Verbatim USB 3.0 2TB Desktop Hard Drive Review

Verbatim calls this new 2TB USB 3.0 external hard disk a ‘desktop’ drive rather than a portable one. Weighing in at 1kg, it’s a bit more than you’d really want to lug around in your bag. It also requires an external power supply, rather than being ‘host powered’ by the computer’s own USB ports – so you’ll need to be somewhere you can plug it into the wall.

That’s not so much of a big deal, though. How often have you really needed to have 2TB of storage capacity available when you’re on the move?

The drive itself looks pretty unremarkable. It comes is a fairly sturdy steel enclosure measuring To put the drive through its paces, transferred a folder of mixed files totalling just over 10GB on to and off the drive. These included video files of several GB in size, together with masses of smaller files such as MP3s. This tests the kind of read and write speeds you can expect from the drives in everyday use.

The results were fast – but nothing like as impressive as USB 3.0’s specs claim. Our 10GB files copied on to the drive in 2mins 23s, and back off again in 2m 22. That’s a data rate of around 70MB/s, or 560 Mbit/s – still faster than the theoretical 480Mbit/s maximum of USB 2.0, but nine times slower than the claimed 4.8Gbit/s of USB3.0.