HGST Touro Desk 4 TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive Black (0S03396)

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Price: $200.52 $185.99   

Product Feature

• Solid add-on storage for all your digital files
• Stackable desktop design
• USB 3.0 Interface
• AC Power Adapter
• 3.5 inch External Hard Disk Drive

Product Description

Touro Desk external drive provides solid add-on storage for all your photos, movies, music and documents. Stackable, with plug and play simplicity, Touro Desk comes with all the quality and reliability you expect from Hitachi. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and innovative external storage solutions and services to store, preserve and manage the world's most valued data.

HGST Touro Desk 4 TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive Black (0S03396) Review

This review is for those among us who would like to know more technical details - what particular hard drive model is inside the enclosure, how fast it is, how it's built, and so on.

The hard drive comes in a black plastic enclosure, with a USB3 cable and a power adapter. The enclosure is unusually thick (2.5", a little thicker than two stacked internal drives), which made me suspect that they used two 2TB drives and through the USB adapter made them act like a single drive. Since I plan to use this as part of a RAID array (and they never tell you what drive ships inside an external storage unit), I had to find out.

The enclosure itself is very ingenious and well built - no screws are holding it together, and it's well assembled (it was hard to tell where the seam even was). It's all done with interlocked plastic clips on the inside - that's cheaper and prettier than using screws. Sadly, that also means that when opening the enclosure you will most likely break at least some of the clips, and leave marks on the (rather soft) edges of the plastic parts.

Inside, I found a single drive (yay!). The model is Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 4TB 32MB Cache CoolSpin SATA 6.0Gbps 3.5-inch drive, P/N 0F14696. As is custom with external storage, they didn't put a really fast drive (just 5400 RPM, only 32 MB cache), but at least it has SATA III, and the USB3 adapter will cut down transfer times. CoolSpin means the drive will vary the speed (down from 5400) when it's not in full use, to minimize wear, power usage, generated heat, and noise. This is great for almost everyone.
A single drive in an enclosure this thick is also good news: it means there is enough room to dissipate heat well (though there is no fan inside).

For some reason, Amazon doesn't offer the bare drive without an enclosure, but here's a link to it's smaller (2TB) brother: HGST Deskstar 2TB 3.5-Inch CoolSpin RPM SATA III 6Gbps 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive (0F12117).

A word about the capacity: hard drive makers nowadays advertise capacity in powers of ten (1 KB is 1000 bytes, 1 MB is 1000 KB, and so on). 4TB therefore means 4,000,000,000,000 bytes. On the other hand, the "proper" way to express storage capacity (because of the way computers are designed to use it) is in powers of 2 (1 KB is 2^10=1024 bytes, 1 MB is 1024 KB and so on). This difference adds up, and 4 "real" TB means 4,398,046,511,104 bytes. In other words, you'll be almost 400 GB short of 4TB, and your computer will display 3.6 TB size instead of 4.0 TB. It's annoying and one feels cheated, but keep in mind that ALL hard drive makers use the same marketing scheme.

Another warning about the capacity is that, as storage density goes up, reliability usually goes down. To put it simply, all other things being equal, it's much more likely to have zero mechanical problems in your car lot if you own 2 cars, than it is if you own 100 cars. Always back up your data, especially if it's important to you (it seems that we all learn it the hard way) - and use drives from different lots and even different makers, so that when they fail, it's less likely that they all fail at the same time.

Drive operation:
I connected the drive to a Windows 7 laptop with USB3. No driver installation is required, the drive is recognized immediately, and it's already formatted and ready to go.
The noise level was so low that I couldn't hear any difference between on and off. I placed my cell phone's microphone right next to the enclosure and measured the sound level, and it went from 32.5 dB (drive off) to 34.5 dB (drive spinning, not used). That makes it the most silent drive I've ever owned.
I then copied a 15.5 GB file to the drive (from an internal striped array, which I assume has faster reads than this drive can write). This took around 127 seconds, for an average write speed of 122 MB/sec (it's fastest when the drive is empty). Then I ran a read test with HD Tune Pro (read the entire drive and graph it), which returned a high value of 135 MB/sec and a low value of 61.6 MB/sec (average 104.1 MB/sec, burst 143.2 MB/sec).

All in all, I'm happy with this purchase and would recommend it as a very good deal.

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