Buffalo Technology seems to have won the race as the first vendor to actually ship a USB 3.0 hard drive.
The company announced Tuesday that it is shipping its new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 external DriveStation HD-HXU3. Tapping into the speed of the new USB 3.0 spec, the drive can push data at least three times faster than a USB 2.0 drive.
Available in 1-terabyte, 1.5TB, and 2TB capacities, the drive is backward-compatible with existing USB 2.0 computers, said Buffalo. The company is also releasing a two-port USB 3.0 PCI card, so users can upgrade their desktop PCs to take advantage of the drive's higher speeds.
Since the USB 3.0 Promoter Group finalized the new USB 3.0 standard about a year ago, vendors have been pushing to get their new products out the door.
Buffalo had been dueling with Netherlands-based company Freecom to actually deliver the first USB 3.0 hard drive to consumers, not just announce it. Freecom had issued a press release promoting its own USB 3.0 drive in September. That drive was supposed to be available in Europe by mid-November, but I was unable to find any European vendors selling it online.
Responding to an earlier request for comment, a Freecom representative said that samples of the drive were sent to some PC manufacturers and key customers this month. But due to an order backlog, the drive would not generally be available to all customers until next year.
With its higher transfer rates, the new USB standard is ideal for moving around large images as well as huge audio and video streams. As such, USB 3.0 is seen as competition for other high-speed transfer technologies, such as eSATA and FireWire.
Though USB 3.0 offers a theoretical maximum burst rate of 625MB or 4.8 gigabits per second, neither the Buffalo nor Freecom drive will come close to that mark at this point. Freecom has rated its drive at 130 megabits per second while a Buffalo representative told me his company's drive would average around 120Mbps.
USB 3.0 has been promoted as offering speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0. But manufacturers will need time to rev up their new drives to approach that threshold.
When will the new Buffalo drive actually hit the stores? The company rep said it's now shipping to online vendor Microcenter and should be available for purchase the week of December 7. Estimated prices are $199 for the 1TB, $249 for the 1.5TB, and $399 for the 2TB.
Updated at 10:25 a.m. PST to include a response from Freecom.
The box is jam-packed with stuff, but is a little short on unreleased musical content.
It's pricey. The "Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972" Blu ray box goes for $349; the DVD is $250; and the CD set a mere $100. The Blu-ray box contains a sprawling 11-disc collection. Young's been working on this set for what feels like decades; was it worth the wait?
There's a beautifully bound, embossed-"leather," covered book with tons of cool pictures. Hard-core fans will love it, everyone else will look through it once and be done with it.
There's only one unreleased live disc, "Live at the Riverboat 1969." The Blu ray box also includes "Live at Canterbury House" (not a Blu-ray, just a DVD and CD), "Live at the Fillmore East 1970," and "Live at Massey Hall 1971," which have been individually released over the past couple of years. I already bought them, as I'm sure many fans have. What a rip off to make us buy them again.
Most discs have music running times of under 60 minutes, so why oh why didn't Neil fill up more of the discs' capacity, or did he just need to justify an exorbitant MSRP? $350 for 11 discs? Strange, Hollywood movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make retail for under 20 bucks a pop, so why does Neil charge $31 for a disc for music he made nearly 40 years ago? Rip off.
The Blu-ray features ultrahigh resolution 24-bit /192 kHz stereo sound, which you can play over some newer AV receivers, but I'm not so sure that any high-end electronics can access the superduper-sounding PCM tracks. Surround sound? Only one disc has surround. Blu-ray sound quality is about the same as the previously released 24 bit/96 kHz sound on the DVDs that came out years ago. Don't buy the Blu-ray box for the sound; the DVDs are fine.
I had a rough time navigating the Blu-rays' stupidly designed menus and accessing some of the "bonus" material and "hidden" tracks. Hey, I paid my money, why do I have to go round and round to find the music I paid for?
