Buffalo 4-Bay & 2-Bay RAID NAS Devices Price: $179.99 - 449.99 Shipping Options:: $5 Standard Shipping Estimates: Ships in 3-5 Business Days. (Wednesday, Dec 30 to Monday, Jan 04) + transit Condition: New
Do these include the drives, or are they empty bays, with caveat emptor to add the drives once these are purchased? It sure isn’t clear from the info that is presented…
While we’re on the topic of drives, what capacity are the individual drives? Does the 4TB model come in a 2x2TB or a 1x4TB configuration? Does the 8TB model come in 2x4TB or a 4x2TB configuration?
They come with four 2tb drives for a total of 8tb. In RAID formation you could get a fast 8tb with no redundancy (speed limited by your external interface) or about 6tb in raid 5. If the controller goes out you might lose everything. If a drive goes out you’ll have to get a replacement.
This is interesting because Seagate has an 8tb drive on the market. I use one for data storage and another for crashplan backup repository. Not instantaneous raid but good enough for me.
I am sort of surprised these haven’t sold out yet. Buffalo are adamant about only using NAS drives in their units. In fact if you read the warranty, anything but and you get no tech support. I had to get WD Reds just so they would talk to me about their crappy firmware (which has since been updated and fixed). I have WD greens in them now though as the firmware fixed the Raid bug issues and the greens have lasted in my D-Links for 5+ years and 2+ on the B’s; on 24x7 and are spinning for at least 12 hours a day. The Buffalo are much faster transfers even though the same 8 4TB WD’s are in the 4 B-NAS 421’s as the 12 4TB WD’s are in the 6 D-Link NAS.
I’d buy another at this price but when you have 40TB in Raid 1 of crap, you have 39.5TB too much crap already.
Remember, “Raid” is not a backup but a mirror image. Yes - I consider it a backup as long as if a drive fails, I replace and mirror it again before it crashes. However it is not. Although to back up 40TB I would need 40TB and who’s to say when the backup to the backup shouldn’t be backed up? Burn your pictures to disc and repeat every 10 years. After 8 cycles, you won’t have to worry about it anyway. The rest is easily re-acquired.