Buffalo Mini Station HD-PNTU3 500GB Review
Buffalo Mini Station is comparatively slower than the top five drives that we tested. The cost per GB is also a bit high at Rs. 7.5. The only good aspects are the sturdy build and the variety of utilities of which TurboPC and RAMDISK are the most useful. Unless the price comes down, this drive is hard to recommend. Get the Silicon Power Armor A80 instead.
Design and Build:
Buffalo Mini Station looks quite simple but it comes with a chassis that can survive minor drops. Reason being the presence of silicon shock absorbers placed between the chassis and the drive within. It comes in a black glossy finish which is a finger print magnet. It feels quite solid in your hands and the sides do not bent easily.
Test Setup:
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K @3.4GHz
Motheboard: Intel DP67BG
RAM: 2x2GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM @1333MHz (timing: 9-9-9-24)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
OS Drive: Intel SSDSA2H080GIGN (80 GB SSD)
RAID 0 Combination: 2 x 300GB WD Velociraptor
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6850
Power Supply: Corsair HX620W
Performance
The drive gives unformatted space of 465.73 GB. It gave a Read Burst speed of 104.1 MB/s which was much slower than that of Hitachi Mobile Touro Pro which gives 182 MB/s. In the real world testing which involved transferring 4GB sequential and assorted files from the WD drive to the RAID array and back we got the following scores. Read / Write (sequential file) in MB/s – 71.91 / 74.01 and Read / Write (Assorted) in MB/s –68.28 / 51.37. This performance was slower than other drives such as Silicon Power Armor A80, Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro, Seagate GoFlex Slim among others. With the TurboCopy mode activated you get a 10-15 percent jump in the readings, but we were disappointed with the default transfer speeds.
Verdict:
Buffalo Mini Station is comparatively slower than the top five drives that we tested. The cost per GB is also a bit high at Rs. 7.5. The only good aspects are the sturdy build and the variety of utilities of which TurboPC and RAMDISK are the most useful. Unless the price comes down, this drive is hard to recommend. Get the Silicon Power Armor A80 instead.
Features: 3/5
Peformance: 2/5
Build Quality:3/5
Value:2.5/5
Overall: 2.5/5
Price: Rs. 3,500