Review: Buffalo Terastation Home Server

Buffalo’s second entry in the Nas category is really quite impressive. The Terastation’s resemblance to a small bank vault is surely intentional – Buffalo wants you to feel that your data is as safe as cash in the bank.

Like Maxtor’s Shared Storage II drive, the Terastation provides a full terabyte of storage. However, the Terastation is more than £100 cheaper than its Maxtor rival, so it’s the best option if you really want to go the whole hog and add as much capacity as you can.

Inside the Terastation are four separate 250GB drives (which accounts for its thumping 7.2kg weight). This allows you to use an option known as Raid 5, which sacrifices one of the drives (reducing overall capacity to 750GB) but provides additional reliability.

Home users may prefer to treat the Terastation as an ordinary 1TB drive, but the extra reliability of Raid 5 will appeal to business users.

The installation process was quite straightforward. A small program called the Client Utility locates the drive on your network, checks its IP address and then adds it to the list of Network Places.

All the other options, such as user accounts, shared folders and Raid settings, are configured via a web browser. You can also add network printers or extra storage using the four USB ports – two each on the front and back of the unit. There are even separate indicator lights for each of the four drives, telling you when they’re in use and when each drive is full.

Buffalo has clearly put a lot of thought into the design of the Terastation. The one big disappointment is the lack of cross-platform support for Macs or Linux. Still, if you’ve got a PC-only network that needs plenty of shared storage, the Terastation is a real thoroughbred solution.

This article is part of a group test of network-attached devices.
See also
Adaptec Snap Server 110
Buffalo Linkstation Multimedia Home Server
Freecom Storage Gateway WLAN
Iomega Storcenter Network Hard Drive
La Cie Ethernet Disk Mini
Linksys EFG120
Maxtor Shared Storage II
Plextor PX-EH25L
Western Digital Netcenter 500
Living with NAS
DIY NAS

The table of features can be read via our pdf download.