| Product: |
Buffalo Ministation TurboUSB HD-PS250U2 250 GB |
| Date: |
20/10/09 (30 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Tough, reliable, quiet
Disadvantages: I havn't worked out why there is a power lead, but you can leave it behind
A few years ago I started getting more serious with photography, soon enough I went digital which lets you take as many photos as you want without the processing costs, although then you end up with hundreds, no, thousands of photos which you need to store somewhere! Being rather organised I save all my photos, then back them up onto DVD, and onto this wonderful little drive, then get to work editing, and back them up again! The upshot of which is large volumes of data requiring somewhere to sit!
Most of the time I work on short contracts doing various environmental or ecology jobs, so can only take with me what I can fit in a car boot, or in a couple of suitcases. In goes the laptop, and in too goes the Buffalo Ministation. I can take photos happily all summer long, sound in the knowledge I 320GB of space to store them all!
The size of this drive is quite impressive, it's very compact and slim, and is a nice dark grey/black non-shiny finish. The build quality is very good, and apparently according to the information supplied you can even drop it and it will be OK! This may be the case when it is not being used, but I would be doubtful of this when it is in use. I took mine apart so that I could get the data off my old laptop hard disk, and inside are several soft rubber shock absorbers, and the drive just slots into it's SATA socket and is held firmly by the shock absorbers. I've now got it back with it's own disk and all is well and good!
You get two cables with this drive, one is a pretty standard USB cable, although it does have a clip so that you can wrap it around the drive and it clips in place which saves it getting tangled or lost. There is also a power lead which tends to get in the way a bit. I've actually used this drive without the power lead, and it seemed to work fine, so I don't know why it's there really, maybe for USB1.1 it's needed, or possibly for higher capacity drives. Other drives do have a USB cable that slots in the edge and hides away which I would prefer.
With the drive you also get a Buffalo Turbo USB disk, which speeds up data transfer to and from the drive. It does work reasonably well, and can speed up transfers by about 20% in my experience. I'm sure that there was some kind of back-up software on this disk too, but I don't use it, also there is the option of having a password to protect the contents of the drive, but I don't use that either.
Although it reports as being 250GB, like all drives this isn't quite so! My computer reports there being 249,995,624,448 bytes of space, which actually equates to 232GB. This is all rather confusing but it's basically to do with computer stuff working in a binary not metric world, and system stuff to make the drive work! Anyway, what's 18GB between friends!!
Overal this is a great little drive, reliable, quick and small with big storage capacity. This drive is also now a great price, for a little extra you can get 320GB, but then there is a bit of a price jump up to the 500GB drive. To be honest though, if you want massive storage then you probably should get a terrabyte desktop drive which can stay at home. For portability and durability this one is just great.
Summary: Ample storage in a compact, tough package.
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