Hitachi XL2000 2TB External Hard Drive

This 7200 RPM external hard drive has a whopping 2 TB of

capacity, which will satiate all your data storage needs.  At a time  when USB

3.0 is gaining ground, and external hard drives are shipping with eSATA or

FireWire interfaces, this drive comes with a USB 2.0 interface. We sure hope

that the drive would also be available in a USB 3.0 avatar soon as well. The

drive's casing is sturdy and is lined with series of gaps that serve for air

ventilation as well as to vertically mount it with the supplied stand. The

casing can host only a single drive.

We hooked the drive to a machine with an AMD Phenom II X4

2.60 GHz CPU running on a MSI 790FX GD70 motherboard, with 4 GB DDR III RAM,

running on Windows 7. We then tried transferring one  GB of data comprising of

videos, music, documents, application executables, etc. Copying this data from

the PC to the hard drive took 55 seconds, while the reverse took only 15

seconds. In the HDTune benchmark, this drive clocked an average transfer rate of

20.3 MB/s with an access time of 15 ms. These results are slightly better then

Seagate's GoFlex external hard drive, which we've also reviewed this month.

Bottomline: The drive is a good buy as far as its

price and performance are concerned, but we do wish it had a USB 3.0 interface.

That would give a boost to its performance.