Buffalo Technology announced a new new 1TB/2TB/3TB external hard drive built for speed, integrating a 1GB DDR3 cache to enhance performance. Buffalo claims speed improvements of 350%. Read on for details.
Buffalo Technology announced a new new external hard drive built for speed, integrating a 1GB DDR3 cache to enhance performance. Buffalo claims speed improvements of 350%. The product is called the DriveStation DDR (although they tell me that the name is not finalized and could change) and is expected on shelves in early 2013. Pricing is expected to be HD-GD1.0TU3 – $119 / HD-GD2.0TU3 – $149 / HD-GD3.0TU3 – $189. Here is the DriveStation DDR portion of their announcement:
DriveStation DDR, available in early 2013, is a high performance external USB 3.0 hard drive with a large 1 GB cache for accelerated file transfer speeds:
- Utilizes 1 GB DDR3 RAM cache for significant performance enhancements to outperform standard USB 3.0 hard drives by up to 350%
- Features attractive, high-gloss chassis that can be placed vertically or horizontally
- Available in early 2013 at an estimated street price of $119 for 1 TB (HD-GD1.0U3), $149 for 2 TB (HD-GD2.0U3) and $189 for 3 TB (HD-GD3.0U3)
The performance gain is obtained by adding 1GB of DDR3 to the drive controller PCB board and then caching write and read activity through the DDR3. This has the benefit of providing a buffer and can also allow for fewer, more sustained reads and writes, which should translate into better performance. Anyone who is using an external drive to perform video editing would appreciate the fastest speeds on the market. While in their booth, Buffalo showed me the product performing drive speed testing and I consistently saw reads and writes being significantly better than standard drives. To illustrate, here is a comparison of the DriveStation DDR speeds (on the right side) to a standard external drive without the DDR3 (on the left side). You can see that sequential speeds are roughly doubled, with significant improvement also seen in 512K or smaller file transfers. Of course, once you get into larger file sizes, the speed advantage is smaller.
I’ll keep you posted on availability as this product comes to market.
Buffalo Technology Press Release