Buffalo Portable 1TB USB Drive w/DDR3 Cache

I have a stack of external portable drives - the downside of photography, and they're all good at storing data but the speeds aren't that great. Even at USB 3.0, you're still going to run into the slowness of the hard drive. To help mitigate that, Buffalo's Ministation DDR adds a small 1gb flash memory to the drive, so that writes to the drive are automatically copied there first, then copied to the magnetic part of the hard drive.For a performance increase, it's noticeable. When copying a few GB of photos, it seemed noticeably faster from my Macbook to this drive but not enough for me to be excited about it (compared to SSDs via Thunderbolt, you get spoiled quickly.) Once photos were copied on there, I didn't seem to notice any real speed improvements in Lightroom when reading images off of the external drive. Nor did I seem to notice any real speed increase when dragging files off of the external onto other drives.At $180, it's pretty pricy compared to the DIY approach of buying a 1tb hybrid Seagate drive and an external USB 3.0 enclosure (and saving yourself $50.) So who is this drive for then? If you don't mind paying slightly over twice the cost for an external drive to gain a bit of speed, then this is a solid drive for you. But the DIY route might be the best option for some people. Overall, this is a good drive, but it's a niche product.