With peak speeds of more 115 MB / s in USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt, the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt is rather swift. Unfortunately, its price is really high.
The Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt 500GB model has good flow and USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. Only downside, it is two times more expensive than ordinary disk of the same capacity.
The promise
Buffalo offers a 2.5-inch external drive not only has a USB 3.0 interface, but an interface Thunderbolt. The Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt (HD-PATU3) is available with a capacity of 1 TB (about 260 euros) or 500 GB (210 euros).
Reality
Buffalo external drive comes with two cables rather short (about 50 cm) to the first USB 3.0 interface and the second interface for Thunderbolt. This is significant, since Thunderbolt cables are often sold as an option. The case of Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt is very attractive with its white and silver design. It fits easily with your MacBook. Activity is indicated by a white LED placed at the front, forming a white line down, unfortunately too discreet.
Fast, regardless of the interface
The Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt is formatted with the HFS + file system to be directly usable on Mac OS. To use it with Windows, just reformat the drive to NTFS. It then has a storage capacity of 465 GB Disk offers high top speeds of 117 MB / s read and write. We measured the rates of PC not only USB 3.0, but also in Thunderbolt. For large file transfers, it achieves speeds of 110.9 MB / s read and 95.4 MB / s write. Read rates remain high for medium sized files such as MP3 and JPEG photos (respectively 108.8 and 104.2 MB / s). In writing, are satisfactory (70.4 and 36.6 MB / s). Scores close to those of the excellent Seagate Portable Backup Plus.
The verdict
The Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt external drives offers very good performance USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt but it is very expensive and comes without software.
