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It is 18x17x4.5cm, the first figure the depth is when cables are plugged in. The unit weights 1135grams and it is shiny black in colour. Why do not manufacturers make such unit a non shiny colour so that fingermarks are not a problem?

The front has a small square on/off button and when off it appears to have three small graphics to its right to show full, half full or empty. In fact when on there are a line of blue square LEDs that show the amount of free space on the drive.

The rear has two connections for DC input and USB, beyond these is a fan outlet should the drive become to warm. Both the leads are 1.5metres in length meaning the drive need not be sighted right beside the PC or notebook.

This USB2 drive needs power and a USB port, no drivers are required and a few seconds after connecting the drive Windows recognises it and you have close to a Terra Bite of extra storage space. I see they also do 1.5 and 2TB units.

See also: Storage

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While speed of data transfer is important, so is security and this is handled by the first piece of software Secure Lock Mobile. This along with the other software is all on an accompanying CD-ROM and you can either install it all or what you wish. I found 100MB of hard disc space was taken by installing all that it offers, this process took six minutes.

After a reboot a small utility sits on the right edge of the screen touch it and the various applications become available.

One of which is a utility to reformat the drive NTFS (it comes formatted to FAT32) but of course this will overwrite anything on the drive so the time to use this is before you transfer any data to the drive or you will need to redo the transfer. It explains why NTFS is likely to be better, but not why it does not come formatted in this manner.

It has some Power Saving software that switches off the drive when you turn off your PC or notebook, should you forget.

The Backup solution can do a full backup but please remember this works within Windows and so it cannot backup files that are currently open so should you want a full backup you will need software that works when Windows is not running. However for backing up data files, audio files, video files and image file it is fine.

Turbo PC and Turbo Copy claim to increase the data transfer speed by up to 85% but this is outside the scope of this review.

Finally some applets to automate various tasks. All these applications and applets add value to the unit. While this 1TB drive does transfer data quite quickly and most importantly restore it again you must decide if you need a unit of this size as so many drives are around that are very small and also do not require external power.

I found it quiet in use and hardly ever heard the fan, while the blue squares on the face give an indication of available space I feel that if you have a Terra Bite of storage you should really know how much data you are moving.

Doing my Internet searches found the Buffalo Drive Station AV 2TB at a best price of £148.43 from the first link below.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003QU0WW2?ie=UTF8&tag=gadge0a-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634

http://www.buffalo-technology.com/products/external-drives/drivestation/hd-avu2-drivestation-av/