Buffalo Drive Station Duo 500 GB

Sunday, February 04, 2007

The key highlight of this storage box is that it has two 250 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard disks which can be configured in RAID 0 or 1 levels. If you need high storage space with good performance, configure it in RAID 0. If you want more reliability, then configure it as RAID 1. The Drive Station Duo supports 2.0 USB as well as 4 pin and 6 pin 1394 FireWire connectors. This makes it easy to connect to a laptop as well.

The storage box is a little bulky and looks like a mini UPS, but that's justifiable as it has two 3.5 inch hard disks, external power jack and a cooling fan. It comes with a software called Memeo Auto-Backup that lets you backup all your data from storage devices such as local hard disks or pen drives.

You can also encrypt (password protect) the 2 hard disks and the files stored on them through its other software, Secure Lock Ware.

We tested it on a P4 3.2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM using WinBench99. Since it contains two identical HDDs, we tested one of those. The drive scored a remarkable 16.5 MB/s in Business Disk WinMark99 at CPU utilization of 48.31%.

It took us about 29.4 seconds to transfer 500 MB of MP3 files to it, which is quite fast. These scores are much better than the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition External HDD (reviewed in July 2006) which scored 13.3 MB/s in Business Disk WinMark99.

Bottom Line: The Drive Station has an ample storage capacity of 500 GB, is fast and gives good value for money.

Sulabh Puri

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