Buffalo Drive Station Duo 500 GB

The key highlight of this storage box is that it has two 250 GB 7200 RPM SATA

hard disks which can be configured in RAID 0 or 1 levels. If you need high

storage space with good performance, configure it in RAID 0. If you want more

reliability, then configure it as RAID 1. The Drive Station Duo supports 2.0 USB

as well as 4 pin and 6 pin 1394 FireWire connectors. This makes it easy to

connect to a laptop as well.

The storage box is a little bulky and looks like a mini UPS, but that's

justifiable as it has two 3.5 inch hard disks, external power jack and a cooling

fan. It comes with a software called Memeo Auto-Backup that lets you backup all

your data from storage devices such as local hard disks or pen drives.

You can also encrypt (password protect) the 2 hard disks and the files stored

on them through its other software, Secure Lock Ware.

We tested it on a P4 3.2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM using WinBench99. Since

it contains two identical HDDs, we tested one of those. The drive scored a

remarkable 16.5 MB/s in Business Disk WinMark99 at CPU utilization of 48.31%.

It took us about 29.4 seconds to transfer 500 MB of MP3 files to it, which is

quite fast. These scores are much better than the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini

Edition External HDD (reviewed in July 2006) which scored 13.3 MB/s in Business

Disk WinMark99.

Bottom Line: The Drive Station has an ample storage capacity of 500

GB, is fast and gives good value for money.

Sulabh Puri