Buffalo 4TB DriveStation External Hard Drive

Pros: USB3 (which is very, very fast). USB2 backwards compatibility. No fans and no garishly bright LED's. Attractive, minimal case design. Will only power on when the USB3 cable is connected, which is a cool power saving feature.

Cons: Minimally-ventillated plastic enclosure runs a little warm and has no standoffs to allow for stacking multiple drives. No S.M.A.R.T. status. The included documentation makes no mention of the aforementioned cool power saving feature of the drive only powering up when connected, so make sure you actually connect it before you assume your drive is DOA.

Overall Review: I should preface this review by saying that though I am a ravenous consumer of hard drives, this drive is actually the first USB3 drive I have owned, and the interface standard absolutely lives up to the hype. I get sustained write rates (copying file backups in the form of DMG sparse bundles) in excess of 100mb/s on my Mac Pro, substantially quicker than I ever saw with eSATA. The connector is robust and easy to deal with, also unlike eSATA. Of course, that speaks more to USB3 standard than to this drive, so to turn our attention there: overall, this seems to be a really nice consumer-grade external drive package. The drive enclosure is a very simple, glossy back plastic affair. The drive is cooled passively, meaning no fans, which is great for minimizing noise, not so great if you really hammer on the drives. I tried copying a full 2tb of data to the drive and found that it did get a little hot, but no worse than I have seen with other fanless plastic enclosures. I would definitely caution anyone about stacking these drives on top of each other or placing them vertically right against one another, however-- the only provided ventilation is on the top of the drive, and there are no standoffs to prevent you from blocking these vents entirely. The enclosure is fairly minimal and attractive, and is not garnished with any awful blaring-bright LED's. The "adaptable positioning" is a little silly of Buffalo's marking folks to boast about, but yes, you can definitely orient it two different ways without the need for a stand. Acoustic properties are excellent, the drive is very quiet in all modes of operation. The drive arrives formatted NTFS, but does mount on a Mac right out of the box, and once reformatted works flawlessly with Mac OS (10.9.2). Curiously, the drive does not seem to support SMART-- first time I have seen that in a while, but not really a deal-breaker for an external. The included power supply is generic, and there is no indication as to who makes the drive inside the enclosure. Overall, this drive seems to be a nice, if no-frills, choice for someone seeking a high-speed, low-cost backup solution. In comparison to other external hard drives I have used, I think the most substantial drawback here is the minimal provision for cooling. Those who envision using this drive for long-term sustained data transfer might do better to seek a drive with more robust cooling provisions, but for general storage use this offers an attractive option.

Pros: Overall very fast drive. Performance was on the high end of what's possible in an external enclosure right now. Really impressive considering the internal drive is only 5400rpm. Buffalo's technology makes it so you get the energy savings from a slower rotation speed without having to sacrifice performance through intelligent use of the integrated cache and associated firmware adjustments. Performance specs: Read: Min spd: 94MB/s. Max: 193MB/s. Average: 160MB/s. Access time of 16.8ms. Burst rate is 216MB/s. Subjectively I got read rates around 150MB/s. Write speeds averaged around 46MB/s. Much slower, but to be expected. Writing to a drive is always slower than reading from it. This drive couldn't be any easier to use, it's fast and it's priced right. Solid buy!

Cons: Tried to download their software to test it, download failed with no error messages. They should probably include their software on a CD in the package. Warranty is only 1 year. 5 is pretty standard but 3 is the industry standard for a consumer drive. One egg taken away for the short warranty period.

Overall Review: Buffalo is a growing name in the consumer storage space. Their NAS (Network attached storage) offerings have been competitive for quite some time. They offer a good value of performance and price. While they leave room for improvement in customer service and support they are quickly becoming one of the major players in the consumer storage space. They need to invest more in customer support and put longer warranties on their products. If they had a minimum warranty of 3 years on all their storage devices, NAS and local, then they'd be a real contender. Assuming, of course, that they also had to support structure to make that warranty actually useful to customers.

