INTRODUCTION

   Thanks to the continuous price drops of storage media devices in the market lately whenever i log onto various forums to participate in various conversations and also see what's happening around the world i can't keep up with the number of threads from people who are looking to get new portable USB hard drives and USB flash drives. Unfortunately most consumers seem to first focus on capacity, then performance and leave quality for last but i can't really blame them with the current state of the economy. However I’ve seen quite a few people who always seem to place performance first and for good or bad that's pretty much the why we do storage related reviews since consumers need to know what performance levels they are getting with their hard earned money. A few months ago we reviewed the very fast TOURO MOBILD PRO 2.5" 500GB USB 3.0 portable hard drive by HGST and today we will be testing the latest and even faster 1TB variant.

   HGST, a Western Digital company, is a market leader in enterprise hard disk drives and develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and external storage solutions and services that are used by large and sophisticated technology companies to store, preserve and manage data. HGST storage solutions have a reputation for quality, reliability and innovation. Our drives are trusted by the world’s high-transactional enterprises, Internet services companies, creative professionals, and consumer electronics and automotive system manufacturers to store the avalanche of new content resulting from cloud computing and services, virtualization, social networks, HD video and mobile platforms. HGST focuses on delivering innovative, customized storage solutions that are an integral part of a customer’s broader systems, infrastructure and application platforms ensuring a storage value proposition that addresses each customer use case and pain point. This consultative approach to storage coupled with technical expertise, a comprehensive customer support infrastructure, world-class operations and a broad portfolio of solutions sets a high standard for product and service excellence. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives in 2003, HGST became a separate and wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation in March, 2012. HGST maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California and is marketed under the HGST brand name.

   The TOURO MOBILE PRO 2.5 USB 3.0 1TB PHD is based on one of the fastest 2.5" SATA III HDDs currently available in the market, the brand new Travelstar 7K1000 featuring a rotational speed of 7200RPM, two 500GB Platters and 32MB of data buffer (cache). So just by looking at the specs sheet of the drive inside you know that you are getting top tier performance right from the get go. Moving to the housing well nothing really new to see here since it's the exact same one used with the 500GB variant (that's a good thing in case you're wondering) so once again it's made by hard plastic and has a nice piano black finish at the top/bottom. So the only remaining question just how it compares to its smaller 500GB brother and all the other solutions in our charts so shall we?

SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

PACKAGING AND CONTENTS

Just like with the 500GB version the box has an clear plastic opening at the front allowing you to take a quick look at the unit.

The bundle contents and the system requirements are listed at the right side in 3 languages.

The thickness of the drive is showcased at the left of the box along with the free 3GB cloud storage offered by HGST.

At the rear of the box we see the features list in 9 languages.

As expected inside the bundle you will find the basics such as the TOURO MOBILE PRO PHD, USB 3.0 cable, user’s manual and warranty information.

THE TOURO MOBILE PRO 1TB

The piano black drive measures just 126mm in length, 80mm in width and 14.5mm in thickness with a weight of 155g.

Of course it can't beat the STOR.E Slim by Toshiba in terms of size but as you can see it's almost the same as the G-TECH Mobile USB.

Until a few months back (500GB variant) at the top we saw the HITACHI logo, however now it has been replaced with the TOURO one.

The USB 3.0 port is placed right beneath the blue activity LED.

You can check the drive capacity, serial number and barcode at the rear.

TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

   Keeping things simple so even people new in the field of computers can understand will always be our way so once again our testing procedure is almost exactly the same as the one we use with 2.5/3.5" external docking stations. This time however we will be comparing the product at hand with a wide range of 2.5" portable drives and standalone 2.5" enclosures all of which were benched using a HGST 7K750 SATA II hard disk drive. Our standard selection of benchmark suites is used here as well including the famous HD Tach RW (Long Bench 32mb Zones), HD Tune Pro (read/write -when possible- speeds), Sisoftware Sandra Pro (Read/Write - also when possible- speeds), AIDA64 (Linear Read/Random Read), Crystal Disk Mark x64 (100MB/1000MB read/write speeds) and finally the quite outdated yet highly reliable ATTO 2.47 (Max Read/Max Write speeds). Every test was repeated for a total of 6 times and after that the average (not peak) numbers were recorded into our charts. As always every test was performed in a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1 with every update installed up to March 27th 2013.

TEST RESULTS - AIDA64 / ATTO

TEST RESULTS - HD TACH RW / HD TUNE PRO

TEST RESULTS - SISOFTWARE SANDRA PRO / CRYSTAL DISK MARK X64

TEST RESULTS - TEMPERATURES

CONCLUSION

   Only two words come to mind after finishing all tests with the TOURO MOBILE PRO 1TB and those words are amazing performance. I don't know how else to describe the recorded performance gap between the MOBILE TOURO PRO and all the other PHDs in our charts, not when the first surpassed all of them with ease. To be honest with all of you when i finished testing the G-Tech Mobile USB PHD i was worried that HGST used the exact same Travelstar 5K1000 2.5" 1TB HDD with the TOURO MOBILE PRO 1TB so i was quite happy when i plugged it in to start testing and found out that they actually used the brand new and very fast 7K1000 instead. HGST still gives you a total of 3GB of free online cloud space with the TOURO MOBILE PRO and although i personally don't trust online cloud storage enough to store crucial data i think it can be of use for people who have data of little importance that they would like to have access to from anywhere on the planet.

   What's even more impressive is the price tag of the HGST TOURO MOBILE PRO 1TB which is currently set at USD89.99 inside the USA (Purchase Directly from Amazon.com) and at around 80Euros inside the EU (Purchase Directly from Amazon.co.uk). At around that price range i can't really think of a portable hard drive that can beat the TOURO MOBILE PRO 1TB in terms of performance and although there are smaller 2.5" drives like the STOR.E Slim line by Toshiba they usually cost more and in the end the choice between performance and size/price is yours. For us the TOURO MOBILE PRO 1TB is currently not only the fastest USB 3.0 PHD available in the market but it also comes at a low cost and that's why it gets our Platinum award.

PROS

- Build Quality
- Design
- Top Performance
- Size
- 3GB Free Cloud Storage
- Price (For Some) 

CONS

- None