Thanks to the superb performance due to the fast 7200RPM drive inside it, the Mobile Touro Pro comes with a hefty price tag. At Rs. 9.44 per GB, the pricing of this drive is higher than Silicon Power A80’s Rs. 5.8 per GB. But then if performance is your only concern, we cannot recommend a better drive than the Touro Pro. Also the cloud storage add-on gives this drive an edge over competing drives.
The Hitachi Mobile Touro Pro features a 7200RPM drive and was probably one of the few external HDDs that offer a 3 GB of cloud storage option, which allows you to have some documents stored on the cloud for access from anywhere. It comes pre-bundled with the Hitachi Backup software which is compatible with both PCs and Macs. It can backup the entire profile of the current user, or you can select the folders that you want to specifically backup everytime you connect the drive to your system. It can also be programmed to backup automatically on a schedule, provided the Hitachi drive is connected to your system. You can even pay for more cloud storage – upto 250 GB.
Design and Build:
With a flat glossy black plastic chassis with a silver aluminum edge, the Mobile Touro Pro looks like the iPhone 4, just a bulkier version. The surface of the drive is a finger print magnet. The only interface is the USB 3.0 one which is backwards compatible with the USB 2.0 port on your system. There is an indicator light that glows blue when the drive is in operation.
Test Setup:
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K @3.4GHz
Motheboard: Intel DP67BG
RAM: 2x2GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM @1333MHz (timing: 9-9-9-24)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
OS Drive: Intel SSDSA2H080GIGN (80 GB SSD)
RAID 0 Combination: 2 x 300GB WD Velociraptor
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6850
Power Supply: Corsair HX620W
Performance:
Amongst the portable USB 3.0 drives that we tested, the Mobile Touro Pro scored the highest in terms of Performance and Features as well as the overall score. It was awarded our prestigious Editor’s Pick award in August 2011. It gives an unformatted space of 465.76 GB. In the synthetic tests it gave a Read Burst Speed of 182.1 MB/s which was higher than even some of the powered drives. In the real world testing which involved transferring 4GB sequential and assorted files from the WD drive to the RAID array and back we got the following scores. Read / Write (sequential file) in MB/s – 108.03 / 104.83 and Read / Write (Assorted) in MB/s – 98.03 / 73.85. The only drive that came close to these performance scores was the Silicon Power Armor A80 640 GB drive and Seagate GoFlex Slim 320GB drive. For an external drive it had stellar intradrive scores touching almost 40 MB/s which was only seen in the powered drives.
Verdict
Thanks to the superb performance due to the fast 7200RPM drive inside it, the Mobile Touro Pro comes with a hefty price tag. At Rs. 9.44 per GB, the pricing of this drive is higher than Silicon Power A80’s Rs. 5.8 per GB. But then if performance is your only concern, we cannot recommend a better drive than the Touro Pro. Also the cloud storage add-on gives this drive an edge over competing drives.
Features: 4.5/5
Performance:4/5
Build: 3.5/5
Value: 3.5/5
Overall: 4/5
Price: Rs. 4,400