Buffalo's Drive Station 640GB external hard drive happily finds the company playing a numbers game. For the whole package stinks of simplicity, efficiency and not a lot more. There's no software disc in the box here, rather a brief instruction leaflet, the device itself, a USB cable and the power connector. Even the latter has the mass market in mind, as you have to fit either a two- or three-pin adapter to the end yourself. This is a production line product from start to finish.

The by-product of the absolute lack of frills is the consummate ease with which you can set the product up. This is, as you might expect, strictly a two-lead affair. When you connect the device up to the power socket it remains quiet, and while there's an audible cue that juice is flowing from the whirring up of the drive inside, that's about your lot. When you connect up a USB cable, a green light on the front of the box affirms the connection. And then an autoplay window appears on your screen. It worked with ease across Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, and for no-frills storage it covers its bases well.

That's pretty much it as far as the package is concerned, or so we thought. For on the drive itself is an executable file that did nothing at all on our Windows 7 test system. Moving over to a Windows XP machine we had more luck, for Buffalo's Drive Navigator loaded up. This allows you to format the drive to NTFS if you prefer (it's FAT32 by default, which brings with it an inevitable file size limit), while you can also enable Turbo USB for faster transfers. Furthermore, there's a collection of other software hidden in there too, behind a fairly tatty menu system, including Memeo's AutoBackUp.

The box itself is a simple black affair, with a venting grill at the top and a stylish yet simple exterior. There's no visual indicator here that you might get with a more expensive device as to how much space is remaining on the drive within, but to the unit's credit it's really quite quiet even in operation. We could barely hear the thing for the most part, even when accessing files contained on it.

It was also efficient in operation. We set up a 4.7GB transfer of several files, and that took a decent enough 5 minutes and 20 seconds to complete. Once its work was done, it went back to sitting quietly on our desk until called for again. It's really hard to either get excited or quibble with its operation.

With a selling price of under £80 when we went shopping, there's little about the DriveStation 640GB that excels, short of the fact that it's a strong value tool for a tidy price. And sometimes it's nice just to have hardware that's there to do a straightforward job, rather than an elaborate and unnecessary reinventing of the wheel. In this respect the DriveStation is a welcome bargain.

Verdict
A solid piece of hardware that delivers plenty of storage at a welcome price. It's nice and quiet, too.

Company: Buffalo

Tags: windows xp microsoft windows ntfs windows vista memeo universal serial bus hard disk drive personal computer