Buffalo MiniStation Turbo USB hard drive review

Perfect for travelling, or just another burden?

19 October 2007 9:00 GMT / By Stephen Patrick

The price of hard drives has tumbled in recent months, which makes buying an external backup drive great financial sense at the moment.

This 120GB HDD from Buffalo costs a mere £60 (inc. VAT) and has been designed with the mobile user in mind. The drive is encased in a black plastic casing that is extremely well protected against drops and knocks. So, even if you treat the drive with minimum respect and just through it in your kit bag, it should continue to work unscathed.

It works with either Mac OS or Windows XP and Vista, so anyone can make the most of it. Simply plugging the drive in is enough to install the drivers and you have yourself 120GB of extra space.

That’s not all, though, as Buffalo as bundled a selection of software with the drive that helps backing up your notebook’s files easier. There are also security tools to keep the information safe.

The USB port you hook it up into powers the drive. If you use an older USB 1.1 drive, you can attach the second additional lead to gain a reasonable amount of power.

When we tested the drive, we saw a slight performance gain when plugging both ports into a USB 2.0 machine. Buffalo claims this shouldn’t be the case, but it’s worth experimenting with your own setup.