Buffalo Linkstation Duo

Buffalo Technology’s latest Nas box, the Linkstation Duo has been targeted to meet the ever-increasing multimedia and storage needs of home and small office users. Offered in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities, it sports two Sata II hard drives that can be easily swapped out for user upgrades. Buffalo Linkstation Duo Sturdy storage …

[Cthonus]

Caveat emptor

Nice products per se, but given their tardiness at coming out with a viable OS X 10.6/Snow Leopard interface I'd be reluctant to purchase anything from them in the future without having gone through their 'Mac Compatible' claims with a very fine toothcomb.

[xyberpix]

Netgear ReadyNAS for me

It seems nice, but as I'm also a Mac user, I'd stick with my ReadyNAS anyday over this one.

It works flawlessly, supports multiple protocols (SMB/AFP/rsync/FTP), and works like a charm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn straight!

ReadyNAS NV+ fitted with 4x1.5TB Western Digitals, £650. Gives you 6TB ( 4.1TB usuable ) in a Raid5 setup. Serving up CIFS and AFP to your home net, plus built in Torrent client and even lets you code your own software add-ons!

Used Buffalo kit in the past and it's been alright, but always hass silly niggles that let it down. They try to be the Apple computer of the home NAS market, but their reputation makes them look more like Amstrad Stereo!

[Sarah Davis]

Yeah,... but,... it's Buffalo,...

... so there's bound to be issues, it'll be be slower than a tabloid reader and overpriced.

Edgestore do a 4 drive USB box for £100 and a 5 bay eSata box for £160 - it's not NAS but it is MAC friendly, and given that a Giganet adaptor is about £10 does show the Buffalo price is highly overpriced

FAIL

[Nigel Wright]

Better than my ReadyNas Duo by the looks of it

My ReadyNas Duo is the biggest pile of poo I have bought in terms of kit for many years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Security is awful

Administration through the web interface has no SSL option so the admin password is sent in the clear. Admin and user passwords cannot contain complex characters and are easily broken. Both flaws could be addressed in a software/firmware upgrade but despite complaints from users neither has been done.

Avoid until these issues are fixed.

[unitron]

Early model Link Station owner here

Does this model also have the problem with the allowable path name length being so short?

[Mostlygaijin]

Not sure about that bottleneck

I am highly doubtful that the rotational speed of the hard drives has anything to do with the transfer speed bottleneck of this particular NAS box. Modern 5400 RPM hard drives easily produce sustainable transfer speeds of over 50MB/s. A slow CPU under the Linkstation's bonnet is the more likely culprit and is probably also responsible for the sluggish web interface.

[My Alter Ego]

Hackability is great (in the good sense)

We've got an array of Linkstations (Pro & Duo) in our company, all with debian installed, locked down tight, only providing SSH. Great for a simple backup device that mirrors data at our homes.

This is why I like Buffalo drives. I'm not massively concerned about transfer rates as we use rsync to mirror our data, so massive sustained transfer rates aren't needed.

It probably uses software raid (like previous ones), so you don't even need an identical drive to swap in if one fails. This could also be the source of bottlenecks.

[Bilgepipe]

Hmm...

My LinkStation Pro is painfully slow, both data transfer and web interface, and the drive bearings were noisy after about 18 months. I'll be looking elsewhere for it's replacement.