Buffalo 500GB Turbo USB Drivestation review

[The_Observer]

Background info

Due to the unexpected demise of the WD Elements 500GB HDD after about 10 Hours of use(5 hours of use when it started to show the about to fail results and next 5 hours trying to get it bacK)I was determined to get a better HDD which would be reliable.After searching length and breadth of internet it suddenly dawned on me "All HDD will fail eventually".And the second part of realisation for the higher and faster death rate of HDD is because they are made in China.This led me to look into the WD Elements HDD and I came to know that the HDD in that is good,the chip that interfaces the HDD to SATA is the problem.Anyway WD was happy to take it back and give a WD World edition 500GB and 3 years of warranty as opposed to 1 year of Elements.This was promising,but the loss of about 380GB of downloads most of which came as corrupted files from the WD Elements and so unusable was an indication that one backup copy wasn;t a good idea.I needed two of them.

The main requirememnts were:
1)It should have encryption:No one wants their "secret" files to be accessed by everyone.I knew I could use Truecrypt for this.make a partition of 490GB and a few MB for Truecrypt and then autorun the auto mount volume every time it's plugged in.But this was not cool.So the HDD had to have a built in encryption which would ask for password when plugged in.

2)It should have ON/Off switch:This would be very helpful in leaving the adapter plugged in at all the time and easy turn on off at hands length.

3)Power saving feature:Automatic start and shutdown with timer would help in shutting down the HDD if not used for a specific amount of time.

4)Good cooling:It's better to have a fan on it for active cooling.

With these in mind I reviewed the top dogs in market:Maxtor one touch and Seagate FreeAgent.I was about to buy the Seagate when an unheard name popped up:Buffalo.Out of curiosity I started to look in this company and saw that they were into high performance stuff.Well good.I did check on their HDD section and didn;t find any complaints from them.And to complete it I found an ad for a Buffalo 500GB HDD used for a week with receipt from best buy.After haggling I got the price to 110$ with delivery to homeBTW it turned out that it has a feature called Turbo USB which is supposed to speed up the file transfer by 37%.Would it work?We will see shortly

Looks

The packaging had enough cushion and space for the HDD,power adapter and USB cable.


The Turbo USB feature is prominently featured on the cover

It came with Securelockware CD,manual,Memeo Backup and another manual for mac.

The drive by itself is good looking and sturdy

The power adapter has a strange look

On closer looks it can be seen that there is a fan mesh with many holes for easy passage of air

Back View

It has the power switch,an output for optional fan not included(and hard to find),power mode button,USB connector and the power input

Front View

There is a mirror like display lighting up on power and usage.This helps to see if the device is on and if the data is being accessed.

Performance

The manual asks to install the software before connecting and doing so it asks the drive to be plugged in and then asks to format the drive with all steps clearly mentioned in the manual.After these steps and starting encryption,when ever the drive is plugged it,it asks for the password input.

Only after that does it appear in disk management making data deletion impossible before password input.


The drive inside the enclosure is Samsung HD501LJ 7200RPM.I am a big fan of Samsung products.Their HDD has never failed on me and I hope this one will live for a long long time.A review of this drive can be found at
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3031
Samsung HD501LJ

There is a power saving utility for the HDD.This can be used to switch of the HDD after a specified amount of time.

Turbo USB

As per Buffalo this technology will speed up the data transfer as it has some kind of controller inside the drive.But this need the software to be used and activated.I took HD Tach and HD Tune reults before and after for comparison.

Before the TURBO USB was enabled it can be seen that the average transfer rate is 14.8MB/s.
http://good-times.webshots.com/photo...03278002NtmyCQ
After enabling it via the software the speed increased to an average of 16.2MB/s!!!


From a rough calculation it can be seen that the difference is about 10%.Well it's good as it doesn't need any effort.

Conclusion

The drive is silent,has power on/off button,independent power management software,status display,long USB cable and good support.An email was replied the next day.

Things to be desired

If the drive has encryption enabled,it needs the software already installed to work.Other wise it can't be used.It's the case with Maxtor drive too.If there was a software like lockngo which doesn't need installation on host machine it would be great.Another important thing is that the optional fan for the HDD cannot be found anywhere.I am sure it would help to keep the drive even cooler.

In short it's a good and fast drive with many features and worth the money.

PS:I didn't have much time to proof read this

[X2P]

Thanks for the review!

I was wondoring, what is the difference between this model with the silver/grey sides vs the model with black sides. Both are available to me and the one with black sides is a good 20$ cheaper. Cheers

[The_Observer]

Hi
I have no idea.If you find it out,post it here.

[K-TRON]

Nice review their RAMBO29
I was thnking about getting a buffalo, but decided to build my own.
Good luck with this harddrive, I have had many Samsung drives outlive WD's.

You should reinstall your usb 2.0 drivers, 16mb/sec is kinda slow. It may be the USB to sats card in the external, but it should be slightly faster. DO you have the Buffalo drivers installed ? - If their are any.

K-TRON

[The_Observer]

Hi
I have the drivers from Buffalo.Seems like it's faster when you copy and this speed is in benchmarking.

I am happy to have a Samsung.I also have had good old ones working perfectly.
Thanks