eva2000

With the unfortunate events with Thailand floods, global hard drive stock availability has plummeted and hard drive prices have sky rocketed by 100-150+ % in the past week or so in Australia. It was now or never to stock up on some extra disk storage. I purchased from Computeralliance.com.au two units each of USB2.0 and USB3.0 based external storage in the form of 3TB Hitachi XL3000 and 3TB Hitachi Touro Desk Pro respectively.

1. Both units formated NTFS capacity is at 2795MB.
   
2. Both units use exactly the same international power adapter with 4 interchangeable adapter heads for Australia, Europe, USA and Japan usage.
   
3. Both units use exact same 6Gb/S SATAIII based 3TB Hitachi 7200rpm HDS723030ALA640 with 64MB cache buffer and rated at 5C to 60C operating temperature. They just they have different firmware applied.
   
4. Bit of a surprise in that Hitachi Touro Desk Pro lists an operating temperature range of 5-35C. While the XL series doesn't list an operating temperature range but I suspect it would be similar. As you will see below from Crystak DiskMark stats, both units will get hotter than that after some active usage - idles around 27C but post-usage idle temps hit 44-45C while in a room that is 27.5C with 53% humidity.
   
5. Hitachi Touro Desk Pro, like XL series have optional software you can install. The Touro Desk Pro includes free 3GB cloud based storage account too and optional 250GB cloud based storage upgrade option for $49/yr. For now I opted not to install the included software.
   
6. Warranty seems a bit confusing, on CA's website it lists Hitachi Touro with 2yr warranty and Hitachi XL with 3yr warranty, but on the PDF spec files for Hitachi Touro and Hitachi XL, they list Asian region has both having 3yr warranties.

3TB Hitachi XL USB2.0 (left) vs 3TB Hitachi Touro Desk Pro USB3.0 (right)

USB3.0 is almost 4x times faster read and 3x times faster write speeds on my DFI UT X58-T3EH8 motherboard with Shintaro USB3.0 adapter.

First installed idle temps are low but slowly ramp up after active operation.





ATTO disk speed



Crystal DiskMark



Aida64 Extreme - Read Disk Suite

XL top vs Touro bottom