Review: Buffalo Drivestation Duo portable hard drive

Roughly the size of a couple of house bricks (only blacker and shinier), the Drivestation Duo from Buffalo comprises a compact metal case containing a pair of 7,200rpm Serial-ATA hard drives, a power supply with cooling and the electronics required to make it work.

To the rear, three ports provide Hi-Speed USB2 along with both 4pin and 6pin Firewire interfaces.

Setup is very easy, thanks mainly to the quick installation wizard supplied on CD. It takes you through installation and cable connection (both USB and Firewire cables are supplied) and installs a Raid utility; the latter allows you to configure the Drivestation Duo in one of a selection of thee Raid modes.

Having two separate hard disks in the box gives you the option of employing them as two individual drives or combining them in one of two ways.

By default, you will see two separate hard drives. Selecting Spanning Mode combines them into one large volume, while choosing Raid 1 Mirror produces a single volume with a redundant mirrored copy. The Raid 1 mode therefore offers you maximum protection from disk errors, but at the cost of half of the total disk space.

A switch at the rear of the device allows you to enable automatic power mode. In this mode, the drives will power up only when requested via a USB signal.

Many users of the Drivestation Duo will use it for fast, reliable data backup: Also supplied on CD is a copy of Memeo Autobackup - a simple to use application that offers powerful backup options. As its name suggests, it will back up crucial files silently in the background without the need to configure manual or scheduled backups.

Being portable, the Drivestation Duo is great for moving data from PC to PC. When the drive is disconnected, Memeo is clever enough to keep track of those files you’ve been working on so they can be saved automatically when the Drive is plugged back in.

Ranging in size from 500MB to 1.5TB, the Drivestation Duo often offers better value per gigabyte than its single-drive cousin, the DriveStation Combo. Plus, you also get the benefits of Raid 1 mirroring.

Also consider:
ATMT Ultra-portable HD160
A mid-range portable storage device from ATMT

Maxtor Onetouch III Mini Edition
Easy to set up and good for anyone who needs a portable backup drive

Western Digital My Book
A stylish external hard disk drive, but lacks a network option.

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