too slow to actually get any sort of incredible advantage in write speed over USB 2 (back in 2011, many Ubuntu users who benchmarked their USB external drives, reported that they couldn’t get the writes to go much faster than 20-25 MB/s over USB 2, no matter what they did), although read speeds have improved quite a bit.

None of the drive manufacturers want to say exactly what type of speed you should get and I couldn’t find any benchmarks from Toshiba or Seagate. Essentially, every drive manufacturer out there will try to have you focus on the theoretical speed limits of the connector. Not what the drive itself will actually perform at. So, brace yourself for a let down.

In fact, Seagate was worse in the waffling department. Here, read this. After talking about bottlenecks and crap, they start blaming Windows problems like drive fragmentation, malware, and recycle bins.

Then they suggest using chkdsk, which they spelled wrong, which can actually corrupt a healthy Windows file system if there wasn’t anything wrong with it.

I’m convinced that if there is a hell, there will be several types of people there for sure.

Pedophiles, murderers, Microsoft employees, a certain former Microsoft executive who perjured himself and who regularly interacts with pedophiles and now sells vaccine patents and buys NPR off, used car salesmen, lawyers, most landlords, politicians, people who talk during the movie, and computer hardware OEM executives.

Usually, if a drive starts performing DEAD SLOW, it’s a sign that it’s about to fail completely and you need to get as much of your data off as you can before it does, unfortunately most don’t give any warning and then you have to chuckdisk. These hardware companies don’t want you to notice the signs of a failing drive because they’re hoping you won’t bother to use your warranty before it expires.

Am I happy with the Canvio Advance?

I suppose in the price range, it’s not the worst out there, but obviously these external SSDs and even the more expensive hard drives overtake it, and when some of the problems are due to a pack in cord, I mean, come on….

3/5… Toshiba, would it kill you to pack in a nicer USB cord that can actually give the customer the speed the drive itself is capable of?