Introduction

As one of the first portable Thunderbolt drives on the market, the bus-powered Buffalo Mini-Station Thunderbolt HD-PATU3 external hard drive is a well designed product. It comes in 500GB & 1TB capacities, it has both Thunderbolt and USB ports, it includes a 18” Thunderbolt cable (as well as a USB 3.0 cable) and has a reasonable price point.

Use & observations

The MiniStation's strength is its enclosure design, as Buffalo uses OEM 2.5 inch drives from a variety of vendors such as Western Digital and Samsung. The case itself is bus-powered and designed to dissapate heat while the unit operates. It has an aluminum and white plastic shell, with a white LED light to indicate the drive's operational status. The case is certainly not flimsy or plastic-y, allowing you to toss it in your laptop bag and tote it with confidence. With well machined parts, tight assembly and an over-all minimalist design aesthetic, the MiniStation is actually an attractive piece of industrial design. Buffalo's inclusion of a Thunderbolt cable is notable since they sell separately for up to $50.

I've carried this drive around for a couple of months in my bag, attaching to various Mac systems as needed, reformatting several times depending on circumstance (however, I didn't format or test it with Windows based systems). The USB 3.0 port allows use with older Macs (and provides speedy through-put with USB 3.0 based Macs), but it truly shines when used with newer Macs as a Thunderbolt device. It has one Thunderbolt and USB port each, meaning if this drive is daisy-chained, it will be at the end of the line since it lacks any pass-through ports.

While not as fast as the desktop version of the Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt drive, the bus-powered Buffalo MiniStation offers a portable storage solution that achieves fast data transfer without the need to carry power adapters.

Using the Black Magic Design Disk Speed Test with my 2011 MacBook Pro15", my Western Digital FireWire 800 MyBook clocked in at 61 MB/s write & 70MB/s read, the GoFlex drive clocked in at 175 MB/s write & 180 MB/s read – and the Ministation clocked in at a respectable 92 MB/s write & 93 MB/s read.

Using Thunderbolt, the MiniStation significantly out-performed Firewire 800 adapter AC powered desktop drives by approximately 40% in read and write speed tests as formatted out of the box. By default, the drive ships formatted using Apple Partition Map - I assume so it can be used with older PowerPC Macs via the USB port. However, reformatting the drive to use GUID partition format for Intel Macs offered a nominal speed increase of 5% to 10% (tests results varied, averaging in the range of 97 MB/s read & write). This was a pleasant surprise.

Conclusion

This drive is well constructed and offers great data speed – it's a good value in either the 500GB or 1TB size (approximately $175 and $210 respectively) with a three year warranty. If you own a Thunderbolt enabled Mac, this is a great device for putting that port to use.

For additional information on the Buffalo MiniStation™ Thunderbolt visit: www.buffalotech.com

For informtion on other storage options visit: Mac Edition Radio's Stocking Stuffers for the Holiday

Ken Kramar - posted 2/28/2013