Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro (500GB)

The Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro ($100 street) combines 500GB of portable storage space with other handy features that include a speedy USB 3.0 connection and the "access anywhere" convenience of the cloud that will give you an extra layer of security no matter what happens to your drive. One or two imperfections keep the Touro Mobile Pro from being the best thing since lunch meat, but cloud connectivity looks to be the next big thing in personal storage, and Hitachi makes a solid argument for it on this fine drive.

Design & Features
Like many of the latest portable drives, the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro takes several design cues from the Apple iPhone. The top and bottom panels are fingerprint-attracting glossy black plastic, and a matte silver band runs around the outside edge. The drive measures 0.59 by 3.14 by 4.96 inches (HWD), just 0.26 inch longer than the similarly styled Toshiba Canvio 3.0 Plus ($120 street, Review forthcoming). It's also a bit heavier, weighing 0.45 pound with the cable attached, as opposed to the Canvio's 0.42 pound. Included with the Touro Mobile Pro is an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable, which detaches for easy storage or replacement.

The Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro has a 500GB hard drive that hums along at 7,200rpm. Although it has a slightly cheaper sticker price than larger competitors, like the Toshiba Canvio 3.0 Plus and the Seagate GoFlex Turbo (750GB) ($119.99 list, Review forthcoming), it comes in at significantly lower capacity. This means you'll be paying a bit more for your storage (20 cents per gigabyte) with it than you will with the 1TB Toshiba Canvio 3.0 Plus (12 cents) or the GoFlex Turbo (16 cents).

The drive comes formatted for NTFS, so it's ready to go with any Windows system, but you can easily reformat it with HFS+ (to work with Macs) or FAT32 (for compatibility with both Windows and Mac operating systems). Hitachi includes its own backup software on the drive, complete with password-protected 256-bit encryption. You also get 3GB of seamless cloud storage with your purchase of the drive, and you can upgrade to as much as 250GB with a paid account. An added benefit of this cloud storage is that you can share online content with others using a simple Web link instead of dealing with email attachments or convoluted file transfer schemes. Hitachi also offers remote apps to provide further access to your files when using an iPhone or iPad. Hitachi covers the Touro Mobile Pro with a two-year warranty, which is the standard warranty period on portable drives.

Performance
Thanks to its USB 3.0 connection, the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro provides both speedy data transfer and broad compatibility with USB 2.0?a must-have when you're connecting to a system more than two years old. We tested the Touro Mobile Pro over both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, but for the fastest data speeds you should stick with USB 3.0 if it's available. If you need even faster speeds, you'd be better off with a solid-state drive (SSD), but compared with hard drives they tend to be smaller in capacity and far more expensive per gigabyte of storage space.

In our testing, the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro copied our 1.22GB folder in 17 seconds. Other USB 3.0 drives, such as the Seagate GoFlex Turbo (750GB) and Western Digital My Passport Essential SE ($159.99 list, 4 stars), completed the same transfer in 22 seconds and 18 seconds, respectively. When using slower USB 2.0, the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro completed the same task in 41 seconds, the same time as the Toshiba Canvio and ahead of both the Seagate GoFlex (44 seconds) and the Western Digital (46 seconds).

We also tested the overall performance of the Touro Mobile Pro using Futuremark PCMark 7. Over a USB 3.0 connection, the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro scored 1,637, which put it ahead of both the Seagate GoFlex Turbo (1,519) and the Toshiba Canvio 3.0 Plus (1,426). Performance remained strong when we ran the same test using USB 2.0: The Hitachi drive scored 1,370, again beating both the Toshiba Canvio 3.0 Plus (1,225) and Seagate GoFlex (1,305).

Although other drives may have more storage capacity, the 500GB Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro offers leading performance and a fast USB 3.0 connection, with convenient cloud connectivity and easy content sharing. Throw in Hitachi's backup utility and high-end encryption, and you have a portable drive that delivers plenty of bang for the buck, even if it's more expensive than similar competitors. Because of its lower capacity, the Touro Mobile Pro doesn't take the Editors' Choice from the Western Digital My Passport SE, but it's still a worthwhile purchase if you're looking for portable storage.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro (500GB) with several other hard drive side by side.

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