Digital Trends

Buffalo DriveStation TurboUSB

October 29th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We freed the DriveStation from its box and plopped it down on our desk. We were immediately distraught at how short the included USB cable is. We’ve sampled a bevy of external drives in our day and this cord is by far the shortest we’ve ever seen, and looks to be about 30 inches long. It’s long enough to drop down behind our desk and plug into our PCs, so we’re not complaining too loudly, but if we wanted to move the drive to the upper deck of our Ikea Jerker desk, we’d be out of luck.

First we installed the Memeo software, which we also sampled with the Buffalo LinkStation. It works wonderfully for the most part. To recap, you specify a backup routine of “folder here is backed up to drive X,” and then every time you add a file to the location it’s automatically copied to the backup drive, which is superb. You can even enable Auto Delete, which will delete files from the backup location if you delete them from the source, which we also love. During testing, the software worked as we expected it, however, we found that after a two-day lull in testing and writing that the software had turned off (it runs in the system tray). When we restarted it, our backup routine was non-existent and we had to re-create it. This is potentially a major problem, as we had assumed our files were being backed up, but when we noticed the desktop alerts weren’t happening (a little box pops up from the system tray to alert you to a file backup occurring) we opened the application to find our backup routine deleted. We’re not sure why this happened, but once we re-created it we had no further issues.

Saving Power

Though we generally had a trouble-free experience with Memeo, the same cannot be said for some of the other bundled software. The first of which is the Power Saver utility, which can allow you to set a timer on the drive for it to shutoff due to inactivity. This helps preserve the drive’s life since its platters aren’t always spinning.

This tool lets you set up a power plan for the drive, at least in theory.

It’s a great idea, but we had difficulty getting it to work. When we told the software to turn the drive off after ten minutes it told us this.

When we tried to set up a power plan for our drive it wouldn’t let us do so.

We waited several minutes and tried again, but the drive was not having it. Whenever we put it into “power-saving mode” and tried to get it to accept the settings, it would tell us to wait and try again. We never got it to work successfully.

TurboUSB

Moving along, we then installed the TurboUSB utility, which activates turbo mode on the drive for improved performance. Why this is even an option, we have no idea. You can even disable it, but why would you? Buffalo should just build this into the drive somehow to make sure customers are getting the most from the drive, rather than making it a separate utility they have to install.

You can enable, or disable turbo mode, in case data transfers are too fast for your liking.

Regardless, we installed it and enabled it, then did some testing. As it turns out the turbo mode isn’t any different than the non-turbo mode, at least in our tests. Here are some numbers:

150MB Write
Non-turbo: 16.3 seconds
Turbo: 10.3 seconds

929MB Write
Non-turbo: 32.8 seconds
Turbo: 33.1 seconds

356MB Read 
Non-Turbo: 1:37 seconds
Turbo: 1:12 seconds



When it comes to write speeds, there is virtually no difference between modes. We did see a difference in a read test, however, which is both surprising and pleasing at the same time.