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Buffalo delivers affordable
network storage

MOST EXTERNAL HARD drives connect to your computer using USB or FireWire cable. NAS or Network Attached Storage means a hard drive that is not connected to a computer but which you can still access over a network.

Since you access it over a network, whether it’s wired or wireless, you won’t get the same speeds as you would plugging directly into the storage but you do get the convenience of placing it where you want and accessing it from anywhere.

There are many brands in the market with NAS solutions but Buffalo is arguably one of the more interesting ones and their latest TeraStation Duo is futher evidence of that. To set it up is very easy. Just plug in the power and Ethernet cables, install the software and you’re ready to go. You can even skip the software and just watch what IP address the TeraStation has on the small display on the front. Then you connect to that IP address with your web browser. From the browser interface you then do all the administration.

The TeraStation I tested had two Western Digital 1TB drives inside, configured as RAID 1 producing a single 1TB drive. This means that one drive is automatically mirrored to the other creating another level of security for the data stored on it. You can also configure the drives in TeraStation as RAID 0, which in this case would have created a larger drive (2GB) but without the duplication of data.

In terms of sharing files you have plenty of choice: CIFS/SMB, AFP, HTTP/HTTPS, FTP/SFTP/FTPS, NFS, and BitTorrent. The alphabet soup also extends to LDAP and media sharing with iTunes, UPnP AV and DLNA servers. All that means you can share files in almost any way you would need to. Performance depends of course on the network you connect the TeraStation to but in my testing speed was more than satisfactory.

Buffalo won’t win any design awards for the TeraStation but since it’s a NAS you can place it wherever you want to- it doesn’t have to sit on top of a desk. It does have a fan but I could never hear any noise from it nor from the hard drives. So even in a quiet environment it shouldn’t be a bother.

Overall there’s not much I can find at fault with the TeraStation. USB 3 would have been nice but it’s NAS so it’s not critical. Available in 1, 2 and 4TB sizes from around AED2,300, Buffalo TeraStation Duo is a good choice for your home or small office if you want storage attached to your network.

—emiratesmac@gmail.com

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