Buffalo External Drive Switches Capacity to Accommodate Stupid Smart TVs

Posted 10/13/2011 at 8:07am | by Paul Lilly

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Is your smart TV too dumb to recognize a 3TB hard drive? You have three choices: Buy a smarter, um, smart TV, invest in a smaller hard drive that won't confuzzle your TV set, or flip the switch on Buffalo's new HD-ALCTU2/V external hard drive to drop from 3TB to 2TB or 1TB, depending on what your not-so-smarty pants TV can handle. It's a pretty cool concept, and one that's not marred by lost storage space should you have to drop down to a lower capacity.

TCMagazine says you can partition the content. Maybe you want to store movies and TV shows on a 2TB partition and shove all your music on the remaining 1TB, or vice versa. Once you have it partitioned the way you want it, you can switch between them at will.

The unit itself is a USB 2.0 device that measures 121mm x 40mm x 201mm, has a glossy black finish, and LEDs to indicate how much free space remains. Rubber mounts prevent vibration from wrecking the drive, and a fan on the rear keeps gets rid of hot hair. 

Buffalo says it will go on sale in Japan sometime this month. No word on when it will ship stateside or for how much.

Image Credit: Buffalo via TCMagazine