Buffalo DriveStation Combo 4 USB Portable Drive

It doesn't matter whether you’re trying to save important documents or your treasured photos, the act of backing up vital data is essential. Luckily, hard drive prices have been falling fast, so users can store up to a terabyte of data without breaking the budget. Buffalo, like several other storage manufacturers, is now offering 1TB of storage for less than $150 at this link
Buffalo Drive Station Combo USB Portable Drive.com. When they buy the Buffalo DriveStation Combo 4, Mac and PC users are getting more than just a lot of disk space to house files; they are getting fast performance, a combination of connections, and strong encryption, a combination unmatched by any other external drives at this size and price.

Like the LaCieHard Disk USB Portable Drive and Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus USB portable drive, the Combo 4 contains twin FireWire connections. Unlike those drives, Buffalo’s offering differentiates itself by including both a FireWire 400 and a FireWire 800 port (LaCie’s and Maxtor’s models only have FireWire 400). The FireWire 400 write speed notched a 15.9-MBps mark, which was blown away by the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus’ 23.4 MBps. The Combo 4’s 26.5-MBps read speed slightly trailed LaCie and Maxtor’s offerings, which notched 29.9 MBps and 29.0 MBps, respectively.

Transferring a 5GB folder of mixed media (music, video, photos, and documents) to the Combo 4 via the USB 2.0 connection took 4 minutes and 7 seconds, or a rate of 20.7 MBps. In terms of read speed, the Combo 4 achieved an excellent 22.2 MBps. When we installed the included Buffalo TurboUSB software, we saw read speeds increase to 25.2 MBps (one of the fastest speeds in the 1TB space), but write speeds didn’t see an improvement, hovering near the 20-MBps rate with a 19.8-MBps mark.

Small Office/Home Office users as well as the home user would benefit well from the Buffalo DriveStation Combo 4 USB portable drive. It is a winner.