Buffalo Technology LinkStation Live 500 GB Network Attached Storage LS-CH500L (Black)

by Buffalo Technology

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.8 x 6.9 inches ; 2.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001FO2VF2
• California residents: Click here for Proposition 65 warning.
• Item model number: LS-CH500L
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (127 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 22, 2003

Product Description

Capacity: 500 GB

Buffalo LinkStation Live LS-CHL Network Hard Drive LS-CH500L Network Attached Storage

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great product, January 12, 2009

By 

Sam Smith - See all my reviews

This review is from: Buffalo Technology LinkStation Live 1.0TB Shared Network Attached Storage LS-CH1.0TL(Black) (Personal Computers)

I ordered this item from another website, and so I avoided any issues that the previous reviewer experienced. That aside, I have now had this product for 2 weeks and it has been working great. The setup took a couple tries to locate the drive, but since that minor bump in the road it has worked very smoothly and exactly as advertised. Hooking up my current external USB drive was very easy as well. Upload/download speeds are very fast. Webaccess works great as well. My only complaint is that when in Auto power mode and the drive is powered down due to inactivity (as it should), you cannot initiate the hard drive again from Webaccess. It can only be turned back on from the home network. Thus, if you want to use Webaccess occasionally, the drive must be ON all the time and wasting energy. A minor gripe in the grand scheme of things though.

60 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost the promises, August 12, 2009

By 

Gerd Sousa (Miami, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Buffalo Technology LinkStation Live 1.0TB Shared Network Attached Storage LS-CH1.0TL(Black) (Personal Computers)

The product is almost everything I was expecting based on the description. One important piece that is not clear on the specs is that the external USB disk MUST be formatted at XFS in order to the users be able to read/write on it. Any legacy USB disk you might have is probably already formatted on NTFS or FAT32. After you install it on the Linkstation USB port you can read but not write on it. There are 2 major impacts on it:
First, you need to spend a lot of time to backup the original content of the Linkstation unit, format it on XFS and spend a lot of time again doing the copy of the data back to it...and you cannot use the unit to do it by itself. You must do the copy from a networked PC causing an intense and unnecessary traffic. Took to me 2 full days to do this operation in a 300GB disk.
Second: After the format you cannot remove the USB disk and read in other machine with Vista or XP on it. Only Linux/Unix OS would be able to read data from there.
One small pitfall happen during the setup, a bug that Bufallo claims impossible to reproduce, so they cannot fix but it is related by dozens of users in their FAQ blog, has locked my admin password. I couldn't enter the admin username and of course couldn;t change anything in the configuration. Only after few days I was able to find out a solution doing a "refresh" on the firmaware. Their blog has the step-by-step for it. I hope the same thing does not happen again.
Besides that, the wake-up function is working fine (but you should use their NAS Navigator application on each client to make the unit awake after a stand-by). The driver is fast enough to allow DVD streaming from a DVD movie saved on the unit and played on my notebook. Also, the Media Server capabilities works fine and any iTunes in the network can create a library based on it. I might end up using the USB port as a backup of the sensitive data in the Linkstation and not as an extended storage unit. (this is the company recommendation anyway)

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Product--- lots of options., December 24, 2008

By 

Jay Vasa "Jay" (Sunnyvale, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Superb product. This machine will become your storage center in the house. I have put my music, videos, and pictures on it. Not only do you get 1TB, but you get a dependable server. Underneath, it is running a linux kernel that has a lot of services. There is a PnP (DLNA) server works with the xbox 360 great. The DLNA Server is really running the Twonky Media Server [...]. There is an FTP Server, Memeo Backup Server. There is a bittorrent client. The web access works great too-- You can upload files anywhere in the world. You need to go to [...] for it to work. The admin interface works good. Although I would of liked a faster processor on this, it does do the job. The gige speed gives me a write of about 16MB/s using jumbo packets. It works with XP and Vista 32/64. I'm using firmware 1.02.
You can also expand the storage adding a USB drive. I may add another TB as I have almost maxed out this 1TB.

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