Recently I was searching for a cheap but fast and valuable external hard drive for my MacBook Air. In the past I used some external hard drives from Western Digital on my USB 2 port. That was a pretty slow experience compared with the internal storage speed of my MBA. I first found the Seagate GoFlex adapter. Which is pretty affordable in the US (round about 99$ on Amazon) but the model available in Germany is about 200€. And that is the price just for the adapter without any storage.
So I went on searching and found the Buffalo HD-PA500TU3 which is available for about 140€ in Germany. Pretty good price for an external hard disk (500 GB) with Thunderbolt AND(!) USB 3 connector.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As recommended by some customer reviews on Amazon I planned to pimp my drive with an Samsung SSD. So I ordered an Samsung 840 Pro 520 GB SSD too.
The delivery reached me just in time on christmas eve.
Replacing the built in Samsung hard drive of the Buffalo station with the SSD was pretty easy. There are some good instruction videos on the web. I connected the newly built “super drive” to my MBA and started the disk speed test. The test run round about 2 minutes at a very high level speed but suddenly there was a disk disconnect message from Mavericks. Something went wrong. I repeated the tests but same result. After some research I found several guys telling that they had the same problems even on the Seagate GoFlex adapter.
I send the SSD sad back to amazon and ordered the Samsung MZ-7TE750BW 840 EVO Basic with 750 GB (!) and nearly same price as the Pro one with 500 GB.
Two days later the SSD found its’s way to my Buffalo station and everything worked like a charm.
The benchmark results are amazing and I currently host all my virtual machines on that disk.. For round about 540€ a very fast external drive with 750 GB in a “Apple” like design. Hard to beat.

In the following the screenshots of two benchmarks.

Performance benchmark of Buffalo station with the ORIGINAL hard drive:

 

Performance benchmark of Buffalo station with the Samsung Evo Basic 705 GB SSD drive: