Buffalo Quattro Drive Station

Often when 1 TB of storage is mentioned, it's invariably assumed to be a NAS.

The Buffalo Quattro Drive Station however, is a 1TB external DAS (Direct

Attached Storage) which is connected directly to a PC rather than a network and

allows you to store, backup and transport large files. It comes with four 7200

rpm that can be configured for RAID 1, 0, 5 and JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). It

comes pre configured with RAID 5, hence reducing the total capacity of the drive

to around 698 GB. It's very easy to use. All you need to do is to connect it to

a USB port of your PC, and it's

ready for use. Apart from USB you also have an

option for e-SATA Connections. It supports OS like Windows XP, 2000, Me, MacOS

9.0, etc. For testing the performance we ran I/O meter test and to our surprise

the result in terms of I/O response per seconds was at par with some of the NAS

devices we reviewed recently (e.g.: SNAP server 520, reviewed PCQ-Feb 07).

However, it took us a long time to copy a 100 GB folder containing multiple

files to Quattro via USB 2.0, from a hard disk (400 GB SATA, 720 rpm). But, here

the bottleneck was the PC and not Quattro. So, to harness the potential of this

device, you also need a PC with possibly a RAID deployment. Alternately, you

could use an e-SATA drive. Overall, keeping in mind the fact that it is mainly

meant for graphic designers, IT professionals and even homes and small offices,

its performance is quite good.

Bottomline: Good, easy to use and flexible external storage solution, but

at a price.