Price : Too low to display
MODEL- HD-W10TIU2/R1 VENDOR- BUFFALO TECHNOLOGY FEATURES- DriveStation Duo USB 2.0/FireWire Hard Drive- 1.0 TB The DriveStation Duo is a quick and easy solution to store access back up and transfer your music photos videos and other files. Get maximum storage with the increased capacity of two spanning hard drives or the extra security of automatic mirroring in one affordable box. Includes DriveStation Duo Quick setup guide Setup CD-ROM with Memeo Backup software for PC USB 2.0 cable FireWire cable Power cord Warranty statement.* Two High Speed 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drives in One* No Need to Install Drivers with Auto Setup* Pre-formatted Hard Drive for Immediate Use* Supports RAID 1 and Full Capacity Spanning Modes* Dual Interface USB 2.0 and FireWire* SecureLockWare Software for Windows PC encrypts your data from theft misplacement and unauthorized access.* Auto Power Feature Turns On and Off Automatically with Your PC* Easy-to-Use Windows RAID Utility for Changing RAID Modes* Memeo AutoBackup Software automatically backs up your files from your Windows PC. -- SPECIFICATIONs -----------------------------------CAPACITY - 1.0 TB (two 3.5" 500GB drives)CONNECTORS - (1) USB 2.0 port (1) 4-pin IEEE-1394a/FireWire port (1) 6-pin IEEE-1394a/FireWire portTRANSFER RATE- up to 480Mbps (USB 2.0) up to 400Mbps (FireWire)SPIN RATE - 7200 RPMSEEK TIME - 11ms max.O/S SUPPORT - Windows XP/Server 2003 Windows 2000/MEENVIRONMEMTAL- 5 to 35 degrees C 20 to 80 % humidity (non-condensing)POWER SOURCE - AC100-240V 50/60 Hz; Consumption 47W max 22W averageDIMENSIONS - 3.9"w x 6.4"h x 8.7"d WT.- 6.4 lbs.
This review is from : Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 1.0 TB (2 x 500 GB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W1.0IU2/R1
Good bang for the buck . I usually do not write reviews but this time after spending so much time doing a research on a good external RAID1 hard drive and finding no useful information I figured I'll write one up to save other people time and money.
I've read a whole bunch of reviews on Amazon and other websites all people complaining about DriveStation Duo RAID-1 configuration on Windows. Not sure what those people did wrong but they definitely got me concerned before buying this unit.
Before choosing this unit I've compared whole bunch of products available. I was looking for external hard drive either USB or NAS that supports RAID-1 for redundancy and I need to have a flexibility to swap one of the hard drives if needed in case it crashes after warranty expires by not going to the manufacture. Out of all products I looked at (Linksys, Buffalo, Maxtor, Iomega, SimpleTech and many others) I liked Linksys NAS200 the best as it gives you most flexibility with hard drives you choose and Linksys usually have a pretty good software to configure and maintain their hardware but the only downside with NAS200 was the speed. I don't need high transfer rates but I do need at least 10Mb/sec when NAS200 was producing around 3Mb/sec.
When I got the hard drive the one thing I was concerned about is configuring it for RAID-1 based on all the problems other users had (from reviews). I just ran a disk utility that comes with the drive, connected hard drive via USB and then configured it for RAID-1. It was that easy. No problems on Windows XP as other people reported. Then I just formatted the drive using Disk Management utility and it is ready to go.
I even decided to test redundancy so I copied some files to the drive and shut it down and pulled out one drive out of it. Started it back up and the drive was accessible with all the files there. So then I shut it down again and reconnected the drive and it started rebuilding it. According to their doc on the website it is supposed to take 8-11 hours for 500Gb hard drive but after 18 hours it did not finish and I decided to call tech support. After calling tech support they confirmed that the reconnected drive will not rebuild since it expects brand new drive RAW formatted and a drive formatted other than RAW it will go in infinite loop trying to rebuild it. First tech support suggested to format the drive while it was rebuilding it (which I didn't think was a good idea but did it anyway) and that didn't work (2-3 hours wasted). Then after keeping me on hold while (probably) reading some documentation tech support rep. said that because I opened up front cover the warranty is void and they can't replace it for me so he suggested returning back to the place where I got it from since there's no way to fix the problem any more. Then I figured I'll take it into my own hands and tried using DiskUtility to change the drive back to Normal Mode (2 independent drives) and that worked fine but changing it back to RAID-1 failed with misspelled error "Disk Restracturing failed". So, I formatted each drive using FAT32 (back to default formatting) and then tried converting it back to RAID-1 and it worked just fine.
