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Buffalo LinkStation Live HS-DH500GL
by nasarali
I bought this just over a year ago to back everything up to on my network. It cost me just over £100 but for that price you get the piece of mind that you will have a backup of all your precious memories in case your main computer went down.
I have a load of home movies and another load of photographs that took me ages to get ... onto a PC and clean them up so they looked better than the original. I have had a few hard drive failures in my almost 15 years of using PCs, but i have always been able to recover the important files through one way or another.
Today I have gigabytes of files that i cannot afford to lose and i think it is worth spending some money on a network drive just in case anything were to every happen. Style wise it looks quite good and is not too big, the material is cheap plastic though.
Feature wise, it has a 500gb hard drive, and connects to the router using 1000mb/s if your computer/router supports it. Mine fortunately did support it but the speed difference was not apparent to me as the backups ran in the background anyway. I have 2 desktop PCs, and a laptop connected to my network and i have differential backups running every night at midnight. This means that it will only backup files that have changed. I have it set to rotate backups every other day so i will always have a good set to go back to. One point to note is that the backups have to be initiated from a PC. I have my main PC back everything up through Windows Backup, this gets all the files off the other PCs as well. You will need to give your main PC the permission to get into the other PCs first though.
The drive doesn't have many buttons, it has a power button on the front and a reset button on the back. I've never pressed the reset button, but i assume it sets everything back to factory state. It has an rj45 and two usb ports on the back. The usb ports are for connecting any external hard drives to the drive which will then show up as extra shares. It can also act as an extra precautionary backup of the main unit if you wanted to back this up to another external drive, which i never really used but it could be useful to somebody.
When this is turned on it lights up and beeps a few times before it connects to the network. There have been times when it started beeping continuously and needed a reboot in order to work again, but i never found out why it did that. Although it is rare, its probably happened a half dozen times in a year.
The drive comes with software to set this up but is probably not needed as you can get into it using the built in web interface. Through this you can configure the settings for this drive such as, adding and removing shares, setting the network properties and time on the device and most importantly, turning off the damned recycle bin feature. This feature moves every file you delete off the drive into a special folder, which doesn't sound like much of a problem, but when you are running backups everyday on this, it tends to run out of space very quickly, in which case you will manually have to delete the recycle bin folder everyday, which is a major annoyance.
I have since replaced this drive with a 2TB drive, as my library of files has increased but this did serve me well, until the problem with it disappearing every few minutes from my network thus no backup job would ever complete. I will probably format and a factory reset this and use it as a streamer drive in the future.
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Buffalo TeraStation Home Server HS-D1.0TGL/R5 1 TB
by tlmartin
And yet another storage review from me :)
Just over 2 years ago, I decided I needed some serious storage, and not only that I needed a central place to store files, My Documents is ok for small bits and pieces, but if you have 3 pc's all accessing the same files, which computer stores them, you have to share the folders, you ... have to do all kinds of stuff and how does it gtet backed up.
So I wanted a storage server, but I didn;t want to spend £2000 on windows SBS and windows home server was not out then. Pop quiz.... what do I do????
Enter me flicking through a Misco catalogue and turn to the Buffalo TeraStation Home server. Now I needed to be careful, as any previous readers will know I have a Netgear SC101 SAN device and I am disappointed because they require drivers to be installed on each pc accessing it. This is somethign I didn;t want as it was vital any pc on the network could access it, with at most a Username and Password.
This device is a true NAS, no drivers needed it has 1TB of storage space over 4 hard drives, gigabit ethernet, you can create shared folders, no software licensing, essentially its like a computer and an OS all in one costing £400 and being quite a small box. I decided to go for the plunge and bought it.
Now I had 24 hours before delivery, to work out how I was going to plan my network folder structure, and how I would set up the hard drives, suddenly panic entered. Even though I have 3 or so PC's backups of data have never been a huge concern for me, although suddenly me having this device I was thinking backups were essential. either its because it could be done or because I was worried about new hardware I'd never used before.
Now this device allows you to set up the Hard Drives in various version of RAID, and this made me wonder what to do.
I could choose RAID 0, 1 or 5
RAID 0 would allow me to use all 4 hard drives having 1 TB of space, as these are IDE hard drives (slowish) it would mean they woudl be possibly nearly 4 times as fast, as the data is split over each hard drive, so 4 bits of data can be got quickly rather than 1 bit at a time. But the problem with this is, if 1 hard drive were to fail, PUFF all data on the other 3 hard drives would be lost. Nah not worth it.
RAID 1 Mirrors the data so in essence I actually have 2 usable hard drives as the other 2 mirror the work, meanign I suddenly only have 500GB of storage space, hmmm £400 is a lot to spend on 500GB of network storage afterall back then 500GB USB drives only cost £100 then. There is also no real speed benefit in fact could slow thigns down. This backup is only good if a hard drive fails physically as the other kicks ion. if i accidentally delete data or I get a virus, this will not protect my work.
The comes RAID 5 What this does is allow me to strip 3 hard drives together and use the 4th as a Parity check. This means I get a speed boost, but if one hard drive physically fails you can slot a blank one in and it can rebuild the lost data from the parity check info. (in essence a+b+c=z, if you loose 'c' you would get a+b+?=z the computer know the ? must be c as thats the only way to equal z) This allows me to have around 750GB of storage space.
So naturally I set this up as RAID 5. I could have left them as 4 sperate hard drives, but this would mean there was no backup for any data and there was no performance boost.
This device has 4 USB ports that can be used for printers (as there is an inbuilt print server) or as I use one of them to plug in an external hard drive to backup the data to (using the internal backup software). I do a backup that is done daily that gives me the differnte revisions, however you can do it so it just over writes, as well as a few other settings.
This is a very simple to use NAS drive, it has a web interface where you can set up the name (I follow Egyptian gods for my server names) and I have numerous folders set up, in fact with the abckup only some fodlers are done daily, a couple of others like my iTunes folder is done weekly and set as overwrite)
For secuirty this storage can link directly to your ActiveDirectory control if you have a Server setup, or you can set up your own access users and groups, so different people can access differnt folders with different access rights.
This also has PC Cast, which allows for multimedia files to be shared over the network, using DNLA however I haven;t used this much as I prefer direct acccess rather than having to replicate things in folders, I like my fodler set up.
The web interface also has maintenance bits too for checking the disk, rebooting software based (incase you hide it away in a difficult to access location, etc)
The drive keeps a low temp and is very quite (considering there are 4 hard drives and a fan to cool them) This plugs straight into a network, and gets an IP from your DHCP server (most likely a router for home users) and from that moment on you see it as if it was a PC in your My Network Places. It is also accessible from Linux and Mac systems.
The onylt hing that gets me is that for Excel files if you save them while they are stored on here Excel asks if you want to save a copy or overwrite. I think this is an Excel thing more than the device problem.
This is a very usefulk device, and with the newer Pro statiosn it gives you a lot of control. In fact if your looking for a lot of storage and the ability to use RAID then these devices are perfect. If your just looking foir a single hard drive NAS max of 1TB then use the LinkStation Live boxes (see review done prior for more detail on those)
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