Buffalo's HD-QSU2/R5 DriveStations: 2TB and yummy eSATA

We say bring it, Buffalo, and your bigazz drives! Meet the new HD-QSU2/R5 DriveStations now with eSATA connectivity in either 1TB or 2TB models. Each ships with four, 7200RPM SATA drives allowing 'em to be conifigured as RAID 0/1/5. That's up to 500GB more capacity than before with eSATA throwing the bits 'tween the DriveStation and PC at 3x the rate of USB 2.0 -- that's over 100MB/s as tested under RAID 5. On sale starting mid-November in Japan (and likely abroad soon after) for about ¥83,580 (about $702) for the 1TB or ¥156,345 (about $1,312) for that biggie 2TB. Hmm, wonder if one of those new BitTorrent routers comes with eSATA? Er, was that out loud?

[Via Impress]

[Boyce Dimaala @ Oct 25th 2006 10:16AM]

Now that's a killer HDD... That's a lot of storage for those *ahem* videos!

[Jonathan Loor @ Oct 25th 2006 10:51AM]

I wonder if they improved transfer speeds over Lan.

[John Hummel @ Oct 25th 2006 10:55AM]

Maybe someone can help me with something. I want something like this - but also want it to be on the network. I've seen NAS devices that let me put them on the network, but the USB/eSATA on them is just to expand them.

I want to be able to have it on the network so I can access it without having to perform a PC share, *and* be able to plug a local machine (like a laptop) into it via USB so I can just zap things on/off of it without having to put the laptop/other device on the network.

Is there a device that can do both, or am I stuck with having a dedicated share machine for this? Thanks!

[Ian Jardine @ Oct 25th 2006 10:58AM]

Prices are beginning to look nice.
Can this run other server software, like slimdevices?

[Darth Tony @ Oct 25th 2006 11:32AM]

This just might be what I have been looking for. Should be plenty fast enough to edit compressed HD video. Now how to find out what brand of drives they use? I will never trust another WD drive.

[Brian Verenkoff @ Oct 25th 2006 11:36AM]

This is not a network server. It's purely for adding another drive letter to your PC. You need a NAS if you want to add it to your network. This same company has 4 drive network NAS boxes that look similar.

[Brian Verenkoff @ Oct 25th 2006 11:36AM]

3TB is likely doable via 4x750.

Amazing that it has true RAID5 support and it's just direct attached HDD. Looks like it has USB and Firewire as well as eSATA.

[Nate @ Oct 25th 2006 12:16PM]

Brian - 4x750 is 3TB, but in RAID 5 you lose a disk, so you'd really need 5x to get 3TB... this is one of the reasons I don't like 4 drive storage devices... in RAID 5, the more drives you use, the smaller percentage of space you "waste". I guess even numbers are nice for the 0/1 crowd, though.

[Coolwave @ Oct 25th 2006 12:46PM]

Wow, that is absolutely beautiful... I'm not recording in HD yet, but I sure will have to pick one of these up when the time comes.

[craig @ Oct 25th 2006 12:52PM]

"Amazing that it has true RAID5 support and it's just direct attached HDD."

That's how any RAID device works. All RAID arrays are block devices.

"in RAID 5, the more drives you use, the smaller percentage of space you "waste"."

but the write performance will always suck. Each write takes 2-3 disk revolutions to complete and only N/2 writes (at best) can occur simultaneously (where N is the total # of drives). RAID 1 performs much better and disks are cheap.

"I guess even numbers are nice for the 0/1 crowd, though."

They're slightly better for write throughput with RAID 5 as well.

Honestly, I have no idea why anyone is interested in RAID 5 for small numbers of disks and low capacity requirements. Disks are just too big and too cheap and there are too many single points of failure to accept such a cheap implementation of redundancy. RAID 5, though straightforward on paper, is complicated to get right in practice. I'd never (again) trust my data to it.

[ScooterJP @ Oct 26th 2006 1:29AM]

"Honestly, I have no idea why anyone is interested in RAID 5 for small numbers of disks and low capacity requirements."

RAID 5 (or 2, straight mirroring) is useful even for low-end users: as more people go digital for photos and max out their in-built PC drives, they need backup in case of failure. Disks may be cheap(ish) to replace, but the lost data might be irreplaceable.
I wouldn't worry for movies and the like which are available to (re)download, but I'd hate to lose my self-generated archives.

[Patiwat @ Oct 27th 2006 7:50PM]

ฺBuffalo products sells their products at premium prices. Their prices for Buffalo-rebranded Maxtor/Seagate HDDs at Yodobashi camera are about 50% higher than prices for easily available OEM drives. And their enclosures are not easily upgradable.

If you want cheap expansion, better to buy a mini-tower, add an eSATA card and RAID card, and then throw in some 500GB drives. At about $175/500GB drive and $400 for a low-end mini-tower with eSATA, you can save quite a bit. Plus, it'll be easily upgradable to 750GB drives when the price of those things comes down.