Your memory in your pocket

Buffalo Inc’s MiniStation Thunderbolt is a dual-interface portable hard drive that lets you back up your precious data almost faster than you can think through the Thunderbolt port connection.

Buffalo is marketing its MiniStation as the world’s first portable Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 dual-interface external drive solution.

Thunderbolt is an interface for connecting peripheral devices to a computer via an expansion bus. Thunder-bolt was developed by Intel and brought to the market with technical collaboration from Apple. It was introduced commercially on Apple's updated MacBook Pro lineup in February 2011, using the same connector as Apple’s Mini DisplayPort. The Thunderbolt connection has a peak bandwidth of 10 Gbit per second.

New PCs are now following Mac’s lead and including a Thunderbolt port. Acer’s flagship Aspire S5 Ultrabook computer is among them.

Thunderbolt is two-times faster than the already superfast USB 3.0, whose peak bandwidth is 5 Gbps.

Although MiniStation has a USB 3.0 interface, it is backwardly compatible to USB 2.0, whose peak bandwidth is 480 Megabit per second.

The MiniStation drive is housed in a sleek aluminium body with a transparent frosted top. 

It has a disk access LED indicator on the underside. The HDD requires no additional power supply because it draws power from the connected port. 

The MiniStation drive can be formatted to support both PCs and Macs, making it a great portable storage solution for any device. It is fully compatible with Mac OS X Time Machine.

The 500 GB MiniStation Thunderbolt, which was sent for a test at The Nation newsroom, was formatted to use with Mac OS computer. So before we could use it with a Windows 7 PC, we had to follow the manual in the box and use My Computer’s Disk Management to format it in the NTFS for Windows format.

During the test, we found that it took a mere 13 seconds to transfer a 1.2 GB folder from an iMac computer using Thunderbolt connection to the MiniStation and only 1.13 minutes to transfers a 7.25-GB folder.

It took about five minutes to transfer a 10-GB folder from a PC using USB 3.0 connection. The transfer speeds might vary depending on the types of files in the folders and structures of sub-folders as well.

Buffalo’s MiniStation Thunderbolt is now available in Thailand and is backed by a limited three-year warranty. The HD-PA500TU3 model (500GB) retails for Bt6,390 and the HD-PA1.0TU3 model (1TB) sells for Bt7,790. Buffalo products can be purchased at Buffalo’s new CentralWorld flagship store, through distributors, online resellers and Buffalo’s web site.

 

   key specs

_ Hard Drive Sizes: 500 GB, 1 TB

_ Thunderbolt Interface: 1 with max. speed of 10 Gbps

_ USB Interface: USB 3.0 / USB 2.0

_ Connector: Micro B Type

_ USB Interface Speeds: Max. 5 Gbps (USB 3.0), Max. 480 Mbps (USB 2.0)

_ Dimensions (W x H x D in.) 80.5x 130 x 22.5mm

_ Weight: 260g

_ Power Supply: DC 5 V (Bus-powered)

_ Client OS Support: Mac OS X 10.5 - 10.7, Windows 7 (32/64-bit), Windows Vista(32/64-bit), Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 (32-bit), Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-bit), 

Windows Server 2008 (32/64-bit), Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)