Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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71 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Some kinks, but not bad overall...., May 20, 2005
The previous reviewer is right - this isn't a blazing fast device. On a 100mbit network, using raid 1, I got roughly 5-7MB/s. That's pretty slow but I probably couldn't expect much more from a 100mbit network anyway. I don't have a gig network to try this on.
The previous reviewer said you can only FTP to one dir. He's right in that it only lets you set up one directory, but I've noticed that if you login as admin via ftp you get both arrays (assuming you are running raid 1) listed - array1 and array2, and you can go into either one. This is important for reasons I will describe later.
Setup is trivial and takes five or ten minutes. The system comes with this "Easy Backup" software which makes simple backups (zip files) of directories you tell it to zip up on a periodic basis. There are few problems with the software - (1) it "detects" your Terastation - meaning that if you have any sort of software or hardware firewall it probably won't "detect" anything. I had to disable all my security for it to detect the terastation. No, it's not smart enough to let you punch in an IP. (2) The zips it saves on the Terastation are named in a meaningless way (987x9a.zip) - meaning that if you ever had to restore anything without EasyBackup you'd have a tough time finding the right zip. (3) It backs up everything every time it runs - there's no incremental backup. So if you have a 10GB directory to backup every day, in 10 days you'll have 100GBs of zip files that are nearly identical. (4) Speaking of which, it doesnt have any logical maximum to zip file sizes. If you give it a 10GB directory, it'll make a 10GB zip. Ever try and open a 10GB zip? It doesn't go so well. Overall, EasyBackup is an OK tool (it is, after all, free) but it isn't a particularly great one.
The rest of my complaints have to do with Mac support. I bought the device to backup my PCs (array1) and my Mac (array2). My Mac has most of my videos, audio files, etc. I leaned towards the buffalo because it specifically supported both PCs and Macs either via Appletalk or SMB shares. Problem is, the Appletalk really doesn't work too well... When copying large files over Appletalk, it will error out "Disk is Full" (it's not). Try and copy the same file from a Unix shell with cp (rather than drag and drop via finder), and you get the same error. This brings us to the second set of problems. "Long" file names, or file names with certain characters in them - ', &, etc. The buffalo doesn't like these either, and if you have thousands of audio files that may contain either long file names or odd characters, it becomes nearly impossible to go through each one looking for ones that might cause problems. Ok, so I can't copy big (>2GB) files and I can't copy files with special characters. At least not via Appletalk or mounting it as a samba share on my mac.
Remember how you can access any directory if you ftp as admin? Well, this is a good thing because, for some reason, all of the above problems with the mac support dissapear if you copy the files via FTP. I copied a few 5GB files with no problems and plenty of long file names with odd characters. For you technical folk - oddly enough, if you use the shell based smbclient command to copy files the problems also dissapear.
Conclusion?
The software it comes with is mediocre. You'll want better backup software. The speed is OK - not fast - not slow. If you are using this as a backup device, whether your backup runs from 1am to 4am or 1am to 2am doesn't really matter to you does it? It's fast enough to play video off of, or listen to music off of. Mac support is there but has a few kinks.
If you are looking for a high speed dedicated disk system to serve up videos and audio to your whole house - this is probably not the best device. In that case, build yourself a PC with a 1TB of disk space - it'll be faster and more flexible. If you are looking for a no-hassle (set it and forget it) backup device and don't care too much about how fast your backups are, the buffalo terastation is a good choice.
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146 of 157 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
RAID 5 Operating Mode is SLOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW!!!, March 18, 2005
I was excited when I was finally able to pick up the 1.0gb Terastation at Fry's 3/14. Got it home and followed the start-up manual for setting up a RAID 5 array (700gb total capacity -- not the 750gb volume as advertised).
Immediately I noticed very slow writes when copying files to the Terasation (63 seconds to copy an 80mb file; 2:24 minutes to copy a 140gb file). I had the unit plugged into a Netgear 5-port gigabit switch and was copying files from a gigabit equipped workstation; therefore, I know the slow copy issue is not network related.
I called Buffalo Tech Support; they could provide no useful answers and escaled the problem to a senior support specialist, then said I would receive a call from him within 48 hours. I then investigated the problem on my own by reformatting the unit into Spanning mode (1tb config). The copy times were significantly better (15 seconds to copy an 80mb file) and what I would normally expect across a gigabit backbone. Next I tried RAID 1 (mirroring mode) and copy times were only slightly slower than Spanning mode; again as expected due to writing across two drives. But when I switched back to RAID 5 again I had very slow write times.
Another call to tech support revealed that RAID 5 mode is software-based, not hardware based which obviously is the problem. However, there is no mention of this in Buffalo's literature about the Terastation. Again they could not supply any solutions to the problem. Incidentally, I never received any call backs from their senior support person. So they then told me that someone from the engineering staff would call me the next business day. I'm still waiting.
I could only recommend this product if you want to use in Spanning mode, but then of course you need a way to back-up 900mb worth of data. RAID 1 only mirrors 2 individual drives so you only get two 230gb volumes, even though there are four separate 250gb drives in the unit. It would be more logical to RAID two drives together into a 500mb volume then mirror that to another 500mb volume but the set-up doesn't allow you do this.
This could have been a good product but it's half-baked and tech support is useless. I'd wait on buying until they work the bugs out.
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27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It is QUITE FAST now... with the latest firmware, July 14, 2005
I bought a TeraStation. Until I upgraded to the latest 1.08 firmware (came out June 23, 2005), I was dissapointed with the speed. However, as you shall see below, I am now quite satisfied with the speed after the firmware upgrade.
Using a RAID 5 configuration, I now get 22 MB / second (168 mbps) read/download speeds, and 11 MB / second (88 mbps) write speeds, when simply copy/pasting a bunch of small and large files to/from the TeraStation to my P4 2.4ghz HTPC.
My networking is set up as follows: Gigabit ethernet Intel Pro/1000MT card in the PC, jumbo frames enabled (9K), category 6 ethernet cable to an SMC 8-port gigabit router with jumbo frames support, and another category 6 cable to the TeraStation. The TeraStation is a 1TB model with Raid5 enabled and jumbo frames set to 7.4K size. If I recall correctly by heart, without Jumbo frames, I got about 104 mbps read (download) on my gigabit network, and 60 mbps write/upload speed.
I have nothing but good things to say about it. From the cool status emails I get on a daily basis, to the neat built-in backup jobs I can set up (I plugged in an external USB 2.0 drive into one of the TeraStation's 4 USB ports, and it backs up my already RAID-5 protected critical data every wednesday night to that hard drive. Neat.) and the great web-based user interface and configuration options.
My Mac Mini is happy with the TeraStation too (connect using SMB not AFP... otherwise your 4GB+ files will not show up)
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