Toshiba, long a powerhouse in both notebook computers and internal components (including notebook-class hard drives), has entered the USB external hard drive fray. These small, portable hard drives are powered entirely through a USB link with your computer. The Toshiba 200GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive ($219.99 direct) is for people who need to back up and transport a lot of data. As this model has the highest capacity of any such drive now available, you'll pay a bit more for it, but a couple of outstanding features make that worth it.

With its rounded edges, oblong look, and the placement of the power light, Toshiba seems to have modeled its external hard drive on the Apple iPod mini/nano v.2. The beveled surround around the power light is in a similar position to the hold switch on the latest iPod mini and iPod nano. That said, the drive's black metallic exterior is a good match for the black color scheme prevalent among business desktops and laptops. It's notable that instead of the blinking light usually associated with disk activity, the Toshiba's light actually dims when the drive is active and comes back to full brightness when the drive is inactive. As the bright-blue LEDs on the front of hard drives are usually distracting, I think this is an improvement.

Toshiba's drive mechanism uses perpendicular recording technology. Instead of recording data longitudinally (left to right) on the drive platter, the drive head records perpendicularly (up and down), which increases how much data you can physically stack on each drive. 200GB is the current max for small notebook-class drives like this one. To put this in perspective, desktop-class drives with perpendicular tech are available in 1terabyte capacities, and older longitudinal notebook drives top out at 120GB right now.

The drive is semiruggedized, with internal air-filled bladders cushioning the drive mechanism and isolating it from the outer metal casing. Toshiba no doubt developed this technology while building notebook PCs for the commercial and consumer markets, as it has vast experience in that. The company claims that the drive can survive a drop of 4 inches while in operation and 29 inches when it's not running. That doesn't sound like much, but 4 inches is similar to leaving the drive on a couple of thick books or on top of a software box while operating, and 29 inches is like the drive falling out of a bag you forgot to zipper shut.

Instead of using a Y-shaped dual-headed USB cable like the Seagate ST9160821U2-RK, the Toshiba drive uses an auxiliary USB power cable. That's more convenient than a short dual-headed cable (such as the one on the HP Pocket Media Drive and the Maxtor OneTouch III mini), but it also means another cord to lose. It's not such a big deal if your notebook or desktop can power a USB notebook drive from one USB 2.0 port, but some older notebooks and systems with USB 1.1 ports will need the second port for power. If the Toshiba drive had come with a carrying case of some kind, then you'd have a place to store the extra cable, but if you just stuff everything in your laptop bag (as I do), it may get lost in the tangle of cables in the bottom of your bag.

In addition to the cables, the drive comes with the usual quick-install guide and a copy of NTI Shadow, a PC Magazine Editors' Choice for backup software. Like Western Digital's WD Sync and CMS' Copy2Go, NTI Shadow is designed to watch your C: (or Macintosh HD) drive for changes to documents, then back up those documents on the fly. It's all automatic, in essence a "no-touch" backup solution. NTI Shadow is designed to back up your "important" files such as Microsoft Word documents, music, photos, and video files, rather than backing up your entire hard drive for disaster recovery. Such a solution assumes that in a catastrophic drive failure, you can recover your PC's hard drive with a factory backup or operating-system discs (Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, or Mac OS X), then manually reinstall your applications such as Word and Office, and then restore your data back onto your drive. I like the option of being able to boot up off an external drive if your C: drive or Macintosh HD drive fails—a function found in programs like CMS's BounceBack Pro— but what you'd really miss is your irreplaceable documents. On the plus side, NTI Shadow makes sure you have a recent backup of your important files, and most of the time that's what you need when you have an "oops moment." NTI Shadow by default saves your files in Windows or Mac native format, so to find a file and recover it, you can just open up the Toshiba's drive icon and drag your file back. NTI Shadow supports versioning, so you can, say, recover last week's version of a presentation instead of yesterday's.

NTI Shadow's backup is just as quick as using Windows to copy a file. Copying our standard 1.2GB test folder to the Toshiba drive took 52 seconds. Most USB 2.0 drives I've tested lately hover at about the one-minute mark on those tests. The 4,200-rpm drive inside the case is a SATA 150 drive, theoretically capable of 150MBps transfers, but you'd have to have a drive enclosure with an eSATA interface to get those speeds. I know that some of our readers may have concerns about using a "slow" 4,200-rpm drive, but in practice, with a USB 2.0 interface, 4,200 rpm is plenty fast for backup purposes.

Compared with similar drives like the Seagate ST9160821U2-RK and the Western Digital Passport (160GB), the Toshiba drive comes out ahead (for now) in capacity. You can, of course, get a larger (up to 1TB) desktop-class 3.5-inch drive, but desktop drives are bulkier and need their own power supplies. But 160GB notebook-class external drives such as the Seagate and WD Passport models are bound to be cheaper on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis at this point, particularly since they aren't the "top of the class" anymore, and you're more likely to find them at a discount.

Bringing the capacity game to a new level, the Toshiba 200GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive gives data hounds and multimedia enthusiasts a new coat-pocket-size repository for their digital lives. You'll know if you need the extra 40GB. (Signs include running out of room on your system's 250GB or larger hard drive.) If so, the Toshiba 200GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive, with its touch-less automatic backup and compact form factor, might be the right reinforcement to watch your back when your data is on the line.