14 DAY TRIAL // Buffalo has been especially active on the storage front lately and, in particular, in the area of portable solutions for consumers. Not only did the company unveil a number of portable hard disk drives, but, quite recently in fact, it showed off a series of external, portable solid state drives (SSDs) operating on the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard. Seemingly intent on going full cycle, Buffalo Technology has now come forth and unwrapped the remaining type of external storage device that it means to start selling.
With platter-based and Flash storage already covered, the only type of storage device not launched by Buffalo is the optical one. As such, the DVSM-PS58U2/S-BK was created as an external DVD writer that, while operating on the USB 2.0 interface, can be used as a boot device.
The DVSM-PS58U2/S-BK weighs 340 grams and measures 137 (W) x 20 (H) x 142 (D) mm. Using a piano black finish, the drive boasts a slot-in loading mechanism and can write data onto disks in a variety of formats and at different speeds, depending on the storage media. For compact disks, namely CD-R/-RW, the unit can scribe data at 24x. As for DVDs, the device can reach speeds of 6x for DVD-R/+R DL and DVD-RW and of 8x for DVD-R/+R and DVD+RW.
The Buffalo DVSM-PS58U2/S-BK will draw whatever power it needs from the USB connector itself, which means that it won't need an auxiliary adapter. Unfortunately, it has not yet been made available, but will make it to the market, at least in Japan, around the middle of next month. It will be bundled with CyberLink's InstantBurn 5 and PowerBackup 2 software tools, as well as MediaShow 5 (for video and photo editing) and Power2Go 6 (for easy CD/DVD burning). As for pricing, the unit will carry a tag of roughly $122.