At the end here are pros and cons of this hard drive:
+ Supports RAID-1
+ High transfer rate
+ Auto-power shut off (via USB). Nice feature. Starts up the drive when you start up your computer and shuts it off when you shut down computer.
+ Swappable hard drives. After hands on experience with the hard drive I found out that it will not be that easy to change them, but at least it'll get you the data if one crashes.
+ Easy to access hard drives - just few screws away
+ No need to install all kinds of drivers and whole bunch of useless memory and CPU wasting software to make this unit work. It is literally Plug-n-Play. Windows recognizes this unit without any issues. You can format it using Disk Management in Windows.
+ Comes with 2 Seagate hard drives and not some proprietary like other manufactures
- 1 year warranty. Some websites advertise 3 years warranty for this drive but support confirmed that it is actually 1 year
- Tech support. Doesn't seem like they know what they're talking about. They kept putting me on hold every time I ask them any question. My guess, they were looking for answers in some documents because they didn't know. Really takes them long time to come back with an answer and at the end those answers are useless and misleading.
So at the end, the drive seems to be performing as advertised. I got about 30Mb/sec when copying large files and over 100Mb/sec when copying some MP3 files. At the end, I think this is a good bang for the buck.
Good bang for the buck . I usually do not write reviews but this time after spending so much time doing a research on a good external RAID1 hard drive and finding no useful information I figured I'll write one up to save other people time and money.
I've read a whole bunch of reviews on Amazon and other websites all people complaining about DriveStation Duo RAID-1 configuration on Windows. Not sure what those people did wrong but they definitely got me concerned before buying this unit.
Before choosing this unit I've compared whole bunch of products available. I was looking for external hard drive either USB or NAS that supports RAID-1 for redundancy and I need to have a flexibility to swap one of the hard drives if needed in case it crashes after warranty expires by not going to the manufacture. Out of all products I looked at (Linksys, Buffalo, Maxtor, Iomega, SimpleTech and many others) I liked Linksys NAS200 the best as it gives you most flexibility with hard drives you choose and Linksys usually have a pretty good software to configure and maintain their hardware but the only downside with NAS200 was the speed. I don't need high transfer rates but I do need at least 10Mb/sec when NAS200 was producing around 3Mb/sec.
When I got the hard drive the one thing I was concerned about is configuring it for RAID-1 based on all the problems other users had (from reviews). I just ran a disk utility that comes with the drive, connected hard drive via USB and then configured it for RAID-1. It was that easy. No problems on Windows XP as other people reported. Then I just formatted the drive using Disk Management utility and it is ready to go.
I even decided to test redundancy so I copied some files to the drive and shut it down and pulled out one drive out of it. Started it back up and the drive was accessible with all the files there. So then I shut it down again and reconnected the drive and it started rebuilding it. According to their doc on the website it is supposed to take 8-11 hours for 500Gb hard drive but after 18 hours it did not finish and I decided to call tech support. After calling tech support they confirmed that the reconnected drive will not rebuild since it expects brand new drive RAW formatted and a drive formatted other than RAW it will go in infinite loop trying to rebuild it. First tech support suggested to format the drive while it was rebuilding it (which I didn't think was a good idea but did it anyway) and that didn't work (2-3 hours wasted). Then after keeping me on hold while (probably) reading some documentation tech support rep. said that because I opened up front cover the warranty is void and they can't replace it for me so he suggested returning back to the place where I got it from since there's no way to fix the problem any more. Then I figured I'll take it into my own hands and tried using DiskUtility to change the drive back to Normal Mode (2 independent drives) and that worked fine but changing it back to RAID-1 failed with misspelled error "Disk Restracturing failed". So, I formatted each drive using FAT32 (back to default formatting) and then tried converting it back to RAID-1 and it worked just fine.
