Product Listing

Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt (500GB) - Dual-Interface Portable HDD

By Wong Chung Wee - 6 Aug 2012
Launch SRP: S$279

Results - Iometer (Part 1)

Iometer Results (Part 1)

For the grinding I/O tests of this benchmark, Thunderbolt technology fared a wee bit better as its wider bandwidth contributed to the more consistent IOps results in terms of 64K Streaming Reads/Writes operations over increasing queue depths. Unfortunately, the differences in performance turned in by the two interfaces were too miniscule to make any meaningful impact in real-life usage.

The drive performed consistently better on its Thunderbolt interface during the File and Web Servers tests, scaling up consistently as the queue depth was incremented. While it's nice to know Thunderbolt did finally make a small difference, the sad part is that this drive is never going to be used in these kind of workloads to benefit the typical buyer of this product.

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6.5
  • Design 7.5
  • Performance 7
  • Features 8
  • Value 4
The Good
Dual interface offerings makes it versatile
Decent USB 3.0 performance
The Bad
Expensive
Bulky for a portable drive
No Thunderbolt daisy-chain capability
Thunderbolt has no advantage on basic HDDs
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