hey everybody it’s la insideman we’re taking a look today at two portable solid state drives from buffalo these are budget minded but actually perform pretty nicely for the price point we’ve got the ssd pu t here which is a usb stick style device and then a more traditional usb hard drive form factor this one is called the ssd pg and we’re going to take a closer look at these drives and what they can do in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that these came in free of charge to the channel from buffalo however all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what these drives are all about now the price point on the ssd pg here is sixty nine dollars for five hundred gigabytes and a one terabyte drive is ninety nine dollars i think the one terabyte version is the sweet spot here the usb stick style version called the ssd put starts at 75 dollars for 500 gigabytes and there’s a one terabyte version for 120 and this is the 500 gig version here now it’s interesting is that the smaller device here the ssdp ut actually performs better than the larger one does and
although this looks like a usb stick this actually will perform at ssd speeds and we’ll take a closer look at it in a second but let’s start off with the lower priced option of the two here and then we’ll take a look at the higher performing one this again is the ssd pg and it feels just like any other external hard drive you’ve probably looked at over the years it is a standard usb 3 connector here on the back this is running at usb 3 gen 1 speeds so it’s got 5 gigabits per second that it can transit through the cable here that it comes with this does come with a usb a to usbc adapter so if you want to plug it into usb type c you don’t have to buy another cable but there are cables that will go from this usb 3 connector to usbc that are not that expensive now the drive itself is made out of plastic although they do say it meets some mil-spec requirements for drops and falls so it should be relatively rugged as most solid state drives are but it’s not made out of metal it is just a plastic casing and again it feels a lot like any other external hard drive you’ve probably used over the years but this one is completely solid state with no moving parts now a little bit earlier we ran some speed tests on the ssd pg here and as you can see we’re getting write speeds at about 300 megabytes per second and read speeds coming in just under
400 megabytes per second we let that test run for a few minutes so i didn’t see any real performance drops on it it was able to keep its performance pretty much on par with what you’re seeing here over the course of about a half an hour or so so i think if you’re writing a lot of data out you should be able to transit that data back and forth from the drive relatively quickly now there are of course much faster ssds out there from samsung and sandisk and everyone else but this is really being aimed at kind of the budget area of the market at an entry level price and i think the performance that we’re seeing out of it for the price point is not a bad deal at all we also took a look at the crystal disk mark test on the ssd pg and it’s not unusual for this test to give us slightly different numbers versus what we just saw with the blackmagic test that we ran and on this test in particular what i’m always looking at are the last three sets of numbers because those are how well the drive performs doing random reason rights and that’s the sort of thing that you’ll encounter if you’re running an operating system off your drive or running software off the drive or using it with a game console for example so it looks like overall it maintains a pretty good level of performance and what i’ll do here is pull up a chart so you can compare the performance of the pg drive here with some of the other ones we’ve looked at recently i would say this drive’s competitor is probably the wd my passport go we looked at that one a little while back and as you can see especially on the
right speeds the buffalo drive here does much better in every category of this test and it will also transfer data sequentially very quickly too as you saw during that blackmagic speed test now let’s take a look at the other one here this again is the ssd put and this is much smaller kind of in a usb stick format like the other drive it comes with one of these inelegant adapters to go to usb type c so you can plug it into your macbook if you connect it up this way now this drive supports usb 3.2 gen2 speeds and to get the best performance out of it you do need to make sure it’s plugged into a gen 2 port many manufacturers will label that port with the usb logo with a little 10 next to it if your computer doesn’t have that i would refer to the instruction manual to get an idea as to which ports will get you the best performance out of the drive now at the time i’m recording this video there is a firmware update that is required to get those gen 2 speeds so my advice would be when you get it head over to the buffalo website and run it just to make sure the drive has got the latest firmware because that update will enable the gen 2 performance without that it’ll perform close to what we saw out of the other drive here so make sure you get that firmware update installed the build quality on this is not spectacular it’s very lightweight plastic it’s very hollow feeling but it is an ssd so if you drop it
nothing bad will happen most likely unless it falls into water or something like that it’s definitely not waterproof you’ve got a little extender here for the usb port it seems to hold itself in place pretty well so once that is extended you can just plug it into your computer and go to town and you’ve got a little indicator light here on the top to let you know that the drive is active now we also ran those speed tests on the put drive here and as you can see it does perform a lot better we’re getting about 520 megabytes per second on the blackmagic disk speed test when writing and we’re seeing about that speed on reading from the drive and that held up pretty consistently as we let this test run out over the course of a few minutes so i didn’t see any thermal throttling issues i didn’t see any caching issues it seems to provide a decent level of performance for its size and price point we also took a look at that crystal disk mark test on here as well and if you take a look at those last three rows the drive here does very well on its random reads and writes it performs relatively consistently across the board which again is important for operating systems and gaming and other things that will be reading or writing random bits of data from the disk now both of these drives will work with anything that supports an external drive including game consoles in fact they give you a game console specific instruction sheet in the box of both of these but if you’ve got a ps5 or an xbox series s or x some of the newer games will not run on these external hard drives even though they have an ssd and that’s because they’re not fast enough to support what developers require out of some of these next-gen games but where these drives can be very useful is that if you’ve got
older xbox one or 360 games or older ps4 and ps3 games you can offload those older games from your internal storage on your next gen console over to the external drive and that of course will free up room for more next-gen games but most of the next-gen games will not work off of either of these drives even though they are pretty quick and your console will tell you which games can run versus which ones cannot so overall i don’t have much to complain about here these drives are very competitively priced they’re no frills they perform quite well especially the little one here and if you’re looking for something simple to plug into your computer or game console or tablet both of these will work just fine and i think are very competitively priced for the performance that we measured with them that is going to do it for now until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by theland.tv supporters including gold level supporters chris allegretta tom albrecht jim callagher hot sauce and video games and brian parker if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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