Buffalo launches a SSD that mimics HDD design

For a better fit in notebooks

Mar 31, 2010 by

HERE‘S AN ODD one for you, it seems like Buffalo has noticed that there’s a problem fitting certain SSD’s into notebooks due to the shape. Hence the company came up with a solution, an SSD that mimics a traditional hard drive in terms of shape. It really sounds stranger than it is, but it’ll all make sense once you see the picture of the new SSD past the break.

The issue appears to be related to how the SATA connectors are placed on many SSD’s, as the top half of the connectors are often covered by a protruding piece of plastic or metal. As you can see from the picture below, Buffalo got around this by removing the overhang. The NSU2 series of drives are also shaped differently with rounded corners, rather than the fairly square corners found on most SSD’s.

We’re not sure if this is a widespread problem, but it seems to be enough of an issue that Buffalo took it upon itself to come up with a new SSD enclosure design. The casing on all SSD’s is really just for looks, as they’d work just as well without it. In saying that, they’d be difficult to handle and they’d be more sensitive to various kinds of interference and physical damage. It will be interesting to see if any of the other SSD makers follow suit on Buffalo’s new design.

The NSU2 series does otherwise appear to be a fairly bog standard SSD that ships in sizes from 32GB to 256GB, offers 64MB of cache memory and has a mini USB port around the back that allows you to easily clone and swap out your hard drive in your notebook. The only performance figure that we managed to find was a sequential read speed of just under 175MB/s. It also features Trim support which should make users of Windows 7 happy. The NSU2 series is currently only available in Japan with a starting price of about $157 for the 32GB model, which seems quite expensive.S|A

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Lars-Göran Nilsson