Pros: The first thing I noticed is how quiet this thing is. I hadn't even realized it was on. This is saying something given that my entire desktop is about 20 decibels. The speed I can't really give negative points for (roughly 25mb/sustained write) as I'm still on usb 2.0. I'm currently backing up my entire 640 Gb windows 7 os drive. The l.e.d. that's used on this thing is not very bright. It's just bright enough to let you know what's going on but not too bright as to light up a dark room like some devices. It also lets you know when data is transferring by fading in and out slowly. This is a nice touch to let you know when the drive is doing any transferring of data. It goes into a low power mode but the second you need it and pull it up into explorer, it's ready to go. The look of the drive is nice and for a 3.5'' internal drive, the footprint is quite small. I especially like the attention to detail regarding the vents. This allows you to store it flat or on it's side vertically. For me I chose flat as space wasn't an issue, but it's certainly nice to have options.The usb cable is roughly 3 feet and really is the perfect length to plug in without having crazy excess. A really cool feature with this drive is that buffalo intelligently put a link to it's download page for the software already on the drive when you pull it up in explorer. This allows instant access to the software available for the device without having to go through some menus on the website. It's a small thing but the attention to detail on this drive is impressive. The software is as follows: Secure lock mobile: Says boot failure (I assume because i'm backup up my os to the drive atm) Turbo pc ex: designed to boost the connection/read/write speeds from your pc to your drive and vice versa. Not sure that it works on usb2.0 given my 25mb/sec sustained write speed. eco manager- allows you to turn on and off the power savings of the drive. Last time I tried this, it failed but previous times it worked just fine (again, i'm backing up my os) disk formatter 2: A simple utility to format the drive into either fat32, ntfs or just plain erase the drive. If you want more than this from a formatting tool, I suggest other software. It comes formatted in ntfs, btw. Finally backup utility. This allows you to schedule a backup on a specific schedule by time itself or hours. If you backup your os drive please keep in mind it cannot backup in-use files. The best full backup utilities work on a boot cd because there are no files in use during pc boot up. This allows EVERY file to be backed up like a mirror image. This software, doesn't do that.

Cons: The software is half-baked. I prefer more features in the software. It should all be in one program instead of 4 different downloads. I get the minimalist approach here but one program to download is far easier for the end user and you could always turn off individual features you don't use.

Overall Review: Obviously, long term reliability is an unknown here so keep that in mind. The hardware and fit and finish of the device and the small attention to detail regarding that hardware, is impeccable. The software is in desperate need of the same innovation the hardware engineers seem to have in spades. If your looking for a quiet, backup drive that looks good on your desk, has automatic power saving technology, and barely makes a sound when in use and the software doesn't matter, this is the drive for you. If however your looking for an all-encompassing backup solution with built-in robust software, you may want to look elsewhere.

Pros: Quiet, cool, fast!! Technology marches on! Has cooling vents on four sides so you can place it flat or vertically on your desk. Even during a long backup it barely gets warm to the touch. You can feel a little vibration through the case, but the noise is inaudible over the sound of my computer fans. Comes with a 40 inch (1 meter) USB cable and a small power supply with a 56 inch cable. Nice lengths for most users, I'd say. There is a small green power LED that also dims and brightens to indicate disk access. I let Windows 7 run a full check on this disk before I used it. It took about 3 hours. No bad sectors reported. I can see this drive being ideal for say, a photographer who runs Lighroom/Photoshop/Aperture on their laptop and wants to have a fast external drive to hold his/her image database. It comes with software that uses some of the computer RAM as a cache to speed up drive access, which would be ideal when editing photos. There is also a backup utility, a power manager that powers down the drive after a chosen time, an encryption program and a disk formatter. I chose not to install any of the software, but if you get one of these drives, I suggest you check out the software and see what might meet your needs. It came in a rather large retail box that should stand up to shipping pretty well.

Cons: If you need a compact portable drive, the 3.5 inch form factor may not be convenient for you. Not really a con, but there is no way to really quantify how much abuse any hard drive will take. I always treat them with care.

Overall Review: I've gone through several external USB drives over the last few years because I'm the principal photographer for BeyondBoudoirPhoto and I have to make multiple backups of my hard drives that store images for clients. The 2 TB size works best for my Lightroom catalog and I have several drives in this size. Up until now I've not been impressed with the performance of USB drives, even the USB 3 drives have been slow compared to internal SATA drives and the USB 3 circuitry sometimes has issues. The last 3.5 inch external drive I bought was so bad that I broke it out of its USB 3 housing and used it as an internal drive! It still wasn't fast, but at least it worked then. One reason these drives tend to be slow is that they use low-speed motors to reduce energy consumption and heat. This new drive from the Buffalo folks uses a 5400 RPM drive inside, so I was not expecting much. Imagine my surprise when it outperformed my recently purchased 7200 RPM SATA3 internal drives! I use a backup program called Casper to do incremental backups and it gives me a speed number in the backup report. Here are three examples I noted today: 2.5 inch 2 TB USB 3 passport drive: 117 MB/sec 3.5 inch 2 TB SATA 3 internal drive: 181 MB/sec 3.5 inch 2TB USB 3 Buffalo drive: 203 MB/sec I really don't know how they made this drive that fast, but I'm not going to complain!

