Buffalo Linkstation Quad

While most low-price NAS products tend to target domestic use separately from serious small office installations, the Buffalo Linkstation Quad attempts to straddle both these markets, albeit, with a price hike. Yet it offers home users a faster, beefier file store and media server, together with RAID redundancy, Internet-wide …

[Cosby]

White Glove

Was Michael Jackson's ghost involved in the review? Chamone!

[Matt Bryant]

Looks good!

For those not interested in building their own RAID NAS this will be attractive (about 95+% of home users). I'd be keen to know if the backup software can de-dupe and provide a generational backup schema, otherwise the disk space could be eaten up pretty quickly and inefficiently.

[Annihilator]

No diskless?

Would much prefer a no-disk version - any plans?

[J 12]

Raid Expansion

Is it possible to expand the RAID, when bigger capacity disks become available?

[Fingers]

@Annihilator

If it is anything like the Terastation & Terastation Pro products, the O/S is striped across all drives in the array. This means that you can't buy one without drives and you can only buy replacement drives from Buffalo in the event of a failure or upgrade.

Of course, there are means of getting around this but it is a bit of a pain having to do so.

If you want to source your own disks, you are better off with another NAS manufacturer. Cheaper too.

[Trev 2]

Playing catchup?

Reading that, it sounds like they've brought out a competitor to the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ range, just too expensively and missing half the useful features of the latter.

Did look at them for our office, but real big panic point was getting the drives from them exclusively. If using RAID5 at least the drives should continue, but having to source the drive from them isn't good especially if you're using this as the office fileserver which is where it's best suited.

Re. raid expansion - from everything I read you'd have to buy 4 new disks from them, then clear it all and recreate the RAID array. Which isn't good compared to the X-RAID system on the ReadyNAS where you can expand it just by adding a new disk and it just gets on with it.

No hot swappable drives? OK, not a major issue generally, but again fails compared to the competition.

Well priced, erm, not too sure about that. Only serious home theatre users and offices are likely to be buying something this expensive, and it fails to meet a lot of their needs.

Mind you, they do a nifty little linkstation 1TB drive which is seriously tiny, no fan etc. and very portable for backups.

[b166er]

No RAID6 ?

I think the Synology DS409Slim is much better for the money, but whatever floats yer boat ;-p

[Youngone]

@Fingers

I have 10 Terastations in service all around the country, and have replaced drives in them before. They are an old model however. I think on the models I have the os is held on cmos. The new discs are seen as 148 GB drives regardless of the size.