As for video "content," I don't know about you, but watching an LP playing on a turntable or reel-to-reel tapes spinning gets old really fast. Reading pages of text off my TV is also less than entertaining. The photo galleries are nice.
... Read more
The WZR-HP-G300NH NFinity High Power wireless router from Buffalo.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)After two long years, Buffalo, just less than a month ago, regained the right to sell wireless products in the U.S. And at CES 2009, the company is showcasing a wide range of networking products that have hardly been known in the U.S. market.
Buffalo's networking products share one thing in common: affordability. ...
Read the full post at CNET's CES 2009 blog.
The MiniStation Shinobi is merely .2 inches thick and weighs only 2 ounces.
With a name that recalls the famed Japanese ninja movie, the MiniStation Shinobi is arguably the thinnest and lightest external hard drive to date--merely .2 inches thick and weighing only 2 ounces.
Buffalo announced the drive on Monday. Unlike other pocket-size external hard drives that use the 2.5-inch drives found in most laptops, this one uses the 1.8-inch laptop hard drive that's more often associated with smaller devices such as portable media players. For this reason, the external hard drive is significantly more compact and lighter, but it also features limited capacity: up to only 60GB. This is because while regular 2.5-inch internal hard drives hit the 500GB mark a long time ago, the 1.8-inch version just very recently reached 240GB.
The USB 2.0-only MiniStation Shinobi comes with Buffalo's SecureLockMobile software that prevents unauthorized access in the event the drive is lost or stolen. Like the DriveStation FlexNet, the Shinobi also comes with Turbo USB technology to boost the throughput performance, plus Memeo's AutoBackup and Auto Sync software.
The MiniStation Shinobi will be available in October in 30GB and 60GB versions for an estimated street price of $120 and $170, respectively.
The DriveStation FlexNet
It can be a hard choice between a direct attached (DAS) and a network attached (NAS) external storage device. The former offers high-speed data throughput but requires a computer, while the latter can work by itself with a throughput speed that's limited by the network connection. How about not having to pick one over the other?
Buffalo Technology is offering that option on Monday with its new DriveStation FlexNet storage device. The device comes with both 10/100 Ethernet network storage functionality for it to be an NAS and a USB 2.0 connection for it to work as a regular external hard drive. However, it can only work as either at a time and has a button that quickly toggles between the two modes.
Other than that, the DriveStation FlexNet is a single hard-drive storage device (hence, no RAID configuration) with a compact and sleek design. It ships with Memeo AutoBackup, has a one-year warranty, and features the useful TurboUSB technology. TurboUSB can boost the USB 2.0 speed up to 20 percent faster than other standard USB drives. I personally witnessed this in SimpleTech's re-drive, the only device I've reviewed so far that features this technology.
The new DriveStation Flexnet will be available in late September with an estimated price of $250 for the 1TB version. There are also 640GB and 500GB versions that cost $170 and $150, respectively.
Love your Eee PC but hate its skimpy 4GB-20GB of SSD storage? Our most recent Eee PC, the 9-inch Eee 901, had a 12GB SSD chip (you can get 20GB in the Linux version), but even that makes it hard to install apps or store photos, music, and so on. The new 10-inch Eee PC will sport up to 40GB of SSD storage, but we're already talking about a $699 laptop there.
As an alternative, memory maker Buffalo is working on 32GB and 64GB SSD chips that can plug right into the PCI-E slot on the Eee's motherboard (which is easily accessible under a panel on the laptop's bottom).
The chips are coming in September; expect to pay around $150 for the 32GB version and $300 for the 64GB version. These will no doubt be followed by even larger, cheaper versions down the road.
The LinkStation Mini is by far the most compact 1TB NAS device to date.
(Credit: Dong Ngo CNET Networks)I've tested and reviewed a good amount of NAS devices and found them generally bulky. Even those we consider "compact", like the Synology DS107+ or the D-Link DNS 323, are still in no way close to being able to fit in your pocket. This is why I let out a big "wow" today when I saw Buffalo's newest kid on the NAS block. The LinkStation Mini immediately and totally changed my expectation in regard to how tiny a network storage device can be!