Pros: The first thing you notice about this drive is the shiny piano black case with the flat black top and bottom. It is very unobtrusive and will look good with any system. Plugging in the USB and power cords and booting revealed another pleasant surprise. I could not hear it at all. If it were not for the small LED on the front, I would not know that it was running. It quickly showed up on my monitor. After testing the drive for errors and durability, I ran a few speed tests. While it is no speed demon, it is no slouch either, with speeds about average of what you would expect for drives in this category and price point. The software is a nice touch. I like small simple programs that do one thing, rather than catch all programs that do much more than you want or need. The software of course only works with Buffalo drives, I haven't fully evaluated the software, but I can tell you that the backup software is simple to use and seems to work well.

Cons: This is a minor, picky comment, but, because the case is flat black on the bottom and top. I had to look closely tell which was which. It would be nice if the Buffalo name on the top were a bit more prominent, maybe Buffalo red. I wouldn't want to use any mechanical drive upside down.

Overall Review: Buffalo does not manufacture hard drives, They manufacture devices that use hard drives. I have seen drives from different manufacturers used in Buffalo products. They were all quality drives from respectable sources. I have seen this model advertised as a 5400 rpm drive. The specs on the drive I am evaluating is 7200 rpm. Regardless, this drive does exactly what it was designed for and does it well. If you don't have a backup system or it's time to upgrade, you won't go wrong with this one.

Pros: The Buffalo Drivestation is nearly silent in operation, I had to check the little green LED to make sure it was really on or off. It’s also fast- I averaged about 100 MB/s while loading this thing up with ripped movies. Given the USB 3 interface, I expected it to be fast, but it’s the details that make this an outstanding external drive. There is no on-off switch, instead the drive automatically shuts off when the PC is asleep or off. It does not emit too much heat, which is a good sign when considering longevity. A three foot USB3 cable is rightfully included, and the drive can be arranged horizontally or vertically. The Backup Utility software (for Windows) is not exactly industrial strength but it’s at least as useful as the Mac OS’s Time Machine. It allows you to set a backup schedule and run backups on designated drives or directories. Simple and effective.

Cons: It’s expensive. Seagate offers a similar product for a good $20 less at the time of this review.

Overall Review: I assume Buffalo’s intent is to appeal to users who want speed and silence and are willing to pay a little more for it. With that in mind, this drive is a real winner. Quiet, fast, unobtrusive… It’s easy to forget this thing is external. I hardly notice its presence. The software, other than the backup utility, is forgettable and I doubt most users will bother with it. Overall, this drive gets a big recommendation from me.

Pros: This is the most impressive 3.0 external device I’ve ever seen. I was amazed to see that this was a 5400 RPM drive. The USB 3.0 connection, and possibly some technology thrown in by Buffalo, makes this drive operate just as fast as any internal 3 ½ inch hard drive. It took less than 14 minutes to create a total system image in Windows 8.1, using Windows internal imaging utility. I am using 55GB of allocated space on my drive, which is a 120GB SSD. Installation a no brainer. Just plug the regular 3 foot USB cable into an unused USB port (hopefully 3.0) on your computer and it show up just like another internal hard drive. It works in any operating system, per the instructions that came with the drive, but it is preformatted NTFS. I’ve plugged this drive into the back of my system and cannot hear it. The drive itself is a handsome black plastic box just big enough to hold the 3 ½ inch hard drive. Fit and finish looked very good. It can be place on its side of flat, and airflow will not be restricted.

Cons: The unit needs its own power – a wall wart of course. This enables the drive to deliver outstanding performance. Buffalo purported to furnish disk formatting and backup software. I passed on both. I was not able to download the imaging software, but I did not try more than a few minutes.

Overall Review: Buffalo Technology technical support is decent but timeconsuming. I fortunately did not use them for this item. This drive will seem huge compared to the 2 ½ inch external drives that are the size of a deck of cards. So if portability is important, you would be better off sticking with a smaller 2 ½ inch, which is slower but does not require its own power.

Pros: This is a nice looking, (a good combo of glossy (on the sides) and matte on top / bottom) External USB 3 drive. Saw decent transfer rates between 50MB/s to 110MB/s when backing up data on it. Can stand both horizontally and vertically without any external attachments, which is a good feature that many external drives lack.

Cons: Slightly bulkier than other 2TB external hdds.

Overall Review: was pretty silent. usual usb3.0 data cable. an adapter needs to be plugged in to supply power.