By Julian Prokaza on Tuesday, 01 April 2008
 If the 250Gb Iomega Ego isn’t quite capacious enough for your mobile storage needs, no problem – Buffalo has just the thing. Its new MiniStation TurboUSB trumps the competition by being the largest portable hard drive currently available – a whopping 500Gb. No larger nor heavier than other portable hard drives, the MiniStation TurboUSB’s increased capacity comes courtesy of the latest 500Gb 2.5in laptop drive technology – a Hitachi-manufactured 5400rpm SATA model with 8Mb of cache, in this case.
Unfortunately, while the metal-clad Iomega eGo looks like the kind of high-tech hip flask that everyone want in their pocket, Buffalo has plumped for a horrid generic-looking plastic case. It certainly won’t catch the eye of any light-fingered types, but at least Buffalo could have spent an extra 0.001p plugging the holes where the ports poke through rather than leave the interior electronics exposed and vulnerable to whatever bits of gunk are floating around inside your bag or pocket.
Buffalo’s claim is that this swathe of grey plastic represents a “tough armoured outer case", but we’re unimpressed. The plastic feels sturdy, but the top and bottom faces lack any internal support and flex even under moderate pressure from a fingertip.
Press the case enough (i.e. not all that much much) and it touches the hard disk case inside. This in turn flexes (not normally an issue when it’s inside a laptop) and makes contact with the spinning disk platters beneath. This obviously causes the drive to throw a conniption and while it’s not something you’d normally do on purpose, it’s easy to foresee a situation where it could happen accidentally on a messy desktop.
On the plus side, the hard disk is snugly fixed inside the case by shock-absorbing mounts that should help mitigate any damage from non-operating shock. The drive itself can resist up to 400G of operating shock too, so it should be able to shrug off most bumps and bangs while its spinning.
Buffalo also makes special mention of the MiniStation TurboUSB’s wrap-around USB cable, which means you’re never without a way to plug it into a PC. It’s a low-tech solution, but wrapping the short cable around the drive and then clipping one end to the other is better than carrying a cable loose in a bag. In theory. In practice, it's a less than perfect arrangement.
There’s a groove where the two halves of the plastic case meet and the cable is supposed to sit inside it when wrapped around. The problem is that not only is the groove far too wide for the cable to sit snugly, but there’s also a plastic ridge running down its midline that prevents the cable from sitting neatly in place. A small point, it has to be said, but since Buffalo deemed it worthy of mention, so did we.
 
With a raw average data transfer rate of 15.1Mb/s, the MiniStation TurboUSB is neither fast nor slow – the Iomega eGo managed 19.9Mb/s. Things improve when it comes to actual file transfer speed though, and it took 32 seconds to copy all 435Mb of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 file to the MiniStation TurboUSB – same as on the Iomega eGo.
Appearance may not matter much for a portable hard drive, but we’d be less bothered by the MiniStation TurboUSB’s cheap looks if it had a price tag to match. In fact, it costs more than two of Iomega’s 250Gb drives and given the dramatic difference in build quality, we’d feel far safer trusting our data to a brace of bullet-proof eGos.
Buffalo MiniStation TurboUSB 500Gb
| Price |
£243 inc VAT (expected street price) |
| Rating |
3 out of 6 |
| Good |
Huge capacity |
| Bad |
Cheap looks; port holes expose the circuit board; case feels flimsy |
| Verdict |
The biggest portable hard disk you can buy, but the cheap-looking build does little to make this drive desirable |
| Manufacturer |
Buffalo |
| Buy from |
Dabs |
Specifications
| Capacity |
500Gb |
| Drive model |
Hitachi Travelstar HTS545040KTA300 |
| RPM |
5400rpm |
| Connectivity |
USB2.0 |
| Other |
Secure Lock Ware encryption and Memeo backup software included (CD-ROM) |
| Size |
127 x 83 x 21mm |
| Weight |
190g |
|
