http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/296/buffalo_technology_terastation

These things are finally hitting affordable price points.

I saw this too. Awesome! 1000gb for around $1000.00 enclosed in a NAS server.

Considering a external, non-NAS Maxtor 250G drive is about 250; I'd say this is a pretty good deal. It looks kind of big though.

Drew

Size really doesn't matter sicne this thing will sit in a closet or basement somewhere. It's meant to be hidden.

Built in raid 5. The best part, is that it can only get cheaper!!!!!!!!!

Sure you can build one for less, but this is probably plug and play.

If you click on the link to the company's home page in the article you can see that it is not that much bigger then 4 ide hard drives. The picture makes it look massive but on the home page the show the case with a human hand and it is pretty compact.

Laters,
Jeff

I've worked with a few of the smaller Buffalo NAS drives (250GB). They are solid products with surprisely good connectivity. I've found most cosumer NAS devices tend to like to cycle on/off your network. Kind of annoying.

The only problem with the Buffalo devices is the lack of a USB or Firefire connection to the PC. You can connect a downstream devices (ie. external drive), but not your PC. The only way to connect is via the network. This is okay for day to day usage, but is really poor for bulk transfers. I'm not sure if this is something the 1 TB solutions has or not, but something to look for.

lanny

Originally posted by lanny
The only problem with the Buffalo devices is the lack of a USB or Firefire connection to the PC. You can connect a downstream devices (ie. external drive), but not your PC. The only way to connect is via the network. This is okay for day to day usage, but is really poor for bulk transfers. I'm not sure if this is something the 1 TB solutions has or not, but something to look for. According to info in the above link this device does not have that limitation. It has both USB 2.0 direct to PC connectivity and Gigabit Ethernet. The TeraStation, which will hopefully be available in the states early next year, is both Macintosh and Windows compatible, capable of RAID-1 (creates an exact copy of all of data on two or more disks) or RAID-5 storage configurations (better redundancy option in case one drive fails), and provides both a 1000Mbps Gigabit Ehternet (standard Ethernet is 10/100Mbps) port and USB 2.0 port for direct to PC connectivity. Jay

The earlier comment about the device only getting cheaper is only partially correct; it could also get larger (as in more storage capacity).

I really like this thing.

Jay - Thanks for the catch on the USB port. This is good to know.
lanny

hey don't nitpick :D

as the capacity gets larger, I bet that the price per gig will only get cheaper.

i like it too.

by the time i finally get around to building my htpc (bought all the parts almost a year and a half ago and they are still boxed) it is going to be even bigger and probably the same price or a little more.

Originally posted by drew138
The earlier comment about the device only getting cheaper is only partially correct; it could also get larger (as in more storage capacity).

I really like this thing.

Does anyone know if this device can support an O/S other than Windows?

Are any flavors of Unix an option?


-jim

Most of these NAS boxes use standard routing protocols, so they should be visible to "almost" any OS.

Except the Ximeta NDAS drives, stay away from these units, it requires special software to be visible on a clinet, very stupid.

Buffalo is ok.. others are:


-Tritton
-Guslink and
-SNAP NAS products


F.

I contacted Buffalo on expected ship dates. The indication is that these units will reach the distribution channels late 1st quarter 2005.

I am impressed by the price point. Might be worth getting two...

The Buffalo site is all in Japanese, so I couldn't tell, but is it safe to assume they are using SATA drives? I wonder what drives they are using and how easily I can buy add'l drives in the future.

I'd expect to be running RAID 5 on this. I was looking at building my own RAID box with SATA drives later this year, but I'd say this product would save me alot of time and maybe even money in the long run.

My music server (Audiotron) works well with NAS devices. My video solution (DVArchive with multiple ReplayTVs) would still require a PC, but at least this would centralize my storage.

It would also allow me to tuck this box away in a locked corner of my basement, which really makes the physical security much greater. The basement is well fire and water proofed. But I have always had a greater worry about a burglar, who would almost certainly grab any computer equipment in my home office, but would not likely find this box sitting in a locked closet in the basement.

That way, for all but the most precious data, I would not feel so compelled to maintain an off site copy.

Or build your own.....

http://www.mashie.org/casemods/udat1.html

Originally posted by plyons10
The Buffalo site is all in Japanese, so I couldn't tell, but is it safe to assume they are using SATA drives?


Google's Automatic Translation http://www.google.com/help/faq_translation.html
does a pretty good job on this site....Sam

I can contact buffalo and see if we can get a group buy together. USB 2.0 cards are CHEAP(I bought a couple or some older PC's for about $12 each) if you don't have one natively in your PC. Would people be interested if we could get these in the $800 range?

By the way, I would get one for $800 for sure. If you have WinXP or Win2K (server or WS) or Server 2003 you can do remote storage management (can't remember the name of it right this second) and use DVArchive without issue and store on this bad bear over ethernet (if by USB 2.0 of course totally a non-issue) but I would want this in my basement - nice an cool. Also, Gigabit NIC's and Switches are CHEAP nowadays (I just got two from Dell for less than $60 each for 8 porters) - this woudl scream over Gigabit.

This was announced for a Feb March release in the US for aroud 999 MSRP. SHould be able to knock a $150 off through the web and have these down to 750 or less by this time next year. Hopefully

Checked if this was released in Hong Kong yet; but no such luck. Hopefully they will start turning up soon.

Here's the link for all the info in English

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97&categoryid=19

Squid

I'm surprised they're not using SATA drives!

Buffalo Technology's website now has the release date for the Terastation in March. A link to sites selling the unit is now active!

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97&categoryid=19

Originally posted by MIS-Man
I can contact buffalo and see if we can get a group buy together. USB 2.0 cards are CHEAP(I bought a couple or some older PC's for about $12 each) if you don't have one natively in your PC. Would people be interested if we could get these in the $800 range?

Well, if you were serious about this (and if you see this 2 months later), please also ask them about the possiblity of buying one bare. I'd like to put in my own 400GB+ drives.

Also, at one point they were saying they only officially supported their own drives. Since many higher capacity drives are coming with 5 year warranties now, that is another reason I'd rather just populate it myself.

Buy.com is offering only pre-release orders. But they do list slightly different specs for the device, describing the drives as 4 x 250mb standard drives. This makes sense, since Buffalo doesn't even make their own hard drives anyway.

Unfortunately, someone is going to have to take the plunge and see what happens when you put some 400 GB drives in there. Of course, you must be able to switch the drives -- isn't that the whole point of RAID?????

I too would be interested in buying one of these bare bones.

Some of the preordered models were released on the 16th. I was not one of them. I am going to wait to hear some feedback and see how well they work. I am crossing my fingers that this will be the answer!! The sales lady on the phone said it could take up to three weeks to receive one. :(

pylons10, you're going to buy one anyway :)

I don't think so... not right away, anyway. I'm an early adopter, but I'm not a masochist -- the price is sure to drop by 10-25% in the next 8 months.

