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Buffalo HD-HB160U2 DriveStation 160 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive | List Price: $232.69
Discount Price: $99.00
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Brand: Buffalo
Binding: Electronics
Features: - 160 GB Capacity; supports USB 2.0/1.1; 7200 rpm
- Preformatted hard drive for out-of-the-box operation; silent running with a fanless design
- Unique heat-sink chassis keeps internal parts cool
- Power-saving shutdown scheduling to preserve energy
- Choice of vertical or horizontal operation lets you conserve desktop space
Great quality product! [Posted on 2005-02-12]
This external DriveStation is superb. Silent and speedy! Why? It runs at 7200 rpm + USB2.0 and fanless cooling. The drive comes pre-formatted out-of-the-box for immediate use. Product made in in Japan meaning the great quality. The drive is backed by a limited 1-year warranty and toll-free 24/7 technical support. I'm currently using two DriveStations and have no problem with them at all.
Buffalo Technology is a new company to many of us but their quality products already won customers for sure.
Excellent Value and It Works [Posted on 2005-08-02]
First and foremost, this drive does exactly what it is intended to do and represents a great value vs. most competitive products. Sorry, Amazon, but this time I bought locally because with rebates I only paid $80 for this 160g drive! Impossible to pass that up!
Notes, pro and con:
* As noted, it simply works! Pull it out of the box, hook up the power cable then the USB cable and turn on the power. In seconds WinXP has 'accepted' the drive and you are ready to run. No software necessary, although some basic software is supplied that you can use if desired.
* Data transfer is quick, just as it should be! Be aware, though, that this drive uses only a 2MB cache vs. the 8MB that other manufacturers like Maxtor and WD use. Having used it to copy and access files, including playing videos, I do not find this to be a problem, but if your plan is to use this for applications that demand a lot of read/write activity (e.g. video rendering, etc.) you might find this small cache to limit the performance vs. the higher cache products out there. But for those of us who simply need more space to store and access files, there doesn't seem to be any noticeable difference.
* The drive comes with a CD of basic (and I do mean BASIC) software. But even though the applications are not graphically sophisticated, they seem to work just fine. There is a disk formatting utility, a back up utility and a power management utility where you can set the drive to sleep after a defined period of inactivity. Each application is independent, not an integrated package, and each is, shall I repeat, BASIC! But again, they work, so who cares if your use is simply for basic storage and retrieval. As an example, while very simplistic, I launched the back-up utility, set up a schedule for back-ups and pressed a button to run a back-up immediately and within a minute I had a clean back up of my selected files! I don't need any more sophistication for my use! (In fact, it is probably all my other oversized, graphically sophisticated programs and files that forced me to buy an extra drive in the first place!!)
* One thing that seemed odd to me, although again it is nothing critical for the type of use I intend, is that the drive and software only support FAT formats and not NTFS. The drive comes preformatted FAT32 but I assumed (incorrectly!) that I could use the formatting utility to upgrade to NTFS. FAT32 it is! Again, for basic uses, who cares. But some of you may have more critical reasons to need NTFS and nowhere on the box or in the manuals is there anything about this.
In summary, I love the drive. It was incredibly cheap, runs perfectly (and quietly) and is pretty good looking, too! Why only 4 stars? Well, the software is not up to competitive levels (although, again, it works fine) and I have a bit of a gripe with the lack of information on the box or manuals. Nowhere on either is the 2MB cache noted nor the limitation to FAT formatting. While this is not a limitation for my use, it might be for others and should be `disclosed', IMHO. Hence, 4 stars. But if your needs are like mine, buy it confidently. It works!
Very Slow Hard Drive [Posted on 2006-05-31]
The setup was very simple. I set it up as a network drive. It took over 7 hours to transfer 3 Gig of data from the Buffalo drive to my local hard drive. Sometimes it says disk full when I try to save a file; even though I only have 40 gig on the drive.
Do not expect tech support. I called numerous times and was on hold for over half an hour on each occassion and still didn't get to talk to any tech support. I am finally able to talk to a tech support as I am writing this review. I was told to update the firmware and check to see if the cause was a network problem or not. I just updated the firmware and the problem still exist.
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