By tiny I refer strictly to the form factor. Having the same footprint (and about the same weight, too) as the OWC Mercury external hard drive, the LinkStation Mini offers twice the amount of storage space: 1 terabyte. That's plenty of storage and more than most regular-size NAS devices offer. Unlike other NAS devices that use regular-size 3.5-inch hard drives, the LinkStation features two 2.5-inch hard drives, 500GB each. This is Buffalo's key to significantly reduce the size and weight of the LinkStation Mini. The compact design of its internal circuit board and outer casing helps, too. In the end, the LinkStaion Mini's actual size is not much bigger than the combination of two 2.5-inch hard drives inside.
The Buffalo LinkStation Mini doesn't have any fans but has a lot of openings on the casing for ventilation. This means the device will operate silently and hopefully will not generate a lot of heat. It features a Gigabit Ethernet port and a USB port for adding more external storage devices to it.
The LinkStation Mini, despite its size, offers a lot of high-end features such as RAID 0, RAID 1, Active Directory support, and Buffalo's Web Access that allows for sharing its storage over the Internet. It's also compatible with Windows' SMB protocol (so you can browse it using Windows Explorer) and support DLNA media streaming server. The drive comes with Memeo AutoBackup software for both Windows and Mac platforms.
In all, the LinkStation seems great, except for its price. At $699 and 17 ounces, the LinkStation Mini by far tops the charts of dollars-per-ounce cost. Fortunately we don't assess the value of technology that way. Come back to CNET.com for an in-depth review of this device and find out if its performance, functionality, as well as other features are worth breaking your bank.
(Credit:
Crave Asia)
Considering how much we've heard of Solid State Disk superiority over conventional spinning hard drives which are often prone to hard disk failure, it's only a matter of time before vendors get on the SDD bandwagon. First up with a large-capacity external version is Buffalo's 100GB model in its SHD-UHRS series of external USB 2.0 drives.
However, as much as some of us would love to flaunt one, there's a hefty premium to be paid for being the Big Cheese among your tech geek pals. That 100GB Buffalo SSD will set you back a very pretty penny of , $636, according to Japan Today. Compare that to a 100GB Hitachi HD that's retailing for just $90 at the local electronics mall, and the choice is simple for now.
(Source: Crave Asia)
(Credit:
Dvice)
This is one of those products that would probably appeal to the same crowd who waxes nostalgic for old brick cell phones. The handset attached to this Buffalo keyboard looks to be around the same vintage, albeit an updated version that uses Skype.
It's beyond us why people would insist on a corded handset like this, when there are so many other alternatives available out there--including phone-mouse combos. It also appears Lilliputian in size, as Dvice points out. Then again, it's destined for Japan, where there aren't too many Shaq wannabes wandering around.
The DriveStation gets a boost from Turbo USB.
(Credit: Buffalo Technology)Buffalo Technologies announced today enhanced versions of its MiniStation and DriveStation product lines that allow for faster data transfers over USB. The proprietary Turbo USB feature operates at the controller level to increase data throughput between 30 percent and 60 percent, according to Buffalo. Because the Turbo USB utility resides on the drive itself, you should be able to benefit from the speed increase while plugged into any PC.
The MiniStation comes in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, and 250GB capacities. It has built-in shock-resistant technology, which can be crucial for portable drives that are likely to be dropped. The USB cable is permanently attached and wraps around the edges of the drive for storage--another thoughtful design touch on a portable drive. Prices for the MiniStation range from $100 to $220 and will be available at the end of August.
The DriveStation comes in capacities of 320GB, 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB. It comes loaded with SecureLockWare software, which password-protects the drive. Drives start at $130 and go up to $500 for the 1TB drive. These will be available at the beginning of September.
