HGST Touro S 1TB review: A really fast external hard drive

It has been a while since we have reviewed an external hard drive. With the festive season upon us, we are sure a lot (if not most) of you will be looking at investing in an external hard drive to store your memories safely. We got the Touro S drive for review for this very purpose. The Touro S is part of the HGST hard drive portfolio, which is owned by storage giant WD. While we have tested Touro drives in the past, the branding always used to mention either Hitachi or HGST. This drive however just has the Touro S branding. Let us check out this 1TB drive. Build and Design: 6/10  The Touro S looks like any other external hard drive. It has a plastic enclosure and comes in multiple colours, of which we got the golden/white coloured one to test. It weighs around 151 grams and is around 12mm thick, quite portable just like an external drive is meant to be. The build quality isn’t the strongest as we noticed that the plastic enclosure easily flexed on mild pressure. Features: 7/10 The Touro S comes in two configurations - 500GB and 1TB - we got the higher capacity variant for testing. User available space is limited to 932GB. Just like most external drives these days, the Touro S comes with a USB 3.0 interface which is backwards compatible, in case you do not have USB 3.0 ports (please upgrade! it’s 2015) on your laptop or desktop. The Touro S houses a 7200 RPM Travelstar 7K1000 internal drive from HGST which has two 500GB platters and 32MB of cache. On the software front, you get access to Touro Cloud backup, which gives you 3GB of free cloud storage. You also get local backup facilities which lets you backup certain folders from your system and save multiple revisions. Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB Source Drive: Corsair Neutron GTX, 240GB SSD PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Performance: 8.5/10 The Crystal Disk Mark benchmark gave an impressive score of 148.4 MB/s and 136.5 MB/s for sequential read and sequential write respectively.  For the real world performance test, we transferred a 10GB single RAR file and a 10GB assorted file to get real life sequential and random file transfer speeds. To simulate a file write we transferred files from the Corsair source SSD to the target Touro S drive and vice versa to simulate a file read.    The 7200 RPM drive shows its magic in the real world file transfer tests. It is a major departure from the standard 5400RPM external hard drives we have seen so far. The charts above clearly indicate that this is one of the fastest 1TB drives we have tested. Assorted file transfers happen quickly as compared to other drives as well - with over 100 MB/s transfer speeds. The drive does get a bit warm when transferring data, but that is a small inconvenience when you look at the blazing speeds. Verdict and Price in India The Touro S is priced at an MRP of Rs 7,500, but it can be bought online for Rs 5,500 - which may sound slightly expensive for an external drive with 1TB capacity. But in terms of competition in the 1TB segment, there is none as far as this drive is concerned. So if pure speed is what you are after, by all means go for this drive. If you are on a budget, there are drives from WD, Seagate and Toshiba which are available for less.