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It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.
The Buffalo drive manages to half the time it takes to boot with our Western Digital Mechanical drive, however it is several seconds behind the Kingston and OCZ Vertex 2 drives.
Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times
Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.
The Buffalo drive is only 1 second slower than the OCZ Vertex 128GB recording a time of only 20 seconds. This is a great result overall.
JMicron controllers really are struggling. When I saw you listed it on the page earlier in the review I was expecting a price around £230, not £280. thats considerably overpriced IMO.
Good review, nice and honest which I like to see. it seems a good unit, but released maybe six months too late to be truly competitive.
Sadly, that seems a little overpriced as you say. Good enough drive by the looks of it, and i love the USB 2 option, really, I wish more would add that. performance is a little lacking just.
I really like buffalo as a company, but i looked at this drive last week as I wanted an SSD and finally found out it had a jmicron controller and knew it would perform much as it did in this review. Is the performance bad? hell no, but compared against the sandforce drives (and OCUK has the vertex 2 for the same price!), its a little of a bad deal. drop it to £230 and it would be a worthwhile purchase.
It is amazing how much this technology has advanced – the Buffalo drive a year ago would have been a class leader.
oh well, but good review, I quite like the drive and the fact it clips apart. those screws are so labourous. Read performance is solid, but write is certainly hindering it a little.
Im glad I found this review, I was going to buy it, for some reason I thought it was an indilinx controller. What a bad move from Buffalo. especially at this price.
Good honest review, thank you.
It seems a solid drive just the pricing needs sorted. OCZ look like good value beside this. Quite an overlooked mistake from Buffalo.
Good product, I like it. Just not so sure about the price. I dont think anyone really NEEDS or notices some of these speed differences, and one or two extra seconds booting up would hardly be a problem 🙂 drop the price by £50.
Sadly the controller is letting it down a little when compared to the newest drives out. Would be tempting if the price was more competitive, it needs to drop significantly in todays market.
Disappointing 🙁
Didnt even know buffalo were selling SSD’s, but yeah, thats way over the odds for what you are getting. those are 2009 prices for a 2009 drive.
It is weird how people complain about these performancve levels when they are insanely high. We all expect so much now from everything.
But its overpriced :p