Buffalo Drivestation Quad USB 3.0 review

When a two-bay external hard disk simply can’t provide enough storage space for your needs, the logical progression is a four-bay unit such as Buffalo’s DriveStation Quad. This external hard drive contains an array with four 1TB hard disks, with the option of running them as a single huge disk or in a RAID array to protect your data.

Each 1TB hard disk spins at 7,200RPM, and the resulting quick transfer speeds should be able to take greater advantage of the faster USB3 connectivity than 5,400RPM disks. They are all easily removed through the front-facing drive bays; after detaching the front cover, each disk slides out on its own caddy. Four screws need to be removed before the disk can be swapped for another.

With support for USB3, we were expecting decent performance and weren’t disappointed. Using RAID1, large files were written at a rapid 100.3MB/s and read at an even faster 149.9MB/s. Small files were understandably slower, but 47.8MB/s write and 71.8MB/s read speeds are still very fast for an external disk.

Like other Buffalo disks, the DriveStation includes the Buffalo Tools software suite. As well as an encryption program, RAM disk and energy-saving Eco Manager, there’s also a basic backup utility. Much more useful is the full version of Novastor backup, which is far more comprehensive.

Four hard disks might seem like overkill if you only want to store a limited number of files on a separate hard disk. However, if you always find yourself running out of hard disk space, the 4TB DriveStation (plus its fast transfer speeds) makes it much more suitable than a single-bay external disk. It isn’t particularly good value per gigabyte, though.