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TagsSo you are thinking about buying a raid-enabled NAS storage array for your home. Maybe not, then again how about something you can store all your music, videos and photos? Well, Buffalo has a solution for the latter in its Linkstation Quad device that is also the former as well.
The amount of data we would like to store and retrieve in the home has grown tremendously over the last few years. Mainly because we have all got digital cameras, camcorders, mp3 players and the like. We are also needing access to this data from various devices; laptops, phones, set-top boxes. The LinkStation Quad should answer all these needs as well as providing a means for these wishing to dig out the holiday snaps when not at home.
The device comes with up to 4 terabytes of hot-swappable, fully redundant drives, so it is very unlikely that you will out of space in the near future. There are a whole host of features and goodies that come with the box. Not on does it come with a BitTorrent client but is DLNA-certified.
It also features Web Access which lets you access music, photos or other files stored on the device, when you are away from home. Buffalo says iPhone users can also stream content from the Quad when on the move.
Setting up is pretty simple. You can plug in an Ethernet cable and the power cable and the device should find your network. The device comes with four 250 GB Seagate ST3250310AS Barracuda 7200.10 hard drives. The case is relatively small for a four drive storage box and that is a good thing if you are using this in the home. The device has a blue status light indicator and LEDs for each drive on the front panel. This panel is also home to a USB port and a function button. Pressing this button while a drive is attached to USB port copies over data from that drive onto the device you have previously defined.
At the back is another USB port where you can attach a printer and share this on the network through the device. You can also attach yet another storage drive as well. There's also a Gigabit Ethernet port, network activity LED, power connector and cable tidy for the power cord.
If the device is directly connected to a computer, the device will power down when the computer powers down, saving energy. In network mode, powering down can be done via the user interface accessible via a web browser.
The device is DLNA-compliant, meaning that it will stream audio and video to a suitably-equipped television or hi-fi.
The device also features a Time Machine. While not a tardis that you can battle the daleks with, it is however, still a pretty handy feature allowing you to roll back your Mac computer should the worst happen and something awful goes wrong.
Web Access is also another feature that is great to use and easy to set up. This basically allows access to the NAS from any browser on the internet through a secure channel.
Disk backup is also a good feature should you own another Buffalo NAS. It will back up its data to another device for the disaster recovery program you thought you should alway have.
Overall, the device solves a number of problems people have with storing the large amounts of pictures, video and movies in their homes. While performance is nothing to write home about, it will be good enough for most of us looking to solve our data storage.
Rating: 8/10
