Confidently store and backup your precious photos, documents, music, and movies with the HGST Touro Desk Pro External Hard Drive. This drive boasts a sleek black casing, and a blue LED indicator for power and activity status. The latest USB 3.0 technology greatly reduces your waiting time during the transfer process.
As an added bonus, the HGST Touro Desk Pro comes with cloud storage for anytime, anywhere access to your favorite content. Along with local backup, the cloud storage delivers two levels of data protection that bring you great peace of mind.
USB 3.0 InterfaceDelivers up to 5Gbps data transfer rate – ten times the speed of USB 2.0 – to get your transfer done in less time.
4TB CapacityThe colossal 4TB storage capacity stores libraries of music, movies, and other data-intensive files.
Cloud StorageLocal and cloud backup deliver two levels of data protection that keep your photos, movies, music, and documents not only safe, but also available anytime, anywhere, from any smartphone or computer Web browser. You can even share you online content with others by simply sending a web link. You can be upgraded the cloud storage to a paid account, and receive 250GB of cloud storage along with iPhone and iPad mobile digital device apps.
Pros: The drives inside the units I ordered are HGST HDS724040ALE640 0F14681 - 4TB 7200RPM SATA 6.0GB/s 64MB cache. I ordered five units and was sent two cases of three, with a drive removed from one case. They all have the same manufacture date and firmware. The drives ordered as internal drives will cost about $75 more than ordering these external Touro Pro units and popping them apart for the drives, so this is the way to go if you're on the cheap for big storage and don't care about the 2 year warranty. Warranty might be a bigger deal if it were 5 years, but I'm not too worried about the drives lasting 2 years. Even if one fails, I could buy another two of these with the money I saved over buying the internal standalone version and still come out cheaper by $75. Case is easy to get apart once you figure out where the clip points are. Drives are quiet, fast, and all of them showed up working perfectly.
Cons: The case is not designed to be opened and then reused/reassembled - there is literally no way to open the case without badly scuffing the edges of both the black plastic side panel and the silver center piece, which is all one solid band around the drive. You can see how easy the silver section scuffs by running the sharp edge of a small flathead screwdriver across the silver section somewhere like the back of the drive. Any little nick will show up. You also cannot open the enclosure without destroying the plastic clips on the black panel that clip into the center silver band. Opening the external enclosure will void your warranty, so if you pop them open, basically hope that the drives are going to last the two years that you would have been able to replace them in had you left the cases intact. As above, if you open the enclosure, it's going to be very obvious.
Overall Review: I wanted five matching drives to put into a Drobo N, and these are great for that. If you're disassembling these drives, the panel to remove is the one on the right when the drive is sitting vertically with the LED facing you on the front. There are 7 plastic clips on the black side panel that clip into the silver section - two on top about 1" from the outside of the drive, 2 on each long side of the drive about 2" and 4" down from the top, 2 on each bottom corner and 1 on the bottom center. I had the best luck with prying in by the LED and popping the bottom corner clip, then the bottom center, then working back across the front edge to get the two front clips and then the top clip closest to the front. From there, you can give the panel a good yank by hand and pop the remaining clips to separate the drive. It just lifts out from there - getting the SATA to USB hardware off is pretty straightforward, two screws and that's it.