BUFFALO Thunderbolt Portable Hard Drive with Thunderbolt Cable Technology MiniStation 1.0 TB Thunderbolt/USB 3.0, Silver (HD-PA1.0TU3)

Buffalo's MiniStation™ Thunderbolt offers easy plug and play storage featuring the revolutionary Thunderbolt technology for unparalleled transfer speeds and a USB port for universal connectivity. With speeds up to 10 Gbps, Thunderbolt is 2X FASTER than USB 3.0, giving you the fastest portable storage interface ever.

Product Features Thunderbolt Interface Interface speeds up to 10 Gbps Includes High Performance USB 3.0 port Thunderbolt cable included Time Machine compatibility Adds storage to your Mac or PC computer Dual Interface Portable Hard Drive Perfect for creative professionals and multimedia enthusiast

Best Price BUFFALO Thunderbolt Portable Hard Drive

The aluminum frame and plastic top look great and feel great in my hands. Very solid with no flex. The two pieces are glued together using some kind of sticky tape (very similar to the glue on the Apple Time Capsule) and it was very difficult to open the case. I do not recommend that you try it!

Once the top and bottom frames are separated, the entire PCB-HD-shieldcage assembly is held together with 6 high-quality screws. These were really well machined screws, with nicely polished beveled edges! (Every little thing counts.)

The circuit board appears to be very well made, with plenty of SMDs, metal shielding and grounding. Both the USB and Thunderbolt ports are grounded with the drive through a metal cage. I think the circuit board "fit and finish" quality almost matches the logic board on my macbook pro.

The hard drive is a SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 HN-M101MBB. The sticker on the drive has both Seagate and Samsung printed on it. My drive had a manufacture date of May 2012. This is the normal 9.5mm laptop drive, which sells for $100. Buffalo did not cheap out and use the thicker drives!

The case worked with other 2.5" 9.5mm height hard drives, so I may be replacing the drive with a SSD in the future. I have not tested alternate drives yet.

GREAT VALUE at $230:
1. The 1TB drive is worth $100.
2. The enclosure/case and circuitry is easily worth $50 in my opinion. It would be hard to find a similar quality USB 3.0 only case at this price. (Despite the glue!)
3. The included cables (Thunderbolt + USB 3) are worth at least $50. (But, the cables are short.)

I paid $229.00, which was the original launch price, and it was a great value. However, at $270 the Seagate Drive with easy-exchange interface looks better to me...

ORIGIN:
The external sticker says Made in Japan. However the hard drive is Made in China.

USAGE:
This drive works great on my Macbook Air 2011 and Macbook Pro 13" 2011. However, the drive was not recognized in my Macbook Pro until I applied the Apple's thunderbolt firmware software update.

The brochure for the drive make it sound like this drive will run at pure thunderbolt speeds. However that is misleading. A 5400RPM drive simply cannot saturate the thunderbolt interface. The drive reads and writes around 100MB/s over thunderbolt on my 2011 Macbook Pro 13". That is still very fast compared to USB 2.0 and slightly faster than FW800; but it is definitely not "twice as fast as USB 3.0". The drive reaches around 30 MB/s in USB 2.0 mode.

Best Price BUFFALO Thunderbolt Portable Hard Drive