14 DAY TRIAL // One would think that companies would keep providing the market with more hard drives of all sorts, and they would be right, as shown by Buffalo, whose newest announcement deals with the MiniStation HD-PNTU3.
The MiniStation series of hard disk drives from Buffalo is a collection of so-called portable hard disk drives.
Though pretty much anything can be considered portable if someone can grab it and move it about, the phrase portable hard disk drive has come to determine those particularly compact external HDDs that have been running around the market.
While desktop HDDs, large as they are in comparison, can still be moved about easily enough, portable HDDs can be put in a pocket or small bag easily.
It is this sort of product that the Buffalo MiniStation models classify as, and this includes the new MiniStation HD-PNTU3, announced here.
The three members so far unveiled have capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB and 1.5 TB, respectively, while the color options they can be ordered in are even more varied.
More specifically, so as to appeal to as many users, regardless of gender or age, Buffalo prepared blue, gold, black pink, silver and red versions of each.
As for the actual specification, whichever are left at least, a mention should be made of the eight rubber mounts, a shock-absorbing system and the Eco Manager software (makes power use efficient).
Finally, all the drives come with the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface standard, which has a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 5 Gbps, about ten times that of USB 2.0 (not that HDDs actually reach that maximum at the moment).
The Buffalo MiniStation HD-PNTU3 series of HDDs has its product page on the company's website and will start selling in about a week or so (mid-October, 2011).
The 500 GB drive will be price at what translates into $145 (110.21 Euro), while the 1 TB and 1.5 TB units have tags of $200 (152.02 Euro) and $284 (215.87 Euro), respectively.