Portable USB hard drives make it easy to back up the hard drives in our computers and share large quantities of files among machines that aren’t on the same local network.
If you’re looking for the fastest high-capacity USB drive around, a portable Solid State Drive (SSD) would fit the bill quite nicely.
But if you’re just looking for something that’s faster than the typical USB hard drive yet doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, you can’t beat a 7200RPM USB hard drive.
There aren’t that many consumer-grade 7200RPM USB hard drives on the market right now, but I recently had the chance to check one out.
At around $60, the HGST Touro S 1TB 7200RPM High-Performance Portable Hard Drive (#ad) costs about the same as a standard 5400RPM USB hard drive, but the increased speed of the faster drive is quite apparent when both drives are connected to a USB 3.0 port.
To that point, this drive’s specs infer a 23% speed increase over a 5400RPM drive, and that’s indeed pretty close to what I experienced in my testing.
The HGST Touro S is a light and compact external drive that easily fits in an average size pocket, yet it packs a full terabyte of storage plus enhanced performance into its sleek aluminum enclosure. Here is a larger photo:
This drive works perfectly with both Windows PCs and Macs, and it also works great with many popular mobile devices such as the Apple iPad and a wide variety of Android tablets. It comes with a 2 Year Parts & Labor warranty.
As with any external USB drive, you’ll need to plug it into a USB 3.0 port in order to take advantage of this drive’s maximum data transfer speeds, but it works just fine with USB 2.0 devices as well.
There is no external power supply needed as the drive draws its power directly from the USB port that it’s attached to.
Bottom line: If you’re looking for the fastest high-capacity consumer-grade external drive that you can buy at an affordable price, the HGST Touro S is definitely worthy of consideration.
Click here (#ad) to read more about the HGST Touro S 1TB 7200RPM High-Performance Portable Hard Drive at Amazon, including hundreds of overwhelmingly positive user reviews.