After searching and purchasing a few similar products to utilize for archiving terabytes worth of photos, I finally settled on the Buffalo DriveStation Duo. The unit is very small compared to comparable products, which made finding a location on my desk for it, very simple. Using the included eSata bracket, connection was a breeze and FLAWLESS. After installing the software, my PC instantly recognized the unit. The software is very light and very simple to use. Within minutes my DriveStation Duo was up and running. I do give the unit 5 stars because it does everything it is supposed to with ease, but I was a little disappointed with the manner in which the hard drives are removed. It is a simple process, but a little clunky feeling. Since I won't be removing disks all that often, I can certainly live with it. My favorite feature might be the auto on/off that powers the unit up and down with your PC. I only use the included RAID software, so I cannot comment on the other software that is included. Overall this is a GREAT product and I would strongly recommend it.

I bought this through another retailer, but wanted to hop on and let everyone know that even though Windows 8 has some compatibility issues with some external hard drives (i.e. Hitachi/HGST) This unit is working flawlessly in Raid 1 mode on my Windows 8 system.

I've been looking for a way to move most of my data off my local hard drive and decided to go with something that could run Raid 1 for redundancy. Setup was very simple and the drive has performed as expected so far. I haven't tried to run any performance tests but moving the roughly 1 TB of data took a while -- which I expected. The only problem that I have is that I don't have a USB 3 port from the docking station for my laptop so am running it on the slower USB 2. It's unfortunate that the DriveStation didn't have other port options but I knew that when I purchased it. We'll see how it holds up but as of now I'd recommend it as a very affordable (and simple) option if you want to run a Raid 0 or 1 setup and don't want a NAS. For my purposes, I wanted something directly connected to the machine and this was the most affordable option I could find.

I was outgrowing my 1 TB external single drives, and it was about time to separate my work projects from my personal. The item arrived quickly, and sported the lovely new electronic smell. Install was a breeze; as I don't have the need for RAID at the moment, I converted the drives quickly to be independent of each other, with one drive making multiple backups of the other. My system doesn't support USB 3.0, so I can't comment on the speed. But I can say USB 2.0 speeds are similar to other external drives, averaging around 20-25 MB/sec, according to the disc tests I ran. 4 months later the drive bay still runs like a charm. It is very quiet, located about 4 feet away from ear shot, and can only be heard when booting up the desktop as the drives spin up. This won't win you any awards for speed if you're doing heavy video processing. For now, it serves my purpose as a drive for my photography business, but I fear as the cameras keep increasing in MP sizes, I may need to update the desktop to either USB 3.0 or something similar, as USB 2.0 is starting to show its age (rendering full size previews of thousands of images can take a long time)!

I needed a redundant way to back-up my picture files. (I just had a hard drive fail) The Buffalo system does it automatically. I had a little trouble setting it up but a call to customer service took care of the problem. Their rep. talked me through the setup and it has worked as advertised.

Drive worked nicely. The RAID utility was minimal and easy to use.

The drive works great but I needed to speak with two people at Buffalo to get it to rebuild.� Regardless, Buffalo will provide phone support even if the product is out of warranty.� You can't beat that.

Would have paid nearly the same amount of money buying just the disk drives. This package is great. Plug and play. Easy to switch between Raid 0 and Raid 1. If you need disk space this is a great way to get it.

Transfers 10 GB/ min from Imac's hdd

Out of the box up and running and Esata on my laptop is nearly as fast as the internal drive so the drive appears as a seamless integration. Haven't spent the time yet understanding the system tools provided but in general I was amazed that 250G transfer only took 45 minutes which is pretty amazing considering the technology of the past.