Even with hours of constant Thunderbolt and HDD access, the drive didn’t overheat or disconnect at all with the HDD inside. The drive’s aluminum underside does a great job conducting heat away, and gets somewhat warm (after all, it is doubling as a heatsink, and aluminum has great thermal conductivity) during use. Just run “dd if=/dev/urandom of=test.bin” in the root of the drive, and let it fill up. In addition to stressing the drive with the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test app set to 50 GB, I filled the stock HDD with random data by running good ol’ dd with data from /dev/urandom, a favorite test of mine for all storage that comes my way. Buffalo has no plans to sell a bare external enclosure for people to stick their own SSD in, but at the current price point upgrading it yourself is a pretty viable option. When connected over Thunderbolt on OS X, in System Profiler you can see the drive attached over an AHCI controller just like any internal drive, and with TRIM enabler patched kexts on OSX you can even TRIM the SSD.
Looking at the QuickBench scores, the Vertex 3 performs just as well inside the MiniStation as it does connected to a 6Gbps SATA controller in our Bench test bed. Keep in mind, with the 1 TB HDD, speeds will actually be slightly higher thanks to the higher storage density.
With the HDD inside, you basically get the kind of speeds you’d expect were the drive connected natively over SATA. There’s no USB 3.0 on my 2011 MacBook Pro, so for USB 3.0 I turned to my desktop which has a Renesas based USB 3.0 controller, and reformatted the drive to NTFS.
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