News - Buffalo DriveStation DDR external HDD uses a 1GB RAM cache

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New storage product offers “SSD performance with HDD like prices” and capacities.

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Read more.

Slightly misleading marketing there... the test in question actually involved writing files to the buffer - hence why they chose 800MB of data, so it could all fit in the 1GB buffer.

The hard drive itself can't possibly achieve those speeds, and presumably the files in the buffer would need to be written to the disk itself eventually...

Not knocking the product itself, probably actually very useful to be able to backup small batches of files extremely quickly. But I suspect it's not quite as magical as the marketing makes it sound!

On the other hand, how often does the average punter transfer more than 1GB to an external drive at a time?
On the other foot however, you still got to be reading that data from some source or other so in the end you'll likely still be limited by the read speed of the source drive.

But as CK said, not knocking it - it's still a good idea.

Marketing gumpffff but I'd like my NAS box to have those sort of speeds
;)

So presumably if you're moving files to the drive (as opposed to copying them) and you lose power for whatever reason, potentially 1GB of data will be lost?

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Originally Posted by zaph0d

On the other hand, how often does the average punter transfer more than 1GB to an external drive at a time?
On the other foot however, you still got to be reading that data from some source or other so in the end you'll likely still be limited by the read speed of the source drive.

But as CK said, not knocking it - it's still a good idea.

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People who store HD video will go over this limit just about every time they copy something from their collection.

This could be very useful for people (like me) who have an SSD for the OS and an HDD for VMs and things like that. The 1GB buffer on this disk could work very well for random reads and writes that you get with a VM disk.

We'll have to wait for the tests and see if it works as advertised.

I seriously doubt with this that the drive has the gig of ram, it will be in the chassis. So valhar2000 (cool name!) you'd be better with one of the hybrid drives coming out

“SSD performance with HDD like prices”

£129 for the 2TB version and £169 !!

To me that is pricey ..

SSD-like performance? Well, maybe, except that that statement has to be limited to writes..* and since most of the benefit of SSDs (for example in a VM as mentioned above) will be in random reads, not random writes (which don't routinely happen to any great extent, in Windows at least). So no, I disagree, not SSD like performance.

*Well unless you, or your OS, routinely copies <1GB of data to the drive and then tries to read it again (hint: that's what RAM's for).

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Originally Posted by this_is_gav

So presumably if you're moving files to the drive (as opposed to copying them) and you lose power for whatever reason, potentially 1GB of data will be lost?

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Depends if it is battery backed.... most high end RAID cards are - Buffalo SOHO product?

Power cut during a transfer would equal epic fail for this drive

My immediate reaction was, like others have said, it's not backed up if it's in volatile RAM. So until it's commited to disk, data is vulnerable to power failure. Battery support might mitigate that .... if it has it.

But other than it being a simple, compact, ready-out-of-the-box solution, I'm struggling to see why I wouldn't just write to a small (say, 40-60GB SSD), and the sync that to a large HD.

I struggle to see the point of this device. It seems to me to be neither fish nor fowl, as it were.