Product Reviews

Buffalo claims its 500GB DriveStation TurboUSB external hard disk is up to 37 per cent faster than other USB disks. We reviewed Buffalo's portable TurboUSB disk in last month's What's New, so we expected some speed gains.

In standard USB mode, it wrote large files at 22.01MB/s and read them at 24.76MB/s, which is fast for a USB disk. It was quick when reading small files at 12.29MB/s, but slower than we expected at writing them, managing 8.43MB/s. In TurboUSB mode, there was an increase of around 20 per cent over standard USB speeds when copying large files, but it was slightly slower than standard mode when copying small files.

Although the DriveStation's TurboUSB mode produced inconsistent results and was sluggish when writing small files, it's otherwise a great performer and is cheap at only 19p per gigabyte.