Buffalo USB 2.0 External Portable Hard Drive with Bus Power Booster (40GB)

CNET editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Design : 6.0
  Features : 6.0
  Performance : 5.0
  Service and support : 5.0
  Overall score: 5.5 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Brian Nadel
• Edited by:
  Felisa Yang
• Reviewed on: 11/16/2005
• Released on: 08/01/2005

Buffalo's USB 2.0 External Portable Hard Drive with Bus Power Booster lets you pack a lot of data into an economical and fairly portable package. Moderately priced, it's a good value for a portable drive, and it includes a unique Mobile Assist Cable for machines that can't power the drive on their own. On the downside, it has mediocre throughput, lacks encryption and backup software, and is a tad chunky.

The black Buffalo USB 2.0 External Portable Hard Drive with Bus Booster measures 0.6 by 2.9 by 4.7 inches and weighs 6 ounces. Think of it as the little brother to the LinkStation line of desktop hard drives. It's larger and heavier than the Lilliputian Apricorn EZ Bus Mini or the Transcend StoreJet, however, because it houses a 5,400rpm, 2.5-inch Western Digital Scorpio hard drive instead of a 1.8-inch drive, as the other two products have. The upside of the bigger drive is its top capacity of 80GB--20GB more than smaller drives. A single LED on the outside glows green when ready and orange when the drive is in use. Curiously, even though it uses a USB connection for power, the Buffalo External Portable Hard Drive has an input jack for power; however, the seven-page manual doesn't mention it, and Buffalo doesn't sell a specific AC adapter for it. Our only real qualm on that score is that the included 3-foot USB cable can be awkward when used with a notebook. You might think about getting a shorter one.

The Buffalo USB 2.0 External Hard Drive is operating-system agnostic, but it doesn't come with drivers for Windows 98 systems (nor could we find any on the company's Web site). Formatted in FAT32, the 40GB drive we tested had 37.2GB of usable space; we quickly reformatted it as an NTFS drive. Paired with a ThinkPad R50, it read our 400MB mix of files at 83.5Mbps and wrote at 76.1Mbps, putting it behind the faster EZ Bus Mini and slightly ahead of the StoreJet. Due to its high speed, the unit is something of a power hog, draining the R50's battery 41 minutes faster than the notebook's native drive and 16 minutes faster than the EZ Bus Mini. Along the way, it never got more than warm and didn't produce the annoying clicks and hums that other drives do. We were disappointed by the lack of encryption and backup software, which competing drives provide.

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