| | |  | Computer Accessories | Home » » Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 2.0 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W2.0IU2/R1 | | | | | | | Description: | | 2TB DRIVESTATION DUO USB 2.0/FWIRE EXT SATA HD | | | Features: | |
• DriveStation Duo; USB 2.0 Cable ;Setup CD Rom with Memeo Backup Software; FireWire (IEEE 1394a) Cable; AC Adapter;Warranty Statement
• Two SATA Drives for Maximum Flexibility, Spanning Mode or RAID 1. USB and FireWire!
• Auto Power Feature Turns On and Off Automatically with Your PC
• Auto Setup-Connect using USB 2.0 or FireWire (IEEE1394) interfaces for flexible, high speed, and plug and play connections.
• Windows and Mac OS 10.3+ RAID Setup Utility
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 6.5 inches | | Product Width:
| 13.0 inches | | Product Height:
| 9.35 inches | | Product Weight:
| 6.39 pounds | | Package Length:
| 13.2 inches | | Package Width:
| 9.5 inches | | Package Height:
| 6.5 inches | | Package Weight:
| 7.95 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 10 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 10 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 Good bang for the buckJan 07, 2008
By T. Klinchik
I usually do not write reviews but this time after spending so much time doing a research on a good external RAID1 hard drive and finding no useful information I figured I'll write one up to save other people time and money.
I've read a whole bunch of reviews on Amazon and other websites all people complaining about DriveStation Duo RAID-1 configuration on Windows. Not sure what those people did wrong but they definitely got me concerned before buying this unit.
Before choosing this unit I've compared whole bunch of products available. I was looking for external hard drive either USB or NAS that supports RAID-1 for redundancy and I need to have a flexibility to swap one of the hard drives if needed in case it crashes after warranty expires by not going to the manufacture. Out of all products I looked at (Linksys, Buffalo, Maxtor, Iomega, SimpleTech and many others) I liked Linksys NAS200 the best as it gives you most flexibility with hard drives you choose and Linksys usually have a pretty good software to configure and maintain their hardware but the only downside with NAS200 was the speed. I don't need high transfer rates but I do need at least 10Mb/sec when NAS200 was producing around 3Mb/sec.
When I got the hard drive the one thing I was concerned about is configuring it for RAID-1 based on all the problems other users had (from reviews). I just ran a disk utility that comes with the drive, connected hard drive via USB and then configured it for RAID-1. It was that easy. No problems on Windows XP as other people reported. Then I just formatted the drive using Disk Management utility and it is ready to go.
I even decided to test redundancy so I copied some files to the drive and shut it down and pulled out one drive out of it. Started it back up and the drive was accessible with all the files there. So then I shut it down again and reconnected the drive and it started rebuilding it. According to their doc on the website it is supposed to take 8-11 hours for 500Gb hard drive but after 18 hours it did not finish and I decided to call tech support. After calling tech support they confirmed that the reconnected drive will not rebuild since it expects brand new drive RAW formatted and a drive formatted other than RAW it will go in infinite loop trying to rebuild it. First tech support suggested to format the drive while it was rebuilding it (which I didn't think was a good idea but did it anyway) and that didn't work (2-3 hours wasted). Then after keeping me on hold while (probably) reading some documentation tech support rep. said that because I opened up front cover the warranty is void and they can't replace it for me so he suggested returning back to the place where I got it from since there's no way to fix the problem any more. Then I figured I'll take it into my own hands and tried using DiskUtility to change the drive back to Normal Mode (2 independent drives) and that worked fine but changing it back to RAID-1 failed with misspelled error "Disk Restracturing failed". So, I formatted each drive using FAT32 (back to default formatting) and then tried converting it back to RAID-1 and it worked just fine.
At the end here are pros and cons of this hard drive:
+ Supports RAID-1
+ High transfer rate
+ Auto-power shut off (via USB). Nice feature. Starts up the drive when you start up your computer and shuts it off when you shut down computer.
+ Swappable hard drives. After hands on experience with the hard drive I found out that it will not be that easy to change them, but at least it'll get you the data if one crashes.
+ Easy to access hard drives - just few screws away
+ No need to install all kinds of drivers and whole bunch of useless memory and CPU wasting software to make this unit work. It is literally Plug-n-Play. Windows recognizes this unit without any issues. You can format it using Disk Management in Windows.
+ Comes with 2 Seagate hard drives and not some proprietary like other manufactures
- 1 year warranty. Some websites advertise 3 years warranty for this drive but support confirmed that it is actually 1 year
- Tech support. Doesn't seem like they know what they're talking about. They kept putting me on hold every time I ask them any question. My guess, they were looking for answers in some documents because they didn't know. Really takes them long time to come back with an answer and at the end those answers are useless and misleading.
So at the end, the drive seems to be performing as advertised. I got about 30Mb/sec when copying large files and over 100Mb/sec when copying some MP3 files. At the end, I think this is a good bang for the buck.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 Basic RAID capabilities; use the firewire cableOct 14, 2007
By Dan Nelson
Even though it's not the most stylish, I like the flat black boxy look. Sit it on the floor next to your battery-backup unit and you won't even notice it's there. Considering it's got two drives, a power supply, and a fan in it, the box is very quiet. The fan is silent at low speed, rarely revs up to high speed, and even then it's not that loud.
