External storage

The GoFlex Satellite looks identical to Seagate’s previous GoFlex drives at first glance, but the presence of a power button and Wi-Fi lights shows its particular purpose: it’s a 500GB Wi-Fi drive with an inbuilt battery and support for sharing to iOS and Android devices. The Satellite acts as a Wi-Fi access point and allows you to browse its contents via either Seagate’s free apps or more simply from a web browser. It’s a decent way to add a lot of storage to your phone or tablet, but it’s not without its quirks.

Kingston’s Wi-Drive is designed to add storage wirelessly for Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch only. It’s a stark contrast to Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite, which does the same thing — where the Seagate drive is a regular hard drive, the Kingston uses flash memory and is therefore a lot lighter and more portable, but limited to iOS devices only and accessed via a free app. One trick that the Wi-Drive has up its sleeve compared to the more storage-rich GoFlex Satellite is that it supports a Wi-Fi pass-through mode, at least in theory.

It was the next logical step for portable storage devices: wireless instead of (or as well as) USB connectivity. No longer just for PCs or notebooks, these new storage devices can be used with smartphones and tablets, allowing you to stream video and access other documents via Wi-Fi. Here we review two of these new devices – Seagate's GoFlex Satellite and Kingston's Wi-Drive – and while both have some limitations, they're welcome additions to the storage market.

We’ve been waiting for USB 3.0 keys to arrive for some time, offering the promise of vastly improved transfer speeds, but having now seen our first example, we have to say that our reactions are mixed. The Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 16GB is definitely faster than competing USB 2.0 keys, making it the fastest USB drive storage available. However, this particular ‘ultimate’ key comes with some drawbacks that may make you think twice before shelling out.

The WD My Passport Essential USB 3.0 500GB bears more than a passing resemblance to the Buffalo MiniStation Lite, save for being about a centimetre shorter and thus slightly more compact. The drive automatically mounts with the option to install the WD SmartWare suite of backup and drive management utilities, although this isn’t a compulsory step. Despite being USB 3.0 compatible, we managed a significantly lower average read speed on the drive compared to both the Buffalo MiniStation Lite and Seagate GoFlex USB 3.0 drives.

The Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB 3.0 is another in the wave of new USB 3.0-ready external drives. We tested the 500GB variant; those with a need for more storage could opt for the $229 640GB option. Aside from offering 500GB of hard drive space, the MiniStation Lite also comes with optional utilities for backup and a faster copying mode, dubbed Turbo Copy, which replaces the standard Windows copy user interface. While $199 for a 500GB external drive is somewhat on the expensive side, we were curious to see how well the MiniStation worked over USB 3.0.

USB 3.0 brings the promise of speed and most of the major drive manufacturers are now rushing external drives to market to take the most advantage of that. The Buffalo DriveStation USB 3.0 1TB is for most respects a standard desktop external drive, requiring AC power as well as a USB port to function. Like the smaller MiniStation Lite, the DriveStation also comes with a suite of drive utilities, including backup, an optional RAMDISK utility and Turbo Copy for faster copying.