Preordered from where? If you check the links on Buffalo's site there are many different places to pre-order from.

Also, I dug a little deeper on the web site. If you look at the knowledge base there are already entries on the TeraStation. It comes with WD 250GB 7200RPM 2MB cache drives. I'm still looking at some of the other entries. It does also say you can replace the drives with larger than 250GB drives when one goes bad, but obviously if you are RAID 5 you won't get the extra capacity.

I may go ahead and get one because I'm tired of not having a comprehensive backup solution for my media. I can always buy another one later and sell the original. Potentially the drives in the thing are worth something as well. I just think they probably won't sell it bare soon because they are using the drives to pad their margin.

Sample item:

http://www.buffalotech.com/KB/index.php?ToDo=view&questId=1&catId=10

Originally posted by truaudiophile
Some of the preordered models were released on the 16th. I was not one of them. I am going to wait to hear some feedback and see how well they work. I am crossing my fingers that this will be the answer!! The sales lady on the phone said it could take up to three weeks to receive one. :(

Originally posted by turls
Potentially the drives in the thing are worth something as well. I just think they probably won't sell it bare soon because they are using the drives to pad their margin.


No doubt you are correct.

So... at $1K for the whole unit, figure the drives are worth only about $100 apiece.... That's $600 for the bare box. This is why I can't stomach it.

this is what really sucks with these companies, why cant they just sell us the box?? why would they want to warranty the drive which they dont make??

The turn off for me is NON SATA drives so it will not work for archiving my HD8300 HDTV PVR . Wake me up when someone has a model that supports SATA drives and hot swapable HDD's .

Also support for MCE 2005 .

Agreed, there ought to be at least 4 companies with a similar solution this year and the price would come down a lot. Wonder if it will happen? The technology in this thing does not look to be cutting edge to me.

$600 is peanuts though if I have the wrong type of drive failure before I get it!

Originally posted by plyons10
So... at $1K for the whole unit, figure the drives are worth only about $100 apiece.... That's $600 for the bare box. This is why I can't stomach it.

I'd be interested to find out how loud the thing is. I have a terrabyte NAS server from aberdeen that is so load even putting it in the attic in an enclosed rack my wife can still hear it screaming at night.:(

Ray

Originally posted by TrainWreck
I'd be interested to find out how loud the thing is. I have a terrabyte NAS server from aberdeen that is so load even putting it in the attic in an enclosed rack my wife can still hear it screaming at night.:(

Ray

And I bet the disks in it will last forever! Overheating is the biggest factor in most home IDE drive failures. So many people cram disks into a case with mediocre ventilation and then complain about the manfucturer making lemon drives...

Thanks,
Mike

You could have this NOW with a terabyte and a little creativeness.

4 - Seagate 250 SATA drives with NCQ @ $160 each
1 - motherboard with ICH6R chipset @ $110
get gigabyte LAN also, onboard video, sound
1 - Intel Celeron D CPU @ $73
1 - 2x512 meg RAM modules @ $125
1 - Quiet PSU @ $38
1 - case @$30
Linux @ $0

Total = $1016 (about $120 less if you use Hitachi drives)

You sould have a quiet terabyte server with fast I/O. I'd select a microATX board and a smaller case maybe. Celeron should be PLENTY fast to serve up stuff for a home network. Use that gigaLAN. Oh, I forgot to mention, you can use it as a computer too. 8>)

Can it be done. Yup, I set up a Fedora Core2 Samba server on an old PIII 800 with 10/100 LAN. Map your drives in WinXP Pro or Win2000 and your done. Connect to Linux PCs too. It can also serve printers, email, whatever you want to do, knock yourself out.

Don't forget that the Buffalo NAS has RAID-5 ... not cheap.

What to do now? Proceed with a home build or wait for the terastation? I am inclinded to proceed with the home build. Any thoughts? Any suggestions for building a home media server primarily for video storage and ripping?

I have not done any video yet.

I built mine with an old PC to test the concepts and see if I could get it all to work. I only have a PIII 800eb with 512megs and 2 40gig 5400rpm drives and can rip at least 2 music stations from another WinXP machine across the LAN to the server, surf the net on the server, and play back music off the server with the ripping PC all at the same time.

To give an idea of network speed, I copied up about 25gigs from another computer and it took about 90min to do it on 10/100 ethernet. If a person really needed a terabyte of storage, I would definately use gigabit ethernet. The PC built will have it already, you'd need a switch/hub and cards for other PCs mabye. Switch is about $60 and cards are $30ish. I have not tried this yet.

Warning, from what I read WinXP Home Edition does not do this type of stuff well from what I have read, which is what I have on my laptop. Win2000 and WinXP Pro worked very well on 2 other computers.

I suppose if you really wanted raid 5 you could buy a different motherboard, PCI-X type raid controller and do it too. This will add quite a bit of cost, $200+ motherboard and maybe $250 for a good controller. I don't really shop this stuff now. I don't think it would really be needed. Look at the piece of junk I'm using and it works very well.

Wait? The thing has supposedly already been shipped in small quantities and is supposed to be out this month. I think the whole point of NAS/SAN is that there are advantages over rolling your own. . . and I certainly agree.

This NAS solution (especially with RAID 5) sounds great, except I really wish they'd sell it as a barebones solution.
I've been looking at a number of different NAS solutions, they either seem too small (200GB is no good for what I want) or too expensive. And then if they are a decent size, theres usually no RAID support.
Ok, I know you get what you pay for, but this NAS seems to be a good compromise - if only it was a a bit more flexible, but I guess they plan on making their money from the drives.

Originally posted by najames
I suppose if you really wanted raid 5 you could buy a different motherboard, PCI-X type raid controller and do it too. This will add quite a bit of cost, $200+ motherboard and maybe $250 for a good controller. I don't really shop this stuff now. I don't think it would really be needed. Look at the piece of junk I'm using and it works very well.

You could also use software RAID-5 and skip the cost of the RAID controller. That is likely to be the solution used by the Buffalo NAS to keep their costs down. I am using software RAID in my media server and its performance is suitable for serving files over the network.

Brian

I'm expecting my LinkTheater (Buffalo PC-P3LWG/DVD) to be delivered tomorrow morning. I'll most likey be connecting this one in the masterbedroom to my Syntax Olevia 27" LCD via component cables, and optical audio to something TBD. I am really hoping a couple of these through out the house, along with the soon to be released Buffalo Terastation, will be the "magic formula" for media content distribution. It will be interesting to see what the USB tuner modules connected to the terastation can do... hopefully live streaming of SD content to the LinkTheaters, kinda like the XP MediaCenterEdition with network Extenders. And, is it asking too much for a HighDef USB 2.0 tuner ? :-)

Originally posted by bkzoller
You could also use software RAID-5 and skip the cost of the RAID controller. That is likely to be the solution used by the Buffalo NAS to keep their costs down.


While the profit motive is strong, I'd be floored if they were implementing this with software RAID. That would seriously undermine the attractiveness of this product. Why even make something gigabit enabled when the controller (if it is software RAID) couldn't keep up with it?????

I am also awaiting for the arrival of this product to see how well it actually is. In the meantime I've been shopping around for some competing products and came up with these two. If anyone has any experience with these I'd love to hear about it. Both of these are more expensive, have no drives included but offer Hot Swap. The second even had redundant power supplies.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=33-124-202&depa=0

http://cgi.*********/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=64072&item=5755274687&rd=1

That 2nd link got blocked, but those are good ones to compare against. I had not seen the top one before.

You can see the second item by going to eBay and searching for 5755274687 (the item number).

I went out to Fastora website and downloaded the manual to their product. Figured I'd read thru it and see if there are any key advantages over this one vs the TeraStation. I'll post here if I find anything interesting. The big negative thus far is just price, since these don't include drives.

Heads up. Documentation for the TeraStation is now available on Buffalo's site. Changing/installing drives seems to be a pain in the ....:(

Link to new docs:

http://www.buffalotech.com/support/downloads-product.php?productid=97

Geez Louise! I just counted and you have to remove no fewer than 20 little screws just to replace a failed drive!

WTF!?!?!?! I mean... could they have made it any more difficult?

I see what you mean about the assembly. That is crazy. Those drives are really packed in there, that's got to run hot. Looks like they really designed for size only (very small package).

Software RAID 5 or a cheap controller will likely get you something like this, or even less likely. A Highpoint 454 Raid controller, $90 from Newegg. More expensive $200 controllers dropped the CPU usage to 9% or less it seemed.

"This card is great but beware of the slow write transfer speeds when using RAID5. I was getting about 8MB/s while writing files with 75% of usage on my CPU which was a AMD 2100+. But otherwise its not a bad budget option. And read speeds were quite well at 89MB/s."

My PIII was even slower with old tech 20.6gigs transferred across the 10/100 wired ethernet in 88 minutes, 3.9megs/sec. I was ripping two stations and playing music at the same time though.

I just ran a Sisoft Sandra network benchmark, 9MB/s. It is the same rating I get if I try to benchmark the network drives 9MB/s, the network is the limiting factor. It also likey correlates to the guy above that is getting 8MB/s too. Sandra says the 5400rpm drives should get about 20MB/s. The 3year old 80gig IDE drive in this PC benchmarks at 29MB/s, the new 160gig IDE in my Winny AMD64 3200 is 46MB/s. I will get the most bang/buck by upgrading the LAN to Gigabit since faster drives would still likley show 9MB/s. Sandra's comparison for Gigibit LAN on 32bit PCI bus is 54MB/s, a whole lot better than 9MB/s. Who wants to fill up their Terabyte systems with 9MB/s on 10/100 LANs, raise your hand?

Guys, read the limitations document as well. Unless I am reading it wrong, it seems that this can't handle files >4GB. That means this is out for me as I was planning on using it for storing video and recordings I make with my PVR. I think I am back to either making my own NAS (PC) or picking up something like the Fastora I mentioned.:(

Originally posted by cbb77
Guys, read the limitations document as well. Unless I am reading it wrong, it seems that this can't handle files >4GB. The only related limitation I can find in the document is the following: The writing of files greater than or equal to 4 GB is prevented due to operating system limitations with the Windows Millennium operating system.So it appears that if you are using a modern OS as the client there should be no such limitation.

Jay

Originally posted by najames
I will get the most bang/buck by upgrading the LAN to Gigabit since faster drives would still likley show 9MB/s. Sandra's comparison for Gigibit LAN on 32bit PCI bus is 54MB/s, a whole lot better than 9MB/s. Who wants to fill up their Terabyte systems with 9MB/s on 10/100 LANs, raise your hand?

My 32bit PCI gigabit cards and switch only tested at 33 MB/s with SiSoft Sandra. Maybe the 54 MB/s is a theorectical maximum. I think I was getting 8 or 9 MB/s when I had 100 Mbit but I didn't benchmark it.

Brian

Originally posted by cbb77
Guys, read the limitations document as well. Unless I am reading it wrong, it seems that this can't handle files >4GB. That means this is out for me as I was planning on using it for storing video and recordings I make with my PVR. I think I am back to either making my own NAS (PC) or picking up something like the Fastora I mentioned.:(


Yeah... the docs are poorly written. Right below that it says the limit is something else. Obviously the whole thing depends on the OS you are using to access the darn drive.

The Terastation itself runs Linux so I doubt it has any native 4 GB limit.

I wouldn't sweat it.

Buffalo Terabyte product specs say "journaling file system" and "IDE ATA133 drives".

Technically, it could be using Linux and still have a 4 gig file limitation. If you install Linux, but format the rest of the disk in FAT32, either Linux or Windows could read it. I don't know anything about Macs.

From Microsoft "You cannot create a file larger than (2^32)-1 bytes (this is one byte less than 4 GB) on a FAT32 partition".

My dual booting AMD64 PC has exactly this setup also. I created both a Windows NTFS partition for Win2000 and a Reiser FS partition for Linux and the remaining space is a partition of FAT32. The reason I built the server, all in Linux Ext3, was to try to avoid the 4GB file limitation of this system.

Good points. The fact is I guess we just don't know.

I've been checking everywhere to see if someone actually has one of these units yet at other forums and no luck so far.

I am simply not in the market for $1,000 crap shoot at this point. Someone out there somewhere must have one of these on order and I can't wait to read a real user review (not these reprinted blurbs of the manuf. specs).

Does the documentatin mention any benefits of using this device with the linkstation?

I don't know about Linkstations, but according to this doc, it has 4 additional USB ports. Hey, how about some USB hubs and making a farm of more 500gig drives and have a multi-terabyte system. 8>)

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97&categoryid=19

ANYONE THINKING OF BUYING A TERASTATION BETTER MAKE SURE THEY READ THE INTRO AND LIMITATIONS DOCUMENT PREVIOUSLY LISTED.

Jim... what limitation in particular are you so concerned about? I dont' think the file size limit matters. We might not be right, but it's really unlikely they were referring to anything other than the native file size limits for those OSs.

First, I would like to thank Buffalo for coming out with a product like this. It is a good idea and will only get better as they refine it. It spins down the drives after inactivity, which is very good. Also I applaud them for listing possible issues.

There are too many "possible" limitations for me. If they are not of a concern to you, by all means feel free to give it a try. These were some of the things that I noticed in reading it.

If you shut it off, it may reset date. I wouldn't want to go on vacation, shut it off and forget to check date.

No further backups can occur if disk sleep mode is enabled. Why have it at all then?

Move or delete shared folders after scheduling a backup and you may lose data due to failed backup. I can see it if you were trying to backup a specific folder and it is moved or deleted but it seems odd and it should be backing up the drives or changes on the drives.

Look at the USB restrictions. One partition limit, some formats can't be accessed as a shared drive, printer restrictions (although some of these seem to be common on many print servers). It just seemed like there were a lot of them to me.

Does not conform to domains after the Win2000 native mode. Huh?

I think the real problem is simply that Buffalo is being a little too forthcoming about the product limitations, and a lot of people are misunderstanding it. I have to say, it's unusually candid of them to publish this doument pre-release.

But most of the concerns people have are based in bad translations, or an incomplete understanding of some Windows/*nix/Samba issues. Mostly, the document is a rundown of everything you normally encounter when connecting Windows systems to Linux/Samba file sharing systems.

For example:

The file size limitations are solely imposed by the client. If you're running Win 98 or ME or NT4, then you're subject to some file size limitations. They're the same limitations as if you were connecting to an Enterprise-grade Windows server. If your PC runs Win2K or XP, then there are no file size limitations, at least none that we'll come close to soon.

The domain interoperability issue ("TeraStation does not conform to domains after Windows 2000 native mode") simply don't affect home users. If you're running a post-2000 Windows domain in native mode, then you either a) already know what you're doing, or b) are my boss.

I'm not sure why it might lose the date when shut off, but notice that it includes an NTP service, so you can synch the clock to a time server. So no big deal, as soon as it restarts, the time will be set correctly. NTP is very cool.

Seriously, the only thing on that whole list that caught my eye was the issue with the backup utility. But I suspect that once the product is shipping and we have a better understanding of how all the pieces work, then even this will turn out to be a "duh" item, just badly explained.

As far as I can tell, Terrastation will work just like any Linux/Samba file server that I might build myself. In real-life use, it will be more reliable, since I'll be less tempted to open the box and tweak it.

The TeraStation is now shipping! Although it looks like only from CDW at the moment. I think I'm going to order it this weekend. I'm still trying to find out info on the USB TV Tuner support and features. I did receive my LinkTheater this week, and so far I am extrememly impressed. I'm hoping the TeraStation leaves me with the same feeling...

Saw five of these at the local Fry's Electronics this afternoon. From the size of the box, it's smaller than I expected. Still, couldn't quite pull the trigger considering I have five 250MB drives, a spare tower case, and a spare motherboard in my closet :)

Originally posted by ToadMazter
The TeraStation is now shipping! Although it looks like only from CDW at the moment. I think I'm going to order it this weekend. I'm still trying to find out info on the USB TV Tuner support and features. I did receive my LinkTheater this week, and so far I am extrememly impressed. I'm hoping the TeraStation leaves me with the same feeling...

No TV tuner support right now or in any estimated time. If the market demands the feature, we will consider partnering or carrying a USB tuner to use with it.

Also, the unit is surprisingly small (especially considering there's 4 disks in there). It's only 12" tall, 15" deep, and like 8" wide.

Sounds to me like the market is demanding a feature--a bare box. Is there a technical reason we can't buy a box without drives so we can populate with whatever size we want?

Originally posted by BrianV
If the market demands the feature

Originally posted by turls
Sounds to me like the market is demanding a feature--a bare box. Is there a technical reason we can't buy a box without drives so we can populate with whatever size we want?

No it's not a technical reason. All of our NAS products have hard drives inside of them. Buffalo has extremely high buying power when buying hard drives so we utilize that buying power to offer products at more affordable prices then competition. Also, our LinkStation line has sold extremely well, trump'ing the sales of the NSLU2 which is a do-it-yourself type product where you install a hard drive.

Additionally, you increase your support avenues and risk the chance that people will put old, shelf hard drives in the box that are less reliable than new ones. Then when the product breaks because of broken hard drives, the original thought is that the NAS device isn't as reliable albeit we have nothing to do with drive reliability.

Again, if enough market demands it, it can be accomodated, but typical AVSForums users are not typical market. In fact, to be completely honest, this is the first time anyone at Buffalo has heard this recommendation.

We do sell NAS boxes without hard drives under a specialty line of products. They also expose full root access to the underpinning OS. Check out www.revogear.com . These are sold with 0 support in very low quantities.

BrianV,

Thanks for the replies. I'm sure you are going to be busy answering all of us on this and the LinkTheater thread!

So I was looking back at Buffalo's website for the datasheet that said the TeraStation would support USB NTSC Tuners. The info has changed, couldn't find it archived anywhere, but now I see that the datasheet shows two additional models, one with 400 GB drives! http://www.buffalotech.com/documents/pdf/TeraStation_DS.pdf That is really cool.... but I would rather have USB tuner support ;) Seriously, the main reason I wanted the Terastation was to be able to record live content without needing a PC. In all honesty, I guess I'm better off building a Windows MediaCenter2005 or MythTV box with a RAID controller and a TB of disk space. I was interested to see your http://www.revogear.com link, but it doesn't have the TerraStation-type enclosure.

Ok, so I guess I am ranting now. So here's my question: If I sign a waiver to never call Buffalo's tech support, can I expose/replace the OS on the TeraStation and install MythTV?

Again, thanks for being here!

First of all, thanks for the response. Before I explore the revogear option . . .

In a RAID box like this, I want as large a capacity as possible. If I start off with only 750GB (RAID 5), and I wanted to buy the drives to upgrade later, its going to be a major pain to get the data off of that RAID array. Since the drives in this thing are probably only worth 40% (or less) of the price of the box, just going out and buying another TeraStation if I need more room isn't a great option.

edit: Since I see you are now offering a box with 400gb drives (thanks to the post above this), the necessity for a bare box solution is probably gone ;)

If you do the math, putting 400GB drives in this box should only increase the price by 20% or so, and the difference between 250 and 400 will only get smaller. Does anybody know what the retail pricing is going to be for the model with 400GB drives? I can't find it anywhere else on Buffalo's web site.

Originally posted by BrianV
No it's not a technical reason. All of our NAS products have hard drives inside of them. Buffalo has extremely high buying power when buying hard drives so we utilize that buying power to offer products at more affordable prices then competition. Also, our LinkStation line has sold extremely well, trump'ing the sales of the NSLU2 which is a do-it-yourself type product where you install a hard drive.

Additionally, you increase your support avenues and risk the chance that people will put old, shelf hard drives in the box that are less reliable than new ones. Then when the product breaks because of broken hard drives, the original thought is that the NAS device isn't as reliable albeit we have nothing to do with drive reliability.

Again, if enough market demands it, it can be accomodated, but typical AVSForums users are not typical market. In fact, to be completely honest, this is the first time anyone at Buffalo has heard this recommendation.

Originally posted by turls
If you do the math, putting 400GB drives in this box should only increase the price by 20% or so, and the difference between 250 and 400 will only get smaller. Does anybody know what the retail pricing is going to be for the model with 400GB drives? I can't find it anywhere else on Buffalo's web site. From looking at disk prices on newegg and buy.com it looks like a 400GB drive is more than double the price of a 250GB drive (about $350 vs. $150). It appears that the price difference from Buffalo is a lot more than 20%. Here's the pricing I found from one vendor.

unit w/250GB drives: Retail $1699 Selling: $965
unit w/400GB drives: Retail $2431 Selling: $1926

Since this vendor did not have the units in stock the prices may not be that useful. However the pricing does look fairly reasonable. IMO Buffalo can't be making huge profits off of the drives selling units at these prices. $900-$1000 seems like a fairly reasonable price considering the current cost of drives and the functionality of the unit.

Jay

You're right, the cost difference between 250's and 400's is around $200, but Buffalo also doesn't buy as many 400's so their buying power makes for an even larger discrepency. If the price difference is $200 per disk, then that's $800 for the whole drive. Buffalo will likely sell far less 1.6 TB units than 1.0 TB units so they need a little bit more markup to accomodate shelf-space, freight, etc. Thus, a $900 price difference is extremely fair due to all of the variable around 400 GB drives.

Originally posted by turls
First of all, thanks for the response. Before I explore the revogear option . . .

In a RAID box like this, I want as large a capacity as possible. If I start off with only 750GB (RAID 5), and I wanted to buy the drives to upgrade later, its going to be a major pain to get the data off of that RAID array. Since the drives in this thing are probably only worth 40% (or less) of the price of the box, just going out and buying another TeraStation if I need more room isn't a great option.

edit: Since I see you are now offering a box with 400gb drives (thanks to the post above this), the necessity for a bare box solution is probably gone ;)

If you do the math, putting 400GB drives in this box should only increase the price by 20% or so, and the difference between 250 and 400 will only get smaller. Does anybody know what the retail pricing is going to be for the model with 400GB drives? I can't find it anywhere else on Buffalo's web site.

See my reply above regarding the cost difference. We're forced to sell products based on hard drive pricing and the biggest drive, much like the fastest CPU commands a serious premium. Thus, if you want the biggest or fastest, you have to pay for it. Most people will search for the cheapest per gigabyte offering, and in this case 250 GB drives offer that.

Additionally, the drives cost more than 40% of the box, in fact they're the major contributor to the cost. It's probably closer to 65% or so, but there's a lot involved in this product. There's a fully built-up PowerPC computer in there, gigabit ethernet controllers are still not extremely cheap nor are power supplies. There's a lot in this product and the $999 price point for the 1.0 TB model is KILLER.

Compare this:

Lacie 1TB -VS- Buffalo 1TB

We both offer the same 4 IDE hard drives.

They have a simple ATA/USB conversion controller in their product.
The TeraStation has a full computer, PowerPC platform with memory, gigabit network controller, USB controller, two IDE controllers, PCI controller, and a plethora of time involved in the embedded systems development.

Lacie and TeraStation are the same price. Buffalo's pricing on this product is absolutely phenomenol.

Brian... thanks for all your comments. We do appreciate it.

I don't know what the real split between the other hardware and the drives' cost is, but I can definitely appreciate the fact that your support costs would be a big problem if you shipped without drives.

>> The TeraStation has a full computer, PowerPC platform with memory, gigabit network controller, USB controller, two IDE controllers, PCI controller, and a plethora of time involved in the embedded systems development. <<

Heh. Yeah, that's why some people want to be able to buy it separately. ;) Personally, I'm attracted to the simplicity and integration, at least this time. The pricing as it is seems reasonable, Terrabyte for a Kilobuck is a first, AFAIK. It's a little unusual that the lowest price/GB is at the low end, I guess.

What I've noticed in a lot of products that include disks is they often go up in price too much for the larger storage. DVR's often fall into this, as do MP3 players and camera storage tanks. Sometimes vendors will charge an extra $200 for a bigger drive, when the bigger drive itself costs less than that, even at retail. I NEVER buy a product like that, I just feel I'm being ripped off paying for the larger storage.

The other thing that happens is that the price of the product doesn't drop, even though the price of storage drops. Six months from now, when 400GB drives drop in price, today's pricing won't look as attractive. Some vendors handle this better than others.

In any event, it looks like the way to get cheap storage is to just daisy-chain these things, or set up multiple 1TB servers. Having my RAID5 volumes limited to 750GB isn't going to kill me. ;)

My real question is... are these actually shipping? When are the larger models going to ship?

The 1TB models are available retail at Fry's Electronics and have been selling for days now. CDW also has them. Within the next week the 1.6 TB model will be available from main distribution.

Additionally, we do have a 0.6 TB version (640 GB) (4 x 160) that streets for $799, so it's a lower end product.

The $999 1.0TB is the best bang for the buck simply because 250 GB drives are the sweet spot for gigabyte/dollar. You're right, the 400's will come down in price over the next quarters, but then there will also be a 500 or 600 GB drive to replace it at that price point.

Take for instance our 250 GB LinkStation. 6 months ago it was ridiculously high priced, the 160 and 120 gigs were the value choice. Now the 250 is the value choice; it's just how hard drives work, and memory for that matter.

You guys are making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Processors, hard disks, and memory have been like this forever, there's no reason to wait and post-pone as then you will always be waiting. The general rule for all of these products are, the biggest/fastest part costs a significant premium (400 GB drive), the next biggest/fastest costs a little less (300 GB drive), and the third biggest/fastest is usually the first and most affordable choice/value. This is true in history if you look at DRAM module sizes as well as processors.

Intels top two procs typically cost WAY more than their others, as well as 2 GB DIMMS and so on.

In 6 months the 1.6 TB will likely be at the price the 1.0 TB is at now, but there will likely be a 2.0 TB model then for you to contemplate.

Unfortunately, I'm a few thousand miles from the nearest Frye's, so I'll have to wait a little.

From the sound of things, you've done the pricing right... my own comments were observations on other products and vendors.

I hope this is not a stupid question ....
Other than the obvious benefits of RAID (and simplicty of this box), what would be the advantages of this unit over just packing 4 250 gig drives into a PC? If I just want to get storage, is it dumb to put that many drives into a Windows XP box? Can an XP PC even handle 4 drives (maybe with 2 ide and 2 SATA, or 4 SATA)?
Thanks!

Thanks for the responses, I've seen 400GB drives as cheap as $200 after rebate, so I was using different numbers than those in this thread. Of course, if you tried to buy 4 you'd jump through hoops qualifying for rebates anyway.

Originally posted by BrianV
The $999 1.0TB is the best bang for the buck simply because 250 GB drives are the sweet spot for gigabyte/dollar. You're right, the 400's will come down in price over the next quarters, but then there will also be a 500 or 600 GB drive to replace it at that price point.

You guys are making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Processors, hard disks, and memory have been like this forever, there's no reason to wait and post-pone as then you will always be waiting. The general rule for all of these products are, the biggest/fastest part costs a significant premium (400 GB drive), the next biggest/fastest costs a little less (300 GB drive), and the third biggest/fastest is usually the first and most affordable choice/value. This is true in history if you look at DRAM module sizes as well as processors.


But the big difference is I feel I'm stuck with whatever I purchase and won't be able to really "upgrade" it from that point. I could always easily upgrade single hard drives in the past. In my particular case a 1.2 TB RAID 5 solution is much more desirable than a 750GB one, and I don't think that's going to change much in the next 2 years (I won't immediately "need" the 1.5TB one as soon as its available, or whatever). So I'll probably wait for the high end product to drop a little.

Originally posted by turls
Thanks for the responses, I've seen 400GB drives as cheap as $200 after rebate, so I was using different numbers than those in this thread. Of course, if you tried to buy 4 you'd jump through hoops qualifying for rebates anyway.

Yeah... I kind of forget that the figures I was using for the 250GB drives are all after rebate too. I guess that, ignoring rebates, the price / drive is more like $150 - $175, huh?

But you'd think even with decent buying power Buffalo could beat almost any post-rebate price we could get anyway ;) Of course there was that time 2 years ago I got a 120GB drive for about $15 post rebate--that's what you call a loss leader ;)

Anytime there's a rebate on a product the manufacturer likely loses money on the sale (IF YOU CLAIM THE REBATE). Rebates are used for a number of things:

1) Moving inventory - You have too many of X sku and you need to make shelf space for your brand new Y sku. Rebate X to sell through them so you don't have to have the retailer ship them back to you.

2) Branding - You are willing to lose money to move product so you get the taste of a product and their brand in consumers mouth, you create a buzz.

3) Retailer Leverage - The retailer themselves (Best Buy, CompUSA, Fry's, whoever) asks for a rebate so they can maintain competitive. If you never give them rebates they don't like it and consider you first to go when they rearrange their product lines. Retailers love with when manufacturers carry rebates as it creates more traffic and sales through their store.

Thus, if you have a HOT product that sells fine on its own and has limited competition then you don't need to rebate. A good example of this is PS2 and Xbox; there aren't much margins in them to begin with, but they don't need rebates. High-end sound receivers, HD Tivo, and other similar devices don't have rebates. Low end networking and storage gear is so competitive that the manufacturers rebate them to stay in the stores, move product, and piss of their competitors. TeraStation will likely not carry rebates like other lower-end products due to its target market and its already incredible price.

Brian, thanks for the insight. I'm just glad there are going to be multiple versions of the TeraStation available, and like you said, there is a good chance you will continue to tweak the offerings as new drive sizes become popular.

Originally posted by imarkup
I hope this is not a stupid question ....
Other than the obvious benefits of RAID (and simplicty of this box), what would be the advantages of this unit over just packing 4 250 gig drives into a PC? If I just want to get storage, is it dumb to put that many drives into a Windows XP box? Can an XP PC even handle 4 drives (maybe with 2 ide and 2 SATA, or 4 SATA)?
Thanks!

It's a huge difference, first a PC requires all of the PC related software, an OS, and it always needs to be on.

TeraStation is a self-contained storage center (NAS). It attaches to your LAN and everyone on the network can access/store/share resources. Much like a PC would be with shares configured, users can access files simultaneously and use it as a single-point of sharing.

PCs require rebooting, if a user is using them they can become slow, and Windows file sharing isn't the best in the world. This device doesn't get restarted often, is self-contained, and requires A LOT less power to run than a PC. It also has a built-in FTP server so you don't have to configure a Windows machine to do that.

It really wasn't designed to be directly compared to a PC with internal storage, it's designed for high-end consumers or SMBs that need a NAS.

Originally posted by turls
Brian, thanks for the insight. I'm just glad there are going to be multiple versions of the TeraStation available, and like you said, there is a good chance you will continue to tweak the offerings as new drive sizes become popular.

Yes we will always offer the best value hard drive and likely the largest hard drive offerings. I understand your desires to upgrade the TeraStation with newer disks, but the product really wasn't built or designed to support that. The TeraStation has a small system partition on the hard drives, if you remove the hard drives there is no system available to partition them. The only way that one could really technically do this is to rely on a PC to spit an image to an IDE hard drive which would require hooking the IDE drive to your PC's IDE controller and configuring it that way. Basically, too much work for a regular consumer and not a really viable solution. Plus, the cost of a new unit wouldn't be that much more expensive than replacement drives, and likely better features and faster interfaces will be included in future products (by time you desire an upgrade).

Thanks for all of the interest in the product, it really is a NEAT product, especially for the price!

You could put a small drive in there that contained the system partition needed. it would be independent of the other drives.

Then make the system hackable so people with the know how, can hack it to support bigger drives. Then in warranty state that the unit is only supported with the drives it came with.

Isn't that what Tivo does more or less. They don't officially support all the hacking, but they didn't make it impossible or take steps to shut it down.

Originally posted by slocko
You could put a small drive in there that contained the system partition needed. it would be independent of the other drives.

Then make the system hackable so people with the know how, can hack it to support bigger drives. Then in warranty state that the unit is only supported with the drives it came with.

Isn't that what Tivo does more or less. They don't officially support all the hacking, but they didn't make it impossible or take steps to shut it down.

That's sort of what happened with our LinkStation, but now we offer the KuroBox (www.revogear.com) which is basically completely hacker friendly, we give full system source code, etc.

Perhaps we could do something similar with a TeraStation-like chassis, but it'd be likely we'd load the system completely on ROM, raising the board price slightly due to the increased ROM memory. I don't know, there are other resources, but inside of TeraStation is cramped now, we couldn't even find room for a 2.5" hard drive if we wanted. It would require a lot of work to create a new product and the market probably isn't big enough, but who knows.

Has Buffalo done any testing of a terastation with Windows Media Center?

I'd like to store all of my movies and music on a terastation.
ie. C:\Movies\ & C:\Music ("C:\" is the Terastation)

and have MCE use those folders as the defaults?

This question is better suited for the HTPC forum, but I was just curious if Buffalo had tested this.

Finally, It seems like to use a terastation with Buffalo's new LT, I'd have to have all my content under one master folder, correct?
C:\Content\Music
C:\Content\Movies
and share C:\Content with the LT?

thx.

Originally posted by MoG
Has Buffalo done any testing of a terastation with Windows Media Center?

I'd like to store all of my movies and music on a terastation.
ie. C:\Movies\ & C:\Music ("C:\" is the Terastation)

and have MCE use those folders as the defaults?

This question is better suited for the HTPC forum, but I was just curious if Buffalo had tested this.

Finally, It seems like to use a terastation with Buffalo's new LT, I'd have to have all my content under one master folder, correct?
C:\Content\Music
C:\Content\Movies
and share C:\Content with the LT?

thx.

I haven't seen the PCast implementation on TeraStation yet, I expect to see it next week; it's not included in the shipping version.

LinkStations requires you to have them all in one share, but you can travel recursive. Thus, if you had a 'Content' folder with a 'Video' and 'Music' folder in it then you could access both the video and music folder.

I will test using WMC with mapped drive letters pointing to a NAS.

WMC gives an error when trying to share a network resource (even if it's mapped), so I guess that answers that. Send an email to Microsoft to get that fixed!!!

Heres a similar product:

ReadyNAS 600 (http://www.infrant.com/)

A lttle more expensive, though...

In a kenwood 8100 thread someone mentioned that WMC doesn't support mapped network resources, so your findings confirm that.

The ReadyNAS does use enterprise rates SATA drives -- that's going to cost more right there. I don't know much about the embedded OS it uses -- I've never heard of it and wouldn't feel as comfortable as I am with Buffalo for firmware updates.

From a cost standpoint we didn't think SATA was a viable option. The performance behind a network interface is hardly tangible, and the added cost of the drives and additional external controller hindered the market and pricepoint. It would raise the price, but not by 50% or anything crazy like that.

Originally posted by BrianV
I understand your desires to upgrade the TeraStation with newer disks, but the product really wasn't built or designed to support that. The TeraStation has a small system partition on the hard drives, if you remove the hard drives there is no system available to partition them.

OK... but tell us some more about the way this OS handles it.

We know the drives aren't hot - swappable (a bit of a disappointment, frankly). So I've got to take the machine down to open it up. I throw in my dig that it takes 23 screws to get one of the drives out, now :) If I'm running RAID5 I can just through another 250GB drive in there (any IDE make, right?) and it should boot up and automatically rebuild the partition, right?

Now... what happens if I put a 400GB drive in there instead? And then, a month later... another 400GB drive? Is the free space (150GB) available as a separate volume after it rebuilds? How would it handle this?

I think the biggest drawback is the lack of hotswappable drives. This device was intended for average users to get up and running quickly. That I do believe it meets. However, the first time a drive fails and a user needs to go through the pain of replacing one, they will be cursing this product. From what I saw, it's by no means user friendly. I would highly recommend redesigning this case and incorporate quick/easy access to the drives.

No way you're going to get a terrabyte for under $1K with hot-swappable drives. It'd probably add $75/drive to the retail price, not to mention making the box bigger. How-swap is totally useless for home or small-business use anyway.... unless you keep a spare drive sitting around, it doesn't save you any downtime. Replacing a drive in this is no worse than replacing one in your average PC, maybe a few extra screws, but that's all. Whenever I've replacved drives in RAID arrays, screwing in the new one was the easy part. Rebuilding the array is where you hold your breath, and that's pretty unavoidable.

Besides, the vast majority of purchasers will never have to replace one.

Okay, so I'm not a fan of hot-swap. ;) But look the TStation for what it is.... a reliable drive that costs $1/GB and attaches to the network instead of a drive controller. So what if you can't upgrade it.... you can't turn a 120GB drive into a 250GB drive either.

There are lots of ways it could be made fancier, but other people already offer fancier arrays. This is interesting because it's the bare essentials at a very reasonable price, nicely integrated, and there's nothing comparable out there.

Zonegray, Nicely said.
Now if I could just get my hands on one. All I find online is "backordered".

I would have to disagree on the hot-swap. Don't get me wrong, the TeraStation is a good idea/unit as it avoids having to cram a bunch of drives in a pc. However, I have dealt with quite a few hard drive failures. I tend to find it a pain in the butt to pull out the case, deal with the cables and swap the drive. Thus my interest in one of the NAS units to not have to deal with a pc full of cables. The hot swap makes it easy as pull and replace. Sure you have to change the drive out of the tray, but that is a whole lot easier that fiddling with the drive cage in a pc. I could even go without hot swap if changing the drives were easy. From the looks of the manual, the TeraStation is not that friendly. Take a look at the ReadyNAS link someone posted earlier. Although that also isn't hot swap, it's a simple matter of 4 front screws to gain access to the drives. The TeraStation could benefit from a similar design.

Again, don't get me wrong. The TeraStation looks like a good unit AND is at a great price point. I'm just going to wait a bit and see how some users report out on it before committing. To tell you the truth, I probably would have already had one on order if the manuals hadn't been posted prior to the units being available. I thought that this was the ultimate unit. It may still be, but off of what I read/saw going to wait a bit.

Brian,
I wanted to start by thanking you for posting to this thread, having an employee of buffalo answering questions really has sold me on buying a linktheater.

It was mentioned earlier but I'd like to hdd my 2 cents that playing ifo's would be super valuable. In my setup I have a powerfile, which is a 200 disk DVD changer on my network. I can hit a web page to change the disk n the player, but I need the linktheater to to be able to open the ifo file in the video_ts folder on a netoekr share for me to be able to use it as a client. If that features happens I'll be buying one of these for every TV in my house!

thanks,
-Matt

Originally posted by BrianV
It's a huge difference, first a PC requires all of the PC related software, an OS, and it always needs to be on.

TeraStation is a self-contained storage center (NAS). It attaches to your LAN and everyone on the network can access/store/share resources. Much like a PC would be with shares configured, users can access files simultaneously and use it as a single-point of sharing.

PCs require rebooting, if a user is using them they can become slow, and Windows file sharing isn't the best in the world. This device doesn't get restarted often, is self-contained, and requires A LOT less power to run than a PC. It also has a built-in FTP server so you don't have to configure a Windows machine to do that.

It really wasn't designed to be directly compared to a PC with internal storage, it's designed for high-end consumers or SMBs that need a NAS.

I have a box I put together with old parts. I have 10 ide hard drives in it for over 2.25 Gigs of storage. I can leave it on all th etime if I want and store HD, Music etc. It was put together from spare parts and I only had to buy a few drives on sale to getup to the current capacity. The only thing is I don't have a raid set up so each drive is individual, which is fine for me since I would only be accessing at most 2 drives at a time. So there is no need to be wasting power by having the drives spin constantly. It's been working well for the last 7 months.

I agree that hot swappability is not critical for the home user (hey -- you can't have everything for under $1K, right?), but I am still very interested in what type of drive(s) I can use as replacements and what happens to extra space if I replace a 250GB drive with a 400GB drive.

Originally posted by plyons10
The ReadyNAS does use enterprise rates SATA drives -- that's going to cost more right there. I don't know much about the embedded OS it uses -- I've never heard of it and wouldn't feel as comfortable as I am with Buffalo for firmware updates.
Sorry, I don't mean to hijack the Buffalo thread, but I thought I'd give a little more insight on the ReadyNAS product.

