Review: Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable SSD 128GB

Final thoughts and rating

...so while we like what Buffalo has done here, we'd suggest holding fire until pricing makes more sense.

Buffalo understands that getting the most out of portable external storage requires pairing a fast SSD with an enclosure sporting a Thunderbolt interface. The firm does precisely this with its MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable SSD by housing a Micron/Crucial m4 drive inside a well-built, attractive chassis that sports both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0/2.0 connectivity.

Our numbers prove that Thunderbolt is the faster interfaces for shovelling lots of data across to a host PC, and the MiniStation manages to sustain 250MB/s when pushing over 26GB across the Thunderbolt cable. Fast as it is in isolated scenarios, Buffalo's choice of drive, the Crucial m4, leads to writing speeds that aren't up there with the best of the competition. Perhaps most problematic of all is the £200 asking price for a 128GB model, which is over twice the cost of the SSD.

Buffalo's sound technology and top-class presentation need to be bolstered by a street price the enthusiast or creative type - the target market - are willing to pay. We believe this is no more than £150 for a 128GB model, so while we like what Buffalo has done here, we'd suggest holding fire until pricing makes more sense.

The Good

Can be supremely fast
Excellent build quality
Thunderbolt and USB 3.0-ready

The Bad

Feels expensive; should be below £150
SSD writing speed isn't the best

HEXUS Rating

Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable SSD (128GB)

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable SSD (128GB) is available from Dabs.com.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Another obviously aimed at Mac fans product, styling and pricing are definite Mac territory. Even £150 is too much, given that they don't pay retail price for the SSD drive they install in it and the TB chips are a few $ each. They shouldn't be asking more than £140 for it, it's not even a triumph of miniaturisation.

You can get a 128GB Corsair USB3 PenDrive for ~£130 instead, smaller, just as rugged, almost as fast… would do just fine for data transfer/backup. The 10Gb Thunderbolt isn't really needed for single drive solutions.

I suspect they use the Crucial M4 to keep active power well under the 4.5W of USB3 and not kill your laptop battery, some of the high end drives have high load power.

This 128GB SSD model is easily available under £150 from various sellers on Amazon. I had a spare Samsung 830 256GB drive so I plumped for the Seagate TB adapter at £73 delivered from Maplin plus a £24 TB cable from Jigsaw24, otherwise I considered this smaller drive as a homebrew Fusion drive.

I don't understand the point of this though. Why would you need a drive this fast for portable storage?

Why haven't they taken the actual SSD out of the 2.5" casing?

That is such a waste of space.

Jay
I don't understand the point of this though. Why would you need a drive this fast for portable storage?

Why would you need a drive that fast & that small (in terms of capacity) for external storage? Surely, a 128GB pendrive makes more sense.