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.