Buffalo spices up spacious NAS line

We can always count on Buffalo to keep the updates rolling for their NAS products, and thanks to cheap and expansive hard drives, we're liking where things are going. Their new 2TB TeraStation holds four drives -- we'll leave the math to you here -- and sports Gigabit Ethernet and RAID 5 compatibility. The LinkStation merely houses a single drive, up to 750GB in capacity, but keeps the Gigabit connectivity for high-speed fun. Both devices also support DLNA to keep the media flowing, but we're not so sure on price or availability. Luckily these are the "consumer" line, so the damage shouldn't be too great.

[Peter @ Jun 22nd 2006 4:57AM]

Hmmm... 2TB for a consumer??? How much porn is that??

[Merkur @ Jun 22nd 2006 5:52AM]

#1 It's never enough !!!

[James @ Jun 22nd 2006 6:08AM]

WOW! This is really old news. Those have been available in the U.S. already. You can find the Terastation at your local Best Buy. The 2TB Terastation is $2000+. And no, you can't get one without a drive.

[Brad Proctor @ Jun 22nd 2006 6:57AM]

Give you a fair warning about Terastations..... The file system is XFS which only supports files smaller than 2 GB. Tried using one to store disk images and found this out the hard way....

[Tony Baker @ Jun 22nd 2006 7:33AM]

I've had a 1TB terastation for the past few months (in RAID5 format so get 750GB) and it hasn't given me any issues, yet, cross fingers, touch wood!

Uses a Linux operating system, for what that's worth.

Does its job quietly. I find that it doesn't like to max out my 100 based network, gets up to about 50%, but fast enough for me although filling it up to start off with can take a day or two!

Also, any USB drives you attach are read-only, unless you format them in EXT3 Linux format (so can't read them back in windows unless you download and use an application, like LTools).

[Hackbin @ Jun 22nd 2006 10:32AM]

Tony,

What about FAT32? That should be R/W accessible by both Windows and Linux.

[Dan @ Jun 22nd 2006 2:01PM]

I did a HUGE hack on one of these things for work, If any of you guys are interested in checking it out..

The limitations to that buffalo is that its running an embedded linux 2.4 kernel and an XFS partition schema.

What this means to the geek: You cant have any files on there that are over 2gig. Neither the kernel or the partition can support files over 2gig, so the thing instantly became useless to my company.

Heres my little writeup on my adventures with the thing:
http://www.thaumatocracy.com/news/?p=315#more-315

[oracle @ Jun 22nd 2006 6:32PM]

I just want someone to make a cheap Gigabit NAS that I can buy with no drives. The Thecus ones are the cheapest I've found, but I still think they're a bit expensive for what they are.

[Dario @ Jun 23rd 2006 6:56AM]

About the file size limit: that question is answered in the FAQ page of the Terastation wiki:

http://www.terastation.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_Large_File_Size_Limit.3F

The Terastation has problems copying files larger than 2GB because of SAMBA (Windows network support).

OTOH, NFS v2 also has a file size limit of 2GB, so I assume that the previous poster installed NFS v2 on the TeraStation.

In my experience XFS works perfectly with files larger than 2GB (it's a 64bit FS), both in kernel 2.4 and in kernel 2.6; see http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/

[shinypenny @ Sep 7th 2006 8:20PM]

Does the TeraStation support non-English (or non-alphabetic character) file names? The LinkStation doesn't, which makes it unsuitable for my purposes.

[BlueMax @ Jul 14th 2007 5:58PM]

Hi can one of these boxes be used as a server. If I want my friends to connect to this server VIA internet and download or upload files on one of these boxes. If not which one can do it, having NAS and Raid of course.

[bsm0f0 @ Nov 8th 2007 11:32AM]

something like http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=1&pid=509 maybe?

built in ftp, itunes server, etc. You're not gonna get above 1.5gb ... but hey, its built in FTP which you require.

[BlueMax @ Jul 14th 2007 5:58PM]

Hi can one of these boxes be used as a server. If I want my friends to connect to this server VIA internet and download or upload files on one of these boxes. If not which one can do it, having NAS and Raid of course.