HGST announces Touro S line of external USB 3.0 hard drives

By Konrad Krawczyk Published February 26, 2014

HGST, a firm that operates under the Western Digital umbrella, announced a new line of external hard drives dubbed Touro S today.

HGST’s Touro S drives come in one of four colors: gold, silver, platinum and ruby (pictured above), and are encased in protective shells made of aluminum. Though HGST’s Touro S family of USB 3.0 external hard drives only ship in capacities of either 500GB or 1TB, anyone who buys a Touro S drive will also get 3GB of HGST’s Touro Cloud Backup storage service for free. If 3GB of cloud storage doesn’t cut it, you can also opt to get 250GB of Touro Cloud Backup storage for $59 per year. Touro Cloud Backup stores up to 10 versions of your files as well.

Recommended Videos

Though you can also interact with your Touro Cloud Backup account via a free iOS app on top of the traditional desktop method, there doesn’t seem to be an Android version available at this time.

HGST’s Touro S drives feature spin rates of 7,200 rpm, which the company claims is up to 23 percent faster than the 5,400 rpm disks found in many external and notebook hard drives. Though we’re not sure about that exact percentage, 7,200 rpm hard drives are noticeably faster than their 5,400 rpm counterparts, generally speaking.

You can grab the 500GB model for $79.95, but doubling that to 1TB will only cost you an extra $20 ($99.95).

What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.

Konrad Krawczyk

Former Computing Editor

Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…

Computing

Google Earth’s AI misadventure lasted only a day. It was a tale of dangerous ignorance.

Nuclear reactors, tanks, and historical destruction on a life-like satellite map? Yeah, that's bad.

Nano Banana AI image generator representation.

Technology behemoths are clearly not reading the room, or they are just moving faster than they should when it comes to AI deployment. Google has already stuffed its Gemini AI in every corner of its software stack, from Android to daily productivity tools like Gmail that are used by hundreds of millions of users every day. AI is everywhere. Not all of it is bad, mind you. But in a few places, it just feels forced.

In its latest AI-fication experiment, the company targeted Google Earth. The idea was to let the audience use its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator and make images that can be placed on the map view. On paper, it's a cool idea. What would the Colosseum of Rome look like in your urban neighborhood? Yeah, fun stuff like that.

Computing

AMD is apparently gearing up to raise GPU prices right after Nvidia’s steep hike

AMD has reportedly told AIB partners about a price hike that goes into effect in. August.

AMD RX 7800

AMD is next in line to raise the asking price of its Radeon GPUs, merely days after the news of a similar hike coming for Nvidia graphics cards started making waves. As per ChannelGate on Weibo (h/t VideoCardz), AMD has informed its board partners that the price of GPU and memory bundles will go up by at least 10% in August.

Is a similar price hike coming for standalone graphics cards? I won't be surprised if that happens. The situation is so bad that AMD is planning to bring back graphics cards with 4GB of onboard memory. AMD just introduced the RX 9050 GPU, which costs $279. Notably, it's just $20 less than the RX 9060 XT that offers double the graphics memory.

Computing

Microsoft will make Windows work well with just 8GB RAM. We desperately need it

The dream of a reliable and affordable Windows laptop hinges on the next milestone at Microsoft.

Surface laptop on wooden table

The year 2026 has marked a huge course correction for Microsoft after years of frustrating users with plenty of confusing processes, unoptimized UI elements, and just the generous bloatware that can bring any Windows system to a crawl. Microsoft has finally shifted into a new phase. From fixing the right-click behavior to speeding up the Search system, the company has fixed plenty of papercuts.

The next major milestone is making Windows 11 run smoothly on Windows PCs with just 8GB of RAM. That directly means entry-level and budget laptops will at least get the basics right, even if that means sacrificing the on-device AI bells and whistles. Let's face it. The increasingly AI-first approach to computing on a Windows 11 machine is a little too taxing on the hardware at hand.