We first saw the Buffalo TeraStation about a week ago tucked in the corner of a small office, at first it looked like a novelty safe, perhaps being one of those mini fridges and inside we've find just enough room for 2 cans of coke. But as we wandered over to the desk where it was perched you could see lights flickering and that it had a Ethernet connection.

This is way beyond a novelty fridge and perhaps the slightly tacky design lets down what is a serious bit of home office hardware. It's difficult for us to get excited about storage but the Tera Station managed it with its 4 250gb drives in this enclosure providing 1 Terabyte of unraided storage and the answer to our own backup and media storage problem.

Plugging up the Terastation started to show that this is a well thought through product, as a NAS device (network attached storage) connectivity and compatibility with a home network are key, connectivity is handled by a single RJ45 for Gigabit Ethernet on the rear plus 2 USB 2.0 ports on the front and 2 on the rear. This hunk of NAS storage is also compatible with Windows OS from 98SE up to XP Pro and also Mac OSX and Linux, the set-up is via a web browser and allayed our fears that it was going to be a beast to configure.

First up we needed to decide how to use the 4 250gb drives, you can just have them as 4 individual drives and therefore each one as a network volume, or stripe them together giving a slightly less than 1 terabyte volume. Both of these are fine but neither offer any form of redundancy for your data, instead you can opt for mirroring with 2 x 250gb Raid 1 volumes or our choice all 4 disks together in a Raid 5 set-up, where one disk acts as the hot spare should one of the other 3 fail, this still gives a massive 750gb of disk space to play with.

The next step is to get our Terastation on the network which is as simple as assigning an IP address and name, you can set-up user names / groups and access lists if you want ever creating virtual volumes to keep data apart. The Buffalo system is based around a 266MHz Freescale PowerPC processor with  512MB of SDRAM and running a cut down Linux kernel, why? Well this allows the Terastation to act as an FTP server without relying on a workstation or server, it can also act as a print server and can managed automatic backups of your networked PC's.

The storage seemed to be very robust and managed some very respectable disk speed scores due to the raid's overall performance, as a system its well suited to most home networks where the kinds of AV streaming applications used normally require a server PC to remain switched on. Instead the Terastation with its remarkably quiet fan could be the only powered device in a home network of laptops and streaming receivers like Buffalos own Link Theatre media player.

Priced at around £600 the TeraStation offers a combination of cheap fast storage (around 60p a gigabyte) and also an easy to use backup / media serving application, it's a well thought out solution to home storage needs which are only set to grow as more of us RIP our DVD collections.

Published - 13/08/2005

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