Buffalo TeraStation Home Server 1.0TB

[Helevitia]

Anbody have any experience with this company or products? I'm looking for a more robust backup system for my home network. This product seems to have everything I could want. The main benefit(for me) is 480Mbps over Gigabit, disk management and RAID 5.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=133&categoryid=25

[Sasq]

Buffalo has been here in Japan forever, products are usually in the upper middle quality range.
my 20gig portable hdd is from them, switches, lots of ethernet products etc.
It won't be built like an IBM tank, but it is a well known and popular brand name here.

[Wombat]

Slashdot has had some like topics lately. I recommend you go through the comments. No specific review of Buffalo, but one of a competitor, and a general "home backup" thread.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/16/1840209&threshold=-1

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/30/1519202&tid=198&tid=218

[Taz]

I was looking at the Terrastation for a customer but after a lot of reading it appears it has some issues, mostly to do with performance I came accross some NAS boxes from Infrant which look like a better option

There's an unofficial Buffalo support forum here :-

http://www.buffaloforums.com/forums/index.php

[Jammrock]

There's also the Infrant ReadyNAS X6. It's gotten a lot of critical acclaim, and you can buy just a shell for ~$600 and put in your own hard drives. Like the 400 GB WD Caviar RE2 WD4000YR.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833329007

http://www.maximumpc.com/2005/09/infrant_readyna.html

Measurements, including TerraStation: http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Review...rodID-H2H5.php

Jammrock

[Helevitia]

Thanks for all of the info from you all. I haven't had a chance to go through it yet, but I will.

[HomeBrewer]

I have their LinkStation 250GB and am very pleased with it. The setup was a snap. The builtin ftp server is simple but works well for just occasional file swaps with friends. I just open and forward port 21 on my router when we have something to share.

The only downside is that the OS (linux) is on the drive so you cant just put in a bigger drive when you want.

[az]

Here's a little piece about this topic: http://www.dansdata.com/gz043.htm

[Helevitia]

After looking at a bunch of different options, the Infrant ReadyNAS X6 barebones that Jammrock recommended seem sto be the best solution for me. I like being able to upgrade drives at a later time. Their website claims a 2TB limit, but I'm guessing a firmware upgrade could raise that? What do you guys think? Also, speed is the most important factor for me since I will use this drive almost everyday rather than just a backup system, though it will be used for that too.

Currently I use the Linnksys NSLU2 with two USB drives attached. It works perfectly for what I want, but it is too slow. The problem is that I have all of my photos on the NAS and when you open up Canon's Zoombrowser software, it wants to laod htumbnails of all images, so it hangs for a good 2-3 minutes while loading everything. I know, I could use different software, but I don't want to.

[Wombat]

After looking at a bunch of different options, the Infrant ReadyNAS X6 barebones that Jammrock recommended seem sto be the best solution for me. I like being able to upgrade drives at a later time. Their website claims a 2TB limit, but I'm guessing a firmware upgrade could raise that? What do you guys think?

I wouldn't bet on it. Addressable space limitations are often either part of the hardware (only so many address pins), or part of the filesystem's limit for address space.

[Jammrock]

Infrant just released a new NAS device, the ReadyNAS NV:

http://infrant.com/products_ReadyNAS_NV.htm

Can't find a RAID size limit in the product info though, but seems to be getting good reviews. And looks pretty cool too.

Reviews:

http://www.trustedreview.com/article...e=5842&head=21

http://www.crn.com/sections/hardware...leId=177105848

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/0...t_readynas_nv/

Jammrock

[Helevitia]

It's 2TB for the NV as well. Thanks for posting these, Jam. It looks good. Damn, it'll get expensive though. Let's see, new non-blocking gigabit switch, new nic card, 2 new hdd's, one nas server, ouch!

[Jammrock]

... new non-blocking gigabit switch ...

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/prod...555&l=en&s=biz

...if you don't mind buying something from the enemy

[Helevitia]

Fortunately, I get a substantial discount. Last I checked it was 60%(only on Cisco not Linksys). There is a cap on how much I can spend per year. I think it is ~$5000. I don't think I'll be spending $5000 though I want to buy a low end switch that is running IOS. This will give me the ability to do a lot of things I wouldn't normally be able to do with Linksys or something similar.

[Helevitia]

Well, I'm finally gonna pull the trigger on the ReadyNAS NV. I can't afford the hard drives yet, so I bought the barebones unit and I'll plug my two external USB drives that I already have and use those as a backup solution until next paycheck And then I'll add a drive/month. I also need to buy the gig switch. I've settled on the Linksys SRW2016 Gb switch.