Review Buffalo has been making NAS boxes for years and the LinkStation Pro is its latest iteration for home and small office use. Housed in a sleek and shiny black unit, the model we tested includes 1TB hard drive – other options are 1.5 and 2TB.
An easy option? Buffalo’s Linkstation Pro
The front has a blue LED at the top and a ‘Function’ button near the bottom. On the rear panel there is Gigabit Ethernet, a USB port, power switch and socket with an external PSU.
As you’d expect in a network hard drive, there’s support for sharing files using CIFS/SMB, and also with AFP, and an FTP server is provided too. Additional features include printer sharing from the USB port on the rear, a DLNA-certified media streamer, iTunes server, BitTorrent client, plus support for Apple’s Time Machine and remote access to your files. Read the rest of this entry »
Review 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 data access and high-capacity backup to satisfy office environments.
Buffalo’s Linkstation Quad: appears imposing, but is small and unobtrusive
The device is a gigabit Ethernet NAS server – supporting 10, 100 and 1000BaseTX network connections ¬– and contains a stack of four SATA hard disk drives, all encased in a compact and tough black box sized 150x150x230mm. A quieter-than-expected fan keeps the drives cool.
The Linkstation Quad has two USB 2.0 ports: one at the front and the other at the rear. You can attach a high-capacity USB external drive to either and back up your Linkstation Quad data to it. Alternatively, you can attach any external storage device, such as a portable disk drive, a USB flash memory or a digital Camera, and back up all its media files to the Linkstation Quad in one step by pressing the ‘Function’ button on the front. You can even attach a standard USB printer – although not a multifunctional printer – and share it between Windows clients, using the Linkstation Quad to manage the network print queue. Read the rest of this entry »