At the end here are pros and cons of this hard drive:
+ Supports RAID-1
+ High transfer rate
+ Auto-power shut off (via USB). Nice feature. Starts up the drive when you start up your computer and shuts it off when you shut down computer.
+ Swappable hard drives. After hands on experience with the hard drive I found out that it will not be that easy to change them, but at least it'll get you the data if one crashes.
+ Easy to access hard drives - just few screws away
+ No need to install all kinds of drivers and whole bunch of useless memory and CPU wasting software to make this unit work. It is literally Plug-n-Play. Windows recognizes this unit without any issues. You can format it using Disk Management in Windows.
+ Comes with 2 Seagate hard drives and not some proprietary like other manufactures
- 1 year warranty. Some websites advertise 3 years warranty for this drive but support confirmed that it is actually 1 year
- Tech support. Doesn't seem like they know what they're talking about. They kept putting me on hold every time I ask them any question. My guess, they were looking for answers in some documents because they didn't know. Really takes them long time to come back with an answer and at the end those answers are useless and misleading.
So at the end, the drive seems to be performing as advertised. I got about 30Mb/sec when copying large files and over 100Mb/sec when copying some MP3 files. At the end, I think this is a good bang for the buck.
Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 1.0 TB (2 x 500 GB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W1.0IU2/R1 Reviews
Basic RAID capabilities; use the firewire cable . Even though it's not the most stylish, I like the flat black boxy look. Sit it on the floor next to your battery-backup unit and you won't even notice it's there. Considering it's got two drives, a power supply, and a fan in it, the box is very quiet. The fan is silent at low speed, rarely revs up to high speed, and even then it's not that loud.
I got it on sale for just a little over what the two 500GB drives cost by themselves. Definitely shop around.
Unlike the other reviewers I had no problems setting up the unit on a PC over the USB interface. Do ensure that you have unplugged any other USB storage devices (flash drives etc) when you run the RAID configuration utility; it makes the device probe take ages. It ships in RAID-1 mode, but it's got a very basic RAID controller. Reads will flip between the two drives every 15 seconds, so don't expect double the speed or double the IOPS of a single drive. On disk failure it beeps and the appropriate drive light goes red, and you can pop the front off, replace the drive, and when you power it up it will rebuild the drive. A rebuild takes over 8 hours.
Regarding its two interface types (Firewire vs USB): Definitely buy a firewire card if your PC doesn't have one! The maximum transfer rate I got from USB was a miserable 15 MB/s, but with a $10 firewire card I can get 37 MB/s. On the other hand, the auto power feature that switches the hard drives off when you shut off your PC only works in USB mode, so consider running both cables and switch to firewire when you want the speed.
+ Very quiet
+ Firewire speed is good
+ Inexpensive
- Auto power-on only works with USB
- USB speed is slow
- RAID-1 mode should have better performance
Basic RAID capabilities; use the firewire cable . Even though it's not the most stylish, I like the flat black boxy look. Sit it on the floor next to your battery-backup unit and you won't even notice it's there. Considering it's got two drives, a power supply, and a fan in it, the box is very quiet. The fan is silent at low speed, rarely revs up to high speed, and even then it's not that loud.
I got it on sale for just a little over what the two 500GB drives cost by themselves. Definitely shop around.
Unlike the other reviewers I had no problems setting up the unit on a PC over the USB interface. Do ensure that you have unplugged any other USB storage devices (flash drives etc) when you run the RAID configuration utility; it makes the device probe take ages. It ships in RAID-1 mode, but it's got a very basic RAID controller. Reads will flip between the two drives every 15 seconds, so don't expect double the speed or double the IOPS of a single drive. On disk failure it beeps and the appropriate drive light goes red, and you can pop the front off, replace the drive, and when you power it up it will rebuild the drive. A rebuild takes over 8 hours.
Regarding its two interface types (Firewire vs USB): Definitely buy a firewire card if your PC doesn't have one! The maximum transfer rate I got from USB was a miserable 15 MB/s, but with a $10 firewire card I can get 37 MB/s. On the other hand, the auto power feature that switches the hard drives off when you shut off your PC only works in USB mode, so consider running both cables and switch to firewire when you want the speed.
+ Very quiet
+ Firewire speed is good
+ Inexpensive
- Auto power-on only works with USB
- USB speed is slow
- RAID-1 mode should have better performance
Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 1.0 TB (2 x 500 GB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W1.0IU2/R1 Opinions
Initial problems but got it to work . The RAID software that came with it did not work. The updated version from their website didn't work either, until I switched to using Firewire. I have read reviews that the RAID software only works on an non-Intel Mac. That wasn't the case for me, but it did not work with USB 2.
After I got it working with Firewire I finally started transferring files to it. Unfortunately it was glacially slow, taking all night to transfer a few hundred gigs - making the drive's 1 TB of space effectively useless. However, I read a review of a different drive that recommended formatting it for NTFS. After doing that, it works wonderfully.
So, in short:
1) Download new RAID software from their website
2) Use RAID software with Firewire only
3) Format it for NTFS
After doing all that, it's a good drive.
The instructions that comes with it is horrible, and the customer support did not pick up after 40 minutes of being on hold. Still, it is a good drive for the money after I finally got it working.
I will post an update later if the drive fails or if I have any more problems.
Initial problems but got it to work . The RAID software that came with it did not work. The updated version from their website didn't work either, until I switched to using Firewire. I have read reviews that the RAID software only works on an non-Intel Mac. That wasn't the case for me, but it did not work with USB 2.
After I got it working with Firewire I finally started transferring files to it. Unfortunately it was glacially slow, taking all night to transfer a few hundred gigs - making the drive's 1 TB of space effectively useless. However, I read a review of a different drive that recommended formatting it for NTFS. After doing that, it works wonderfully.
So, in short:
1) Download new RAID software from their website
2) Use RAID software with Firewire only
3) Format it for NTFS
After doing all that, it's a good drive.
The instructions that comes with it is horrible, and the customer support did not pick up after 40 minutes of being on hold. Still, it is a good drive for the money after I finally got it working.
I will post an update later if the drive fails or if I have any more problems.
Drive good so far but what a pain to setup! . Got the drive and hadn't seen the reviews about Bufallo's software to change the raid setup not working (on PCs that is). Unfortunately I am working with and XP box. Repeat: Buffalo's software to change the raid setup does NOT work. Your results may vary but seems that a large number of people are having this trouble. My solution:
Gotta get a non-intel Mac. Attach the drive via Firewire. Use Bufalo's Mac raid utility to make it raid 1. Open up your mac's disk utility software and "erase" the drive into a new MS-DOS drive. unhook and re-attach to your PC and voila!
Took a long time to get to Bufallo's tech support but once i did the guy tried hard and filled in the missing pieces for me to figure this out.
If you don't have access to a non-intel based mac to use DO NOT buy this drive. 5/8/07
Gotta get a non-intel Mac. Attach the drive via Firewire. Use Bufalo's Mac raid utility to make it raid 1. Open up your mac's disk utility software and "erase" the drive into a new MS-DOS drive. unhook and re-attach to your PC and voila!
Took a long time to get to Bufallo's tech support but once i did the guy tried hard and filled in the missing pieces for me to figure this out.
If you don't have access to a non-intel based mac to use DO NOT buy this drive. 5/8/07
Works nicely but a bit tricky to set up . Advantages: Nice and quiet in operation, appears to work as advertised.
Disadvantages: (1) Automatic power-off feature works only with USB, not Firewire; (2) Initial setup under Windows works only with Firewire, not USB. So if you have only a USB interface, you must get your hands on a machine with Firewire to change the initial configuration, and if you have only a Firewire interface, you cannot use the auto-power-off feature.
If you want to use the disk with Firewire, you can achieve the effect of auto-power-off with a device such as a 6 Outlet Smart Surge Strip.
Disadvantages: (1) Automatic power-off feature works only with USB, not Firewire; (2) Initial setup under Windows works only with Firewire, not USB. So if you have only a USB interface, you must get your hands on a machine with Firewire to change the initial configuration, and if you have only a Firewire interface, you cannot use the auto-power-off feature.
If you want to use the disk with Firewire, you can achieve the effect of auto-power-off with a device such as a 6 Outlet Smart Surge Strip.
Good value but set up is horrible. . The set up for this Buffalo drive is horrible. I use Windows XP 32bit Professional. When I began to install the drivers, the Buffalo set-up program was so poorly written that I was bombarded with dialogue boxes from both Windows XP itself as well as the set up program. Several times, the Buffalo set-up program was asking me if I wanted to install drivers at the same time that Windows XP was asking me the same thing. I didn't know whether to say "yes" to both, or to say "no" to one and "yes" to the other. I cringed in fear and said yes to everything. A few minutes later, it all worked out. I even got the thing to format to NTFS (it comes formatted as FAT32) and I managed to configure it as RAID 1. What is unsettling is that during the process, the set up program will seemingly close completely and then open again only to tell you another set of instructions. In between these things, Windows would ask you if you wanted to install drivers. The whole set up felt completely unprofessional.
On the good side, the drive is quiet even with the fan. One of the selling points for me was that this thing has a fan. The last hard drive I had failed because it overheated and was fanless. Hopefully the fan on this will keep it cool, and thereby last longer. The unit also has activity lights for each of the two 500gb (7200 rpm) hard disks so you know when one of the drives fail (let's face it, no hard drive will last forever). Connecting the drive wasn't problematic as it was recognized easily via the Firewire 400 port (it has a 6pin and a 4pin). (I did try the firewire 4pin port but it was not recognized, though that could be a problem with my PC's firewire hardware - its a bit old and may not support a 4pin.) It also has USB 2.0 connection. (It doesn't support ESATA sadly.) If you're on a budget and you want RAID capability, this is a good choice - provided you can deal with a clunkly installation process. If you use a Mac or any form of a 64bit Windows operating system, do some research. Apparently this drive might have problems with those operating systems.
On the good side, the drive is quiet even with the fan. One of the selling points for me was that this thing has a fan. The last hard drive I had failed because it overheated and was fanless. Hopefully the fan on this will keep it cool, and thereby last longer. The unit also has activity lights for each of the two 500gb (7200 rpm) hard disks so you know when one of the drives fail (let's face it, no hard drive will last forever). Connecting the drive wasn't problematic as it was recognized easily via the Firewire 400 port (it has a 6pin and a 4pin). (I did try the firewire 4pin port but it was not recognized, though that could be a problem with my PC's firewire hardware - its a bit old and may not support a 4pin.) It also has USB 2.0 connection. (It doesn't support ESATA sadly.) If you're on a budget and you want RAID capability, this is a good choice - provided you can deal with a clunkly installation process. If you use a Mac or any form of a 64bit Windows operating system, do some research. Apparently this drive might have problems with those operating systems.
Cons Review
The backup drive that lost my data . I bought the 1TB Drivestation as a backup for my digital photos & intended to use it as a 500GB RAID 1 device. I initially had problems with the Buffalo raid utility, but they finally released a newer version that worked under Windows XP & I was able to configure RAID and format NTFS. It worked well for several months, though I thought it was a bit noisy and slow (even over Firewire). It was too slow to work with directly from Adobe Lightroom (I didn't really expect to be able to do this, but I tried it), so I just periodically copied my photos to it with rsync.
About a month ago, I powered up the drive and it reported an error. It decided to rebuild (had to look up the blinking light pattern on Buffalo's site to determine what it was doing), which took a full 24 hours. It completed successfully, and my data was fine.
Last night, I backed up my photos and shut down my computer and the drive. This morning, I booted and powered up the drive. No errors were reported, but the drive didn't show up in Explorer. I opened the Windows Disk Management panel & the drive appeared as un-initialized. This really sucked. Luckily, I didn't care too much about the data as it was just a backup--so I decided to play with the drive to figure out what happened.
I opened up the Drivestation's case and detached one drive to keep it untouched. Upon booting, the Buffalo controller complained that a drive was dead, but it still made the remaining drive available to Windows. I allowed Windows to initialize it. As expected, it still appeared blank. Windows wanted me to create a partition and format it, which I did not do. Instead, I removed one drive and connected it directly to my PC's SATA controller. I'm now using a data recovery utility to see that there is still data on it. I've looked at both drives & they appear identical. So, it looks like the Buffalo controller F'd something up, which destroyed my file system. If I'd had important data on it, I'd be pretty pissed--though it looks like a utility like GetMyDataBack could recover a decent chunk. Instead, I'm just annoyed that I have an expensive, unreliable RAID enclosure. I can't recommend this product to anyone.
About a month ago, I powered up the drive and it reported an error. It decided to rebuild (had to look up the blinking light pattern on Buffalo's site to determine what it was doing), which took a full 24 hours. It completed successfully, and my data was fine.
Last night, I backed up my photos and shut down my computer and the drive. This morning, I booted and powered up the drive. No errors were reported, but the drive didn't show up in Explorer. I opened the Windows Disk Management panel & the drive appeared as un-initialized. This really sucked. Luckily, I didn't care too much about the data as it was just a backup--so I decided to play with the drive to figure out what happened.
I opened up the Drivestation's case and detached one drive to keep it untouched. Upon booting, the Buffalo controller complained that a drive was dead, but it still made the remaining drive available to Windows. I allowed Windows to initialize it. As expected, it still appeared blank. Windows wanted me to create a partition and format it, which I did not do. Instead, I removed one drive and connected it directly to my PC's SATA controller. I'm now using a data recovery utility to see that there is still data on it. I've looked at both drives & they appear identical. So, it looks like the Buffalo controller F'd something up, which destroyed my file system. If I'd had important data on it, I'd be pretty pissed--though it looks like a utility like GetMyDataBack could recover a decent chunk. Instead, I'm just annoyed that I have an expensive, unreliable RAID enclosure. I can't recommend this product to anyone.
Drive Format Failure !!!! - Not Reliable . I owned this Buffalo P.O.S. for about 10 months before it failed. There seams to be some sort of hardware flaw that damages the file partition. When this happens, the drive will not be recognized under windows or mac computers. Though, the files are still intact, you must own or purchase file recovery software to recover your data.
It is unfortunate for me, I was in the process of reorganizing all my photos and documents and was using this drive as my primary storage because of the RAID feature. It's going to take me a very long time to recover all the data I had stored on the drive. The drives are still good but the buffalo housing is going into the trash can. I will not trust the Buffalo Brand ever.
Save yourself time and $$$ and DON'T BUY this drive.
It is unfortunate for me, I was in the process of reorganizing all my photos and documents and was using this drive as my primary storage because of the RAID feature. It's going to take me a very long time to recover all the data I had stored on the drive. The drives are still good but the buffalo housing is going into the trash can. I will not trust the Buffalo Brand ever.
Save yourself time and $$$ and DON'T BUY this drive.
Could not switch to RAID 1 . Disk comes formatted as FAT32. That's the first problem. Who uses that format anymore? Mainstream uses NTFS. The burden shouldn't be on the mainstream but on those lagging behind the times. But I ignored that for the time being.
First I tested the drive's basic sanity: could I read and write from them? Yes, but performance was horrendous: about 3 minutes to transfer 40 MBytes! It just crawled along.
Decided to ignore that as well for the time being, because I was primarily interested in setting it up as RAID 1 (mirrored drive). I couldn't even get off the ground. When the RAID utility tried to find the drives, it complained that the drives were "in use" and that I should reboot the system. Tried that twice and still got the error.
This was on a Vista machine and none of the dialogs had any images in them: only a single line of text in a font so small it was hardly legible. So when it told me to choose the interface (1, 2, or 3) I had no idea what it was talking about and first chose 1, which caused the above error. Then I tried 3 and was told that the eSATA wasn't connected. It would be nice to tell me what 1, 2, and 3 meant, I was thinking.
Then I decided to try getting it working on my wife's XP machine. Images illustrating the dialogs came right up on her machine, and I saw that they indeed supply diagrams of what the 3 numbers meant. Also the font for the single line of instructions was properly sized. So Vista bugs in their dialogs. However, I got the same error I got on my Vista machine: the drives were "in use."
So decided to switch from USB to firewire. Maybe that was the problem with the RAID utility. No dice. Failed with the same message.
Brought it back to the place I bought it and a salesman said he thought it was a problem with the RAID controller. Maybe he KNEW it was a problem with the RAID controller and the whole lot that they'd bought had this problem. They were selling them anyhow in hopes people wouldn't need the RAID utility and wouldn't notice how slow the drive is. Who knows?
Anyhow, really bad experience with this drive. I went with another brand that had twice the storage for the same price and so far it is working flawlessly, but that brand has a bunch of bad reviews as well! So time will tell.
First I tested the drive's basic sanity: could I read and write from them? Yes, but performance was horrendous: about 3 minutes to transfer 40 MBytes! It just crawled along.
Decided to ignore that as well for the time being, because I was primarily interested in setting it up as RAID 1 (mirrored drive). I couldn't even get off the ground. When the RAID utility tried to find the drives, it complained that the drives were "in use" and that I should reboot the system. Tried that twice and still got the error.
This was on a Vista machine and none of the dialogs had any images in them: only a single line of text in a font so small it was hardly legible. So when it told me to choose the interface (1, 2, or 3) I had no idea what it was talking about and first chose 1, which caused the above error. Then I tried 3 and was told that the eSATA wasn't connected. It would be nice to tell me what 1, 2, and 3 meant, I was thinking.
Then I decided to try getting it working on my wife's XP machine. Images illustrating the dialogs came right up on her machine, and I saw that they indeed supply diagrams of what the 3 numbers meant. Also the font for the single line of instructions was properly sized. So Vista bugs in their dialogs. However, I got the same error I got on my Vista machine: the drives were "in use."
So decided to switch from USB to firewire. Maybe that was the problem with the RAID utility. No dice. Failed with the same message.
Brought it back to the place I bought it and a salesman said he thought it was a problem with the RAID controller. Maybe he KNEW it was a problem with the RAID controller and the whole lot that they'd bought had this problem. They were selling them anyhow in hopes people wouldn't need the RAID utility and wouldn't notice how slow the drive is. Who knows?
Anyhow, really bad experience with this drive. I went with another brand that had twice the storage for the same price and so far it is working flawlessly, but that brand has a bunch of bad reviews as well! So time will tell.
Failing drives . The drives are finicky. They have failed twice in the past year and take a long time to rebuild, usually wiht a loss of data.
Product Image
Feature Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 1.0 TB (2 x 500 GB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W1.0IU2/R1
- DriveStation Duo; USB 2.0 Cable ;Setup CD Rom with Memeo Backup Software; FireWire (IEEE 1394a) Cable; AC Adapter;Warranty Statement
- Two SATA Drives for Maximum Flexibility, Spanning Mode or RAID 1. USB and FireWire!
- Auto Power Feature Turns On and Off Automatically with Your PC
- Auto Setup-Connect using USB 2.0 or FireWire (IEEE1394) interfaces for flexible, high speed, and plug and play connections.
- Windows and Mac OS 10.3+ RAID Setup Utility
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Product Details
EAN : 5051964308201UPC : 747464112244
MPN : HD-W1.0TIU2R1
Brand : Buffalo Technology
Weight : 8 pounds
Height : 7 inches
Length : 14 inches
Width : 10 inches
Binding : Personal Computers
Format : CD
Hardware Platform : Pc
Manufacturer : BUFFALO
Model : HD-W1.0TIU2/R1
Operating System : Windows
Platform : Windows
Publisher : BUFFALO
Size : 1 TB
SKU : 58356
Studio : BUFFALO
Where To Buy
You can buy Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 1.0 TB (2 x 500 GB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W1.0IU2/R1 on Amazon . Click here to Read More
