Buffalo Technology MiniStation USB 3.0 - 1 TB

Most manufacturers seem to have at least one USB 3.0 hard drive in their product range these days, and today we're testing the Buffalo Technology MiniStation 1 TB USB 3.0 external hard drive.

The MiniStation is a 2.5-inch hard drive (7.7 x 1.7 x 11.4 cm) that weighs 213 g and which can be easily carried around in a large pocket or a bag. It connects to a computer via a 50 cm USB 3.0 cable that's also compatible with USB 2.0 ports. It's available with a storage capacity of 500 GB or 1 TB, and all models come in a choice of black or white. Here are the product references for the various MiniStation USB 3.0 drives:

Data transfer speeds are slightly below average for drives of the same format:
 

In particular, random write speeds for smaller files max out at 23.7 MBps, which penalises this HDD's performances on the whole.
This result isn't all that surprising however, considering that the access time in write mode (although tested with different software) isn't all that great either:
 

There aren't many hard drives that take over 5 ms to access files in write mode, but the MiniStation USB 3.0 takes three times as long!

Although these results might look awful, it's important to put them into the context of day-to-day use. The PCMark Vantage test score of 2832 shows that in reality, this drive's performances are actually 10% to 13% lower than the average comparable drive: