Product Round-up Despite somewhat lacklustre adoption of the interface in the last 18 months, USB 3.0 is starting to gain a foothold in the consumer market as availability increases and prices fall down to more reasonable levels.
The current offerings of USB 3.0 portable hard drives in our recent round-up turned out to be a pleasant surprise for performance and value. Yet typically portable storage relies on 2.5in drives that limit the available capacity.
In this SuperSpeed storage round-up, 3.5in drives are tested. Intended to languish on your desk these data dumpsters offer a much wider range of capacities. Featuring simple case designs none of the models on test suffered any distracting noise or vibration. While portable to an extent, all the drives here relied on external power supplies.
Each drive is rated bearing in mind cost, capacity and speed with a CrystalDiskMark 3 performance comparison chart at the end.
1. Buffalo DriveStation HD-LBU3
Buffalo has once again stuck to its traditional format of no-frills drives with the latest USB 3.0 DriveStation. The 2TB disk I have here came out at 1863GB formatted and benchmarked bang in the middle of all of the drives tested. Read the rest of this entry »
Geek Treat of the Week In the early 1990s, the Mackie name became synonymous with project studio recording consoles that, while not the most sophisticated, offered a good deal of routing flexibility and mounting options. The CR1604 was the breakthrough product for the company – a mixer that is still in production in various guises. The idea behind this and other Mackie products was to deliver low noise mic pre-amps, so that even though the mixer might be basic, the signal wouldn’t suffer.
Sound choice: Mackie’s Onyx Blackjack
Now owned by Loud Technologies, Mackie’s design ethic still remains evident in the Onyx Blackjack dual channel USB audio interface. Now, this model isn’t the cheapest of its kind and there’s no MIDI or effects on-board either, but it’s no flimsy plastic box that will fizz with interference as soon it you place it near a laptop. Its all-metal casing keeps it well-shielded and it has decent-sized knobs and switches on the control surface that tell you at a glance what’s what. The weight of the Onyx Blackjack is an advantage too, at 800g it certainly doesn’t be skate around the desk on the whim of a springy cable. Read the rest of this entry »
Review USB 3.0 has been with us for nearly two years now, not that you’d notice, as adoption and availability of peripherals has been somewhat slow. However, things are looking up now as more and more portable HDDs are coming to market featuring the not-so-new interface. Here at Reg Hardware, we’ve put together a round up of the current crop so you know whether to buy or walk on by. Each drive is rated bearing in mind cost, portability and speed with a CrystalDiskMark 3 performance comparison chart at the end.
1. Buffalo MiniStation HD-PCTU3
The MiniStation HD-PCTU3 is a pretty spartan unit with a design as inspiring as its name. You get a black (or white) plastic case and LED activity light bar containing your choice of a 500GB or 1TB 2.5in disk. A two-year warranty is included as well as Buffalo’s own backup utilities and something called TurboCopy, which is supposed to further improve transfer speeds. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The PNY’s new Attaché Original USB Flash drive arrived just too late for our recent Fast Flash Drive round-up, but we decided to try it out nonetheless.
The Attaché Original: faster than PNY’s previous top-speed stick
Like previous Attachés, the new model uses a slide-and-swivel mechanism to withdraw the USB connector from a bay at one end of the cover then rotate it out into the open and round so it’s ready for connection.
What has changed is that the new version is two-thirds of the size of its predecessor – named Attaché without qualification – and that the main body of the drive is bright see-through coloured plastic. The colour depends on the capacity: purple for 4GB, blue for 8GB, red for 16GB and green for the 32GB stick. Read the rest of this entry »
Group Test Anyone else remember how the death of the floppy disk was supposed to mean the end of the ‘sneakernet’ – files exchanged physically on a handy, portable storage format?
It never happened. Instead, floppies were briefly replaced by higher-capacity media like Iomega’s Zip disk and then, when USB really took off, Flash drives. Nowadays, Flash drives are so ubiquitous you can pick low-capacity ones up for nowt at trade fairs.
Flash for Freedom: L-R Corsair Voyager 128, Patriot Xporter XT, Sony Click Excellence, Lexar Lightning and Kingston DataTraveler
The freebies might do for some folk, but plenty of us prefer something rather faster than oh-so-slow giveaways. USB 2.0 helped a lot, but there’s still room for improvement, and drive makers are pushing ever faster drives. USB 3.0 will change the game, but it’ll be a while before compatible Flash drives arrive – let alone low-cost ones.
We asked the main Flash key makers to lend us their fastest drives. We’ve focused on speed, but we’ve factored in portability, solidity and price when we came to choose our Recommended and Editors’ Choice products.
The drive sequential and random read and write speeds were tested using CrystalDiskMark 2.2 running on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 machine. The drives were set not to use Windows’ disk cacheing. Read the rest of this entry »