I got it on sale for just a little over what the two 500GB drives cost by themselves. Definitely shop around.
Unlike the other reviewers I had no problems setting up the unit on a PC over the USB interface. Do ensure that you have unplugged any other USB storage devices (flash drives etc) when you run the RAID configuration utility; it makes the device probe take ages. It ships in RAID-1 mode, but it's got a very basic RAID controller. Reads will flip between the two drives every 15 seconds, so don't expect double the speed or double the IOPS of a single drive. On disk failure it beeps and the appropriate drive light goes red, and you can pop the front off, replace the drive, and when you power it up it will rebuild the drive. A rebuild takes over 8 hours.
Regarding its two interface types (Firewire vs USB): Definitely buy a firewire card if your PC doesn't have one! The maximum transfer rate I got from USB was a miserable 15 MB/s, but with a $10 firewire card I can get 37 MB/s. On the other hand, the auto power feature that switches the hard drives off when you shut off your PC only works in USB mode, so consider running both cables and switch to firewire when you want the speed.
+ Very quiet
+ Firewire speed is good
+ Inexpensive
- Auto power-on only works with USB
- USB speed is slow
- RAID-1 mode should have better performance
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Initial problems, but got it to workJul 03, 2007
By grdzro
The RAID software that came with it did not work. The updated version from their website didn't work either, until I switched to using Firewire. I have read reviews that the RAID software only works on an non-Intel Mac. That wasn't the case for me, but it did not work with USB 2.
After I got it working with Firewire I finally started transferring files to it. Unfortunately it was glacially slow, taking all night to transfer a few hundred gigs - making the drive's 1 TB of space effectively useless. However, I read a review of a different drive that recommended formatting it for NTFS. After doing that, it works wonderfully.
So, in short:
1) Download new RAID software from their website
2) Use RAID software with Firewire only
3) Format it for NTFS
After doing all that, it's a good drive.
The instructions that comes with it is horrible, and the customer support did not pick up after 40 minutes of being on hold. Still, it is a good drive for the money after I finally got it working.
I will post an update later if the drive fails or if I have any more problems.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Drive good so far but what a pain to setup!Jun 08, 2007
By R. Coonfield
"Rusty"
Got the drive and hadn't seen the reviews about Bufallo's software to change the raid setup not working (on PCs that is). Unfortunately I am working with and XP box. Repeat: Buffalo's software to change the raid setup does NOT work. Your results may vary but seems that a large number of people are having this trouble. My solution:
Gotta get a non-intel Mac. Attach the drive via Firewire. Use Bufalo's Mac raid utility to make it raid 1. Open up your mac's disk utility software and "erase" the drive into a new MS-DOS drive. unhook and re-attach to your PC and voila!
Took a long time to get to Bufallo's tech support but once i did the guy tried hard and filled in the missing pieces for me to figure this out.
If you don't have access to a non-intel based mac to use DO NOT buy this drive. 5/8/07
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 The backup drive that lost my dataMay 06, 2008
By Gerald Ryle
"eatmochikin"
I bought the 1TB Drivestation as a backup for my digital photos & intended to use it as a 500GB RAID 1 device. I initially had problems with the Buffalo raid utility, but they finally released a newer version that worked under Windows XP & I was able to configure RAID and format NTFS. It worked well for several months, though I thought it was a bit noisy and slow (even over Firewire). It was too slow to work with directly from Adobe Lightroom (I didn't really expect to be able to do this, but I tried it), so I just periodically copied my photos to it with rsync.
About a month ago, I powered up the drive and it reported an error. It decided to rebuild (had to look up the blinking light pattern on Buffalo's site to determine what it was doing), which took a full 24 hours. It completed successfully, and my data was fine.
Last night, I backed up my photos and shut down my computer and the drive. This morning, I booted and powered up the drive. No errors were reported, but the drive didn't show up in Explorer. I opened the Windows Disk Management panel & the drive appeared as un-initialized. This really sucked. Luckily, I didn't care too much about the data as it was just a backup--so I decided to play with the drive to figure out what happened.
I opened up the Drivestation's case and detached one drive to keep it untouched. Upon booting, the Buffalo controller complained that a drive was dead, but it still made the remaining drive available to Windows. I allowed Windows to initialize it. As expected, it still appeared blank. Windows wanted me to create a partition and format it, which I did not do. Instead, I removed one drive and connected it directly to my PC's SATA controller. I'm now using a data recovery utility to see that there is still data on it. I've looked at both drives & they appear identical. So, it looks like the Buffalo controller F'd something up, which destroyed my file system. If I'd had important data on it, I'd be pretty pissed--though it looks like a utility like GetMyDataBack could recover a decent chunk. Instead, I'm just annoyed that I have an expensive, unreliable RAID enclosure. I can't recommend this product to anyone.
See all 10 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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