Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro 750GB USB 3.0 HDD Review

Hitachi has their own line of high speed, stylish mobile storage products as well. We begin by checking out their 2.5-inch Mobile version using USB 3.0 connectivity.

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Manufacturer: Hitachi
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Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro 750GB USB 3.0 HDD Review 01

We recently looked at the G-Technology G-Drive Mobile. G-Technology is owned by Hitachi and their G-Drive products are geared towards MAC users. Hitachi has their own mobile storage product line as well and these products feature the best in PC connectivity.

The mobile storage market is quite competitive even with raising disk prices from the Thailand flooding. Because of this, Hitachi has taken steps to differentiate themselves from most competitors. We've seen several stylish USB 3.0 drives on the market, but we've yet to see one that includes cloud based storage. Hitachi's included 3GB storage can be increased to 250GB by opting into the paid service. Both the free and paid services can be accessed from any IP based device, like your desktop, notebook, tablet or smart phone. This service obviously goes well beyond just mobile storage and moves into the realm of everywhere storage.

The Touro Mobile Pro also includes local backup with the included backup software. The software is very easy to setup and once configured is seemless.

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Hitachi's Touro Mobile Pro has a single USB 3.0 miniport that can connect to your USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 port. The drive ships with the cable so you don't have to worry about sourcing one elsewhere. Inside the unit we found a 7,200 RPM Hitachi SATA drive. Two options are available; either 500GB or 750GB. We are testing the larger of the two, the 750GB today.

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USB 3.0 is a very fast interface that has been adapted by the storage industry very quickly. We've yet to see just how fast USB 3.0 will take us since there aren't any native USB 3.0 ports built into Intel chipsets, but the NEC and other motherboard solutions give us around 200MB/s of transfer speed. Since the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro uses a platter drive, we should be able to reach maximum speed even with the 200MB/s ceiling in place.

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Using ATTO, we managed to achieve right around 120MB/s while reading and writing to the Touro Mobile Pro. This is right around the same speed you would see with the same 2.5" form factor drive attached to your computer via SATA. The only real downside to USB 3.0 is that it does not take advantage of native command queuing.

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In our real world tests where data is copied to and from a partition on the drive, we achieved respectable performance for a platter drive. In the ISO test we hit 54MB/s; around three times faster than the USB 2.0 tests ran on the G-Drive Mobile. The Program and Game tests were also much faster than the G-Drive we tested last week.

We went on the hunt for the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro 750GB via Google Shopping and were surprised by the results. Office Depot lists the Touro Mobile Pro online and in stores for 93.99. You'll have to pay tax for your state, but Office Depot does list free shipping so the total should be right around 100 Dollars. After doing some comparative shopping at Newegg, we can say that the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro 750GB is priced very well on its own. Once you tack on the included backup software and free cloud service we can say that this external drive is one of the better valued on the market.

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