Buffalo Launches Next Tier of Portable SuperSpeed USB Drives
Buffalo, one of the better but lesser known drive accessory manufacturers, has released a new thin external USB 3.0 2.5" drive, a follow-up to the DriveStation. The Ministation Cobalt USB 3.0 version has all of the classic Buffalo quality, and throws in SuperSpeed USB as well as a nice software suite. The included Buffalo Tools comes with a RAM Disk utility which is a concept that is been around for ages, but is seeing some resurgence in the netbook era. Slow hard drives with ample fast RAM can take advantage of RAM disks for browsing and other drive intensive tasks. We keep a portable version of Firefox installed in a RAM disk for crisp browsing. This eliminates the slow writing of all the tiny temp files to the hard drive and visibly improves browsing. RAM disks are deleted upon reboots but retained during suspends. This is one of the best ways to keep from leaving browsing history traces on a computer. If you've gotten in to the habit of shutting your PC down to suspend instead of off, you can easily reduce the number of times you have to reinstall. Installs to a RAM disk only take seconds though.
The sleek MiniStation Cobalt USB 3.0 2.5" drive is supposed to see benefits from the Turbo PC software in copy speeds. Buffalo claims up to 30% speed boosts on USB 3.0 transfers and a whopping 70% increase on USB 2.0 transfers. This is likely accomplished with RAM buffering, which will appear to complete transfer to the drive while remaining bytes are transferred from the software behind the scenes. While this might seem sneaky, feeling fast and being fast are effectively the same thing for the majority of real world drive uses. The MiniStation Cobalt drives are available in 500 and 640GB sizes, and should happily run with USB 3.0 bus power. USB 2.0 users may need to attach a power cable as drives that size may tax USB 2.0 power past its limit. Shipping should begin early next month, but prices have not been released yet.
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