Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

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.

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)

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.

Bought one for home and found out it does such an excellent job, I bought one for my small office as well.

For home, i needed a NAS to store media on an always on device to stream to PS3 and XBox 360. This Buffalo device does this very well, with hardly any set-up at all on these two DLNA devices. Just enable 'Media Server' from the very easy to use browser based admin utility and your set.

Other great features: web access is a very simple page to access (buffalonas.com), combined with comprehensive, but easy to use user management. Also the Bittorrent feature is so easy and so convenient, you'll use it even if you dont know at the moment what this does. It works while the computer is off - obviously, and works quietly - actually silently, because this device is so quiet even while accessing files.

Not 5 stars because: silly really - on PS3, Photos are selected as Videos, and Videos are selected as Photos. But you get used to that. The web access could have slightly easier interfaces that dont return you to the home directory, and easier tools to save the files rather than viewing pictures in web pages.

LinkStation Live LS-CHL 500G is an excellent NAS.
Pro:
1. Low power consumption (~24W - 17W)
2. Very reliable. (Copy files for many hours, and no problem)
3. Good file security design. (Provide different user and different folder with different access right both on web and local)
4. Compact design. It is just slice bigger then my hand.
5. Can work as printer server.
6. Excellent software.
7. Easy to setup.
8. Run quietly and cool.

Con:
1. There is no log out button on web access page. (It is ok because close the web page, it will log it off automatically)
2. Some minor software bugs during installation.

I am highly recommending this NAS, Buffalo LinkStation Live LS-CHL 500G to all my friends.

Take it easy - this is my first product review on Amazon web site.

Intro
I've owned 2 Buffalo hard drives for last 3 years: 500GB USB and HS-DH500GL 500GB NAS. Both of them are still working.

LS-CH500L
Happy owner of LS-CH500L 500GB NAS hard drive. I got it two weeks ago for extra capacity and bit-torrent. I would give this box a 95% customer satisfaction. I would concentrate on comparing LS-CH to HS-DH, which is the model that replaced by this CH Series line.

Pros:
1. Good looking design
2. Very quite and cool
3. Pre-configured On/Off schedule settings
4. Easy setup (YMMV, since this is my second Buffalo NAS)
5. Built-in Bittorent client is absolutely terrific
6. DLNA certified out-of-the-box with stable and user-friendly Media server (Mediabolic garbage replaced with MVConnect)
7. Web Access - dyndns out-of-the-box through buffalonas.com web site
8. Reasonably priced

Cons:
1. Print Server - usability in most cases is 30% - it's still doesn't support multifunctional printers, so called AIO.
2. New firmware changes and features might not be included

Conclusion:
Essentially CH represents a repackaged DH with modified web interface, different vendor for a media server and integrated Bit-Torrent-client.

-- I wish Buffalo would revise firmware more often for previous models. Unfortunately, Buffalo is up-to making more sales by forcing us to buy new boxes instead of building a brand loyalty and releasing new features into previous models to keep existing customers happy. Very sad, but true.

BTW, Amazon should merge this product review/description with
"Buffalo LinkStation Live LS-CHL - NAS - 500 GB - Serial ATA-150 - HD 500 GB x 1 - Gigabit Ethernet", since it's exactly the same product.

I have used the media server extensively on this unit (based on firefly, and fairly solid), and that works fairly well. Since that was my main reason for getting the unit, I am pleased overall. I have about 60 GB of MP3s that I'm sharing with it.

I have an ancient HP Laserjet 4 printer connected via a Manhattan USB-Parallel adapter, and that mostly works (much to my surprise, due to the adapter), but I have to reboot the NAS occasionally, because it sometimes will stop working.

I tried file sharing over the net with static IP, using both the buffalo NAS service and dynamic DNS, but was only successful getting non-SSL connections to work. I suspect this is an issue with my router, but am not sure. The linkstation is supposed to work with uPNP routers, but in my case, the NAS doesn't detect my linksys router as being uPNP compatible (which it is).

I also experiemented with modding the firmware via acpcommander, and was successful at getting castget (podcasting client) to work on the stock firmware (previous review comments based on 100% stock firmware).

And the "sleep" mode of this box works really well. Since I use my unit at home, I have it programmed to go off at night, and back on in the AM.

So bottom line is that I like this unit, but it has a few glitches, IMO. Maybe this will improve with updated firmware. I think that if your needs are not to esoteric, and you are satisfied with the capabilities of the unit as it comes out of the box, then you will be pretty satisfied.

I purchased this product to to satisfy my need for a central music and photo storage as well as a way to handle backing up of two Mac laptops. I soon discovered that my ideal dream of a central repository for music and photos is still not a reality, but that was not a result of this drives capabilities.

The drive works great as a cheaper option for a time capsule, I can now successfully back up two Mac laptops using time machine. The instructions for setting up a time machine backup could use some clarity, but with a bit of searching and some trial and error, I was able to get it working.

The NAS does a great job of streaming music. It was as simple as copying over my music library and turning on the streaming media server. Launching iTunes the shared music library was visible and ready to go. However given the limitations of iTunes, I am still required to keep my library locally to sync my iPod, or deal with not having access to my iTunes library when the laptop is outside the network.

Another nice feature is the ability to publicly share a folder on the drive, accessible via the web. Once again, the directions for getting this going are sparse, but some trial and error will yield results.

The issues I have with the product that make it less then perfect are:

There is not a nice way to share photos using the NAS. If you have a large digital photo collection, it could be real easy to lose track of what photos are what since you have to use the file system for navigation. A nice feature addition would be a method to allow a tool, such as iPhoto to view the photos on the NAS, maybe using a technology like photocasting.

The directions are sparse, and the online directions (build into the NAS web interface) sometimes appear in non-english fonts. Some critical, in my opinion, details missing form the documentation are things like, changing almost any setting from the web interface will cause all NAS connections to temporarily drop. This is less than enjoyable when you are 12 hours into a backup and it then has to start over.

In summary, I am happy with the product at the moment, while it is not perfect, it does perform most of my desired functionality.

I dropped my review by one star because the Media Server has become unreliable. The drive still works great as a vanilla NAS, but it's stopped reliably serving up media to my PS3. Unfortunate because it worked well for several months.

Also, at the time of my original review Windows was required to update the firmware. Buffalo has since come through with an OS X firmware updater.

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I am using this primarily as a media server for my PS3. I have the NAS and the PS3 on wired connections to the router (also a Bufallo product using DD-WRT firmware) and I consistently achieve streams just over 30mbps on the PS3. Works great for full 1080p HD content.

My home network picks the drive up as a SMB share easy enough. Windows, Linux and Mac OS find it with zero configuration. It will automagically serve up any audio library stored on the device as an iTunes shared library, again with zero configuration. I have never used the included NAS browsing utilities provided with the NAS by Buffalo.

There is an iPhone app for accessing the NAS away from home that works just fine. I kind of wish it had support for mp3 playlists but playing media and looking and photos works just fine. Emailing content from the NAS is also available via the app.

I gave one star off for the necessity of Windows to update the firmware. While this probably isn't an issue for most people, I had a heck of a time upgrading using Windows 7 via Parallels in Mac OS X. I documented everything in the Buffalo support forums in case anyone else has a similar problem.

I purchased this product primarily as a back-up server for another NAS device (not made by Buffalo Tech). My primary NAS has only 500GB. I thought the 1TB Linkstation could eventually replace the primary NAS device. So far, I am not convinced.

By comparison, the Linkstation was not as easy to set up; setting shares with restricted access somewhat confusing. I am still not able to set up web access to the admin page, which makes adding users when away from home not possible. It is for this reason, I am still hanging on to my primary NAS device. The NAS Navigator desktop SW is not at all stable/reliable -- it is not able to see the NAS drive half of the time even when the drive is accessible via Windows Explorer. I share the same complaint that you can't 'wake up' the Linkstation remotely in auto power saving mode.

The worst of part of my experience so far (after 2 months) was the drive failed after 2 weeks. It was replaced by Buffalo under warranty. I have to give some credit to the helpdesk folks for making the exchange process pretty painless.