Posted by ketyung
on Mar/17/2008
at 7:16 am
External USB hard drives still remain pretty popular despite its slow speed and CPU-power hungry nature. Of course, the main factor of its success is it gives extra convenience of being portable to carry around and its USB connector is widely compatible with many different types of computers and gadgets. But Buffalo wanna take the external USB hard drive to another level that gives users not only the convenience, but also making the drive super fast and less resource-hungry.
Buffalo’s MiniStation Turbo USB external hard drive is claimed to come with an extra Turbo mode, which the specialty is to give a speed boost of 64% faster than a standard 4200-rpm drive. But to do this all you need is to install a driver that comes with it on your computer. Once the drive plugged into the USB port of your computer with the driver installed, the Buffalo’s drive will be recognized automatically and the Turbo mode kicks off.
But, EverythingUSB has done a review on the Buffalo’s Turbo drive and found that the drive gives only about 13% better than without running on Turbo mode. (Turbo mode is found giving read and write speeds at 39.3 MB/s and 28.4 MB/s respectively) But the drive runs under normal mode also pretty quick, which has a top read speed of 34.7MB/s and write speed of 25.5 MB/s, which is faster than most USB drives that operate at the 25MB/s to 30MB/s range. Despite higher speed, the Buffalo’s Turbo drive doesn’t show any increase in CPU usage, which is commonly seen with other USB drives. he Buffalo drive is found even with a CPU usage utilization dropped in half from 11% to 5% after switching on the Turbo mode.
Another worth-mentioned feature is the drive comes included with a Memeo backup software. The software offers pretty easy way for backing up your data. Different from other backup software which normally gets you to choose where you wanna backup your data to first. The Memeo gets you to specify where you wish to back your data up to first. You’re not limited only to backing up to this drive, you can even have it to backup to other locations such as another hard drive, a flash drive, your iPod, or even a network location. You even can keep previous versions of files without overwriting them and security is another extra with the 128-bit AES encryption, which only the Memeo software can be used to restore the data.
via [OhGizmo], via [EverythingUSB]
March 17th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Thats some pretty good stats for a USB External hard Drive.
April 19th, 2008 at 1:00 am
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