I have to assume being 8TB this is 4 2TB drives, but any word on what drives? WD Red/Green? Seagate Fail-Monsters (seriously, has anyone ever had a Seagate that didn’t die?)? Hitachi Deathstars (they’re actually pretty reliable, but it’s impossible not to call them that)?
Buffalo doesn’t have that information. They use drives appropriate for the computer but it may vary from lot to lot.
Thanks, them not telling us is all the confirmation we need to know that this thing is packing 4 2TB Seagate HDDs primed and ready to detonate at the first sniff of irreplaceable data (j/k!).
In all seriousness though, this Buffalo Terastation is a good, basic NAS, I would replace all of the included drives with WD Reds, though. Or just buy the diskless version and start with WD Reds from the get-go.
I actually own one of these. One of the problems that I have with it is either the RAM or the Processor is a little under-powered. Everything on my network is gigabit, but copying files to the NAS I barely see 100MB speeds.
The NAS shows the drives I have are wdc wd20ezrx-00d, which show up as a Western Digital 2TB drive, probably the Green model.
Hope that helps, if you have any other questions just let me know and I will try to answer them if I can.
Pretty sure it’s the processor. I had a Linkstation Quad, which was the more home-oriented of Buffalo’s line. IIRC, it ran on a 400-MHz MIPS-compatible processor. Typical throughput was around 100 Mbps, as you’ve observed with yours.
I eventually yanked the drives out (the ones that still worked…they were 1.5-GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10s, and one or two had already failed) and moved them into a cheap box (AMD A4-3300 on a MicroATX motherboard in a cheap case) that’s been chugging along ever since. That box will saturate a gigabit link with no problem, or serve up multiple video streams without a hitch. I suspect you can build a similar box for what this one costs, and come out way ahead performance-wise.
I use quite a bit of Buffalo stuff at home and work. The only 2 failures I’ve had is one TeraStation that got hit by lightning and fried the network ports (lost the Cisco switch it was attached to as well) and another that baked in a rack when the A/C failed and temps went above 110*. I have an LS220 at home with 2 of the most failtastic models of 3TB Seagate drives out there, and it’s been OK since 10/14.
Speed wise Bytes vs bits matters. With 1000Mb/s network speeds, 125MB/s transfer speeds is pretty much the best you can hope for in a perfect world. 100MB/s is pretty respectable. If the transfer really is 100Mb/s, something is wrong because my 2-bay LS220 in Raid 1 can do about 40MB/s.
This doesn’t look like a bad deal to me but it’s more than I need at home and work gets all rack-mount.
By 100MB speeds I was meaning the copy speed hits about 25Mbps, which means it is acting like the NIC is on 100 instead of 1000. PC has a gigabit NIC, the NAS has a gigabit NIC, and they are plugged into a gigabit switch.
Anyway, aside from the copy speed this NAS has been pretty decent. I plan on replacing it with a DIY model in the next couple of years, hopefully SSD drives will be down a bit more by then and I can put some of those in there. Not that I really need that for streaming Plex or just storing files, but fewer moving parts should mean fewer failures.
And just in case anyone was wondering, I popped the case open. The RAM and Processor are pretty well onboard, so the only thing really upgrade-able is the drives. Possibly the power supply, if you can find one that is comparable.
I was looking to see if I could add some RAM, had a couple extra sticks laying around. Not a single slot available on the board, so this is most likely a custom board with everything integrated. That stinks…
Capitalization is important here. MB is “mega bytes” while Mb is “mega bits”. Since there are 8 bits in a byte, 100MB speed would be about 800Mb, which isn’t a bad percentage of 1000Mb.