Buffalo's Linkstation Mini is considerably smaller than most of the network storage devices we've looked at.

There are various versions with differently sized hard disks, but the one we looked at squeezes 1TB (1,000GB) of storage into a box less than half the size of the next-smallest such device we've seen.

It doesn't have much in the way of connections and setup is easy. We ran the supplied CD which installed the management software and detected the disk on our network (first, of course, it must be plugged in to both the network and a mains socket). Disappointingly, and unlike network hard disks from Linksys and Iomega, for instance, it didn't automatically set up the network disk as a shared disk on our computer, although this can be done easily from the software.

As with all network hard disks, speed is a problem, in that it's much slower than a hard disk attached to the computer. It achieved the maximum possible speed over a standard home network, of 12Mbytes/sec, though, copying our 5GB of mixed test files in just under 7 minutes. If you have a faster gigabit home network, progress will be faster, though.

The device has a USB port on the back. Annoyingly, it can't be plugged into a computer for faster copying, but you can plug in a printer to share that across the network, or plug in a digital camera or USB storage device. It can then copy the files on that device to the hard disk with one press of a button. That's a handy facility, although it only copies certain files such as pictures, music and video, so it won't automatically back up your word processing documents. It is also compatible with the UPnP and DLNA protocols, meaning you can use it to serve music and video to a media streaming device without having to have a computer switched on.

Currently, 1TB network hard disks are fairly expensive, but this one costs no more than most, and if you don't have that much data, the 500GB edition may be a better buy. It's impressively quiet compared with the fan-heavy units we're used to, and if size matters to you, it's well worth investing in the Buffalo Linkstation Mini.

Vista compatible: Yes