Buffalo Terastation Live
Long time absent from the market in France but very popular in Japan and the US, the Japanese manufacturer Buffalo finally made it. With its Terastation that was announced at the end of 2004, this company was one of the first to fill the NAS Raid 5 slot for home use. The line rapidly evolved with a Pro model and then with the addition of the Terastation Live and Pro II to their catalogue. The difference between these two last models is in the Pro II’s Active Directory support while the Live, more for home use, allows sharing a printer and integrates a PCast multi-media server.
While previously they showed the way for the competition, Buffalo seems a bit behind today. It’s true that the Terastation Live does seem like the most austere of the bunch. Its gray and imposing casing lacks class, the interface hasn’t been translated into French, no special function really differentiates it from the others, and on the contrary, it even lacks a few of the current popular ones (download manager, notably). In short, we get the impression that they have been a bit surpassed competition that has been very dynamic!
Installation and start up
It’s also the only product equipped with drives, which enables Buffalo to offer a very competitive cost per gigabyte for low capacities (notably, the 1 TB model).
On the other hand, nothing is planned for its evolution. While it’s obviously possible to replace all the drives for higher capacity models, the operation is apparently not too anticipated by the manufacturer. Actually, this requires a specific procedure, detailed in the Wiki dedicated to
NAS Buffalo, otherwise you may not have a functional machine after the replacement of drives.
This is a replacement which moreover is carried out very easily. Although drives hot plugging/unplugging is not an option, the tray insertion system is quite similar to that of Hotswap machines. In addition, a door allows blocking access to units to avoid a possible accidental removal.
Once turned on, the very practical LCD screen displays the connection speed, how much drives are full, and especially among other things, the IP address assigned to NAS !
In use
What the Terastation Live loses in discretion with its 31 cm high casing, it gains in cooling efficiency. Its fan is 92 mm and thermoregulated enabling the drives to function at very reasonable temperatures. Unfortunately, there is just the startup timer that is missing, which however was present in the first Terastation. This is all the more a downside given that it isn’t compensated for by a hard drive sleep function.
First contact with the configuration interface revealed two slight disappointments: loading pages is slow and menus are only available in English. If the possibility of only one language isn’t a barrier, menus are also clear and well organized. In addition, an on-line help – rather basic but always welcome – defines each option available on the page.
The system is supposed to be able to send email when certain things occur (drive failure, overheating, fan breakdown, etc.) but in a rather surprising way because its mail client does not support SMTP privileges! You therefore will have to have access to a mail server which does not ask for a login/password for its use.
Performance/price ratio
In terms of performances, the capabilities offered by Buffalo are satisfactory because the Terastation Live generally finishes neck and neck with the Synology CS-407. However, this is except in the case of reading files in SMB where performances are at best equal to those in writing and at worst slightly inferior. This behavior systematically observed in all our tests is all the more strange that the same limit is not seen in FTP.
Given that Buffalo is still rather hard to find in France, the competition isn’t helping to lower its price. The only thing is that as we already mentioned the 1 TB model can be a real deal. Sometimes seen for less than 600 € taxes included, it is less expensive than rival products that are empty! For professional use or if the various other options offered by the competition (potential drive evolution, download management, energy saving options, web server, Telnet/SSH access, etc.) do not interest you, it could be a good choice.
Otherwise, if you like to tinker in this domain and have no fear of the Linux command line interface, you can find the activation procedure for Telnet service
on this site. Once done, you will then have the power to personalize the Terastation Live by adding the desired missing functions.
We liked :
– satisfactory performances in writing and FTP ;
– efficient cooling ;
– LCD screen ;
– the price of the 1 TB version.
We didn’t like :
– performances in reading/SMB ;
– the missing startup timer;
– the rather austere look ;
– impossible to write on a FAT32 drive in USB ;
– no hotswap ;
– the price of the other versions !