1. The ReadyNAS firmware called RAIDiator is Linux-based.

2. The RAID implementation on the ReadyNAS is hardware-driven to optimize on performance (RAID engine is embedded in the processor core). Other non-performance-critical tasks such as error handling is done in the firmware for better control.

3. There were some comments about hotswap. The ReadyNAS 600 enclosure does not support hotswap, but RAIDiator is designed to work with hotswappable enclosures (i.e. ReadyNAS 1000). Keep in mind that just having hotswappable enclosure won't buy you hotswap. The OS needs to be aware of it and support it.

4. It's actually pretty simple to replace a failed disk. Remove 3 thumbscrews on the enclosure, pop open the top, remove 4 screws to release the drive cage, and remove 4 screws securing the disk.

5. Someone questioned the need for SATA. The ReadyNAS has 4 distinct SATA channels and they all act in master mode. With the disk striping involved in performing RAID operations, it pays to not have to switch between master and slave mode required with shared IDE bus. Also, the thin SATA cabling makes for better airflow, especially important in a small 4-disk enclosure.

6. Several people mentioned what would happen if disks are replaced with larger capacity disks and whether the new capacity can be utilized. The ReadyNAS has full volume management capability to handle this. So if you replace your 250GB HDDs one at a time with 400GB disks, you can create an additional volume with the leftover 150GB space while retaining your original volume.

7. RAIDiator OS is embedded on a compact flash. This means if one day you want to do a complete re-install onto a set of 600GB disks, simply replace your disks, and it'll automatically perform an installation using the new disks. You can start accessing the box in as little as 30 minutes.

8. The ReadyNAS comes with very conservative performance settings to ensure data integrity. But there are performance tweaking options if you're one of those with the need for speed ;-) You can elect to disable journalling and enable disk writecache if for some reason you wanted to double your write performance. Granted you should connect a UPS to ensure you don't lose data in the write cache or you don't want to wait several hours to check the filesystem in the event of power failure, but a fairly basic $30 UPS with a USB monitoring interface is all you need.

9. With regard to plyons10 comment on whether he's comfortable with firmware updates, the guys that designed the ReadyNAS come with enterprise-level RAID background, and they designed the highly integrated network storage processor with a RAID core and tightly coupled that with the embedded firmware. So it's definitely not a fly-by-night operation. And if you ever did want to update the firmware, it takes only 2 mouse clicks.

10. Probably something that folks on this board won't care much about, but the ReadyNAS product was designed more for the small/medium sized office environments, and as such it supports more advanced features such as multiple security options, such as support for domains and Active Directory Service. Someone mentioned the price being a little higher, but if you compared it to other products in the same category, it's less than half as much. Perhaps if there's enough pull, there could be a future ReadyNAS product offering that would be more affordable.

Now back to the main topic...

Originally posted by cbb77
I think the biggest drawback is the lack of hotswappable drives. This device was intended for average users to get up and running quickly. That I do believe it meets. However, the first time a drive fails and a user needs to go through the pain of replacing one, they will be cursing this product. From what I saw, it's by no means user friendly. I would highly recommend redesigning this case and incorporate quick/easy access to the drives.

Posts like this kill me, you can't have your cake and eat it too. First of all, a real hot-swap system with IDE just doesn't work that well. Then, the whole backplane controller if you want TRUE hot-swap. This would add probably $400+ to the bill of materials which the end user would end up paying. Also, it's not that invovled, anyone popping $1,000 for a computer part should be able to use a phillips screwdriver.

This is what's involved:

1) Identify which drive is bad (which light is red and what number is next to it)
2) Unscrew the chassis using one tool (a standard phillips)
3) Pull the hard drive case out, detatch the cables which are conveniently labeled
4) Pull out the drives which are also marked (the cage is marked actually). Pull out the one that has the same number as the light that was red.
5) Insert new drive, cable up, screw back together

Total time = 10 minutes. 10 minutes down time, nothing tricky, come on man!!!

Originally posted by cbb77
I think the biggest drawback is the lack of hotswappable drives. This device was intended for average users to get up and running quickly. That I do believe it meets. However, the first time a drive fails and a user needs to go through the pain of replacing one, they will be cursing this product. From what I saw, it's by no means user friendly. I would highly recommend redesigning this case and incorporate quick/easy access to the drives.

Not to mention, when i worked as a development engineer in Dell's enterprise server group, more often than I can remember it was backplane controllers breaking. In fact, the controllers seemed less reliable than the harddrives. Replacing a backplane would not be easy or fun for an "average" user.

Originally posted by zonegray
No way you're going to get a terrabyte for under $1K with hot-swappable drives. It'd probably add $75/drive to the retail price, not to mention making the box bigger. How-swap is totally useless for home or small-business use anyway.... unless you keep a spare drive sitting around, it doesn't save you any downtime. Replacing a drive in this is no worse than replacing one in your average PC, maybe a few extra screws, but that's all. Whenever I've replacved drives in RAID arrays, screwing in the new one was the easy part. Rebuilding the array is where you hold your breath, and that's pretty unavoidable.

Besides, the vast majority of purchasers will never have to replace one.

Okay, so I'm not a fan of hot-swap. ;) But look the TStation for what it is.... a reliable drive that costs $1/GB and attaches to the network instead of a drive controller. So what if you can't upgrade it.... you can't turn a 120GB drive into a 250GB drive either.

There are lots of ways it could be made fancier, but other people already offer fancier arrays. This is interesting because it's the bare essentials at a very reasonable price, nicely integrated, and there's nothing comparable out there.

Thanks, nicely put!!!! I'm so glad when someone really understands the product and its market.

Originally posted by mattgam
Brian,
I wanted to start by thanking you for posting to this thread, having an employee of buffalo answering questions really has sold me on buying a linktheater.

It was mentioned earlier but I'd like to hdd my 2 cents that playing ifo's would be super valuable. In my setup I have a powerfile, which is a 200 disk DVD changer on my network. I can hit a web page to change the disk n the player, but I need the linktheater to to be able to open the ifo file in the video_ts folder on a netoekr share for me to be able to use it as a client. If that features happens I'll be buying one of these for every TV in my house!

thanks,
-Matt

I'll see what I can figure out about interactive IFOs from the network. Would this work as a work around:

You load your DVDs onto the TeraStation by folder, you enter the folder of the TeraStation and select the Play_All option, it will then play all of the VOBs in order. You will have a slight 2 second break between the VOBS. We do that here at the office when we're screwing off.

I think that last post was meant for the Linkstation thread . . .

Originally posted by plyons10
I agree that hot swappability is not critical for the home user (hey -- you can't have everything for under $1K, right?), but I am still very interested in what type of drive(s) I can use as replacements and what happens to extra space if I replace a 250GB drive with a 400GB drive.
If you have the 1TB model (4 x 250) and you replace a broