Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro 500GB portable drive

USB 3.0 has become more of a rule than the exception nowadays, as an increasing number of manufacturers are switching to the interface for quicker data transfer. Portable hard disk manufacturers are also making the switch and it’s a given that USB 2.0 will soon be phased out. A plethora of companies are manufacturing portable hard drives and now, Hitachi have come up with the new Touro Mobile Pro portable drive with USB 3.0 and a data storage capacity of 500 GB. Does Hitachi’s new portable drive pack a punch? Read on to find out.

The Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro

Design and Features

The Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro hard drive comes in a glossy black colour. It has a sleek, thin exterior with the company name embossed on the front and the model number and storage capacity on the back of the drive. The USB 3.0 supporting device also has a silver rim along the sides  which gives it a very professional look. The hard drive we reviewed did catch a lot of scratches and fingerprints and the worst part is that all these are quite visible under most lighting conditions. This might not be a problem for most people, as it’s the weight rather than the looks that matter to most, while choosing a portable hard drive. The Hitachi Touro weighs a cool 155gm which is definitely one of the lighter models available in the market.

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A close up of the portable hard disk

As far as features are concerned, the USB 3.0 portable drive has a usable storage capacity of 465 GB. The drive inside the Hitachi runs at 7200rpm and has a cache memory of 15MB and comes with a rather short cable that might be a problem for some users. The hard drive allows two options for data backup and storage – local and on the cloud. The cloud storage provides a free storage of 3GB for registered users that can be utilized via a simple, effective interface. Overall, the Hitachi Touro exudes class and matches up in features as well.

Two options for data backup - local and on the cloud

Test Rig Specifications

Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz

Motherboard: Gigabyte P67A-UD3R

Memory: Corsair Dominator GT 6 GB DDR3 (3 x 2 GB) 

Hard drive: WD Velociraptor 300 GB

GPU:  AMD Radeon HD6970

PSU: Cooler Master 1000W

Performance

We connected the Hitachi Touro to a test PC and ran a few synthetic and real world tests. The SiSoft Sandra test gave a read drive index of 86.8 MB/s at a random access time of 13.86 ms. HDTach gave a random access time of 16.6 ms at a CPU utilization of 1%. The average read cycle was 89.3 MB/s and the burst speed was 180.5 MB/s. CrystalDiskMark 3.0 gave sequential read rates of 113.5 MB/s and sequential write rates of 113.4 MB/s. Random 4K read rates recorded a 0.51MB/s and random 4K write rates recorded a 0.793 MB/s. The device did perform fairly well in the synthetic tests but these tests divulge only half of the details and it’s the real world tests that actually test the drive’s performance.

We took two files – sequential (single 4GB file) and random (assorted data of 4GB) and put the Hitachi Touro through its paces. Below are the results we’ve charted out over a graph.    

Performance Chart

A 107.7 MB/s speed for writing a 4GB sequential file and a 110.7 for a 4GB sequential read is definitely impressive. As visible from the graph, as far as performance is concerned the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro definitely delivers.

Verdict

The Hitachi Touro can be currently bought at a price of Rs. 4,408. Besides the local data storage capabilities it also provides an additional 3GB of data backup on the cloud. There are a lot of softwares that provide free data backup on the cloud, so that feature gets more or less negated. As far as the performance is concerned, it’s definitely faster than most portable drives and particularly, the WD My Passport, but the storage capacity provided is a mere 500GB. We believe it is pretty expensively priced (hence the 5/10 rating) as compared to the current portable hard drives in the market. Hitachi have done pretty much everything correct with this drive, but it’s definitely not worth a buy unless Hitachi plans a massive price drop, which seems pretty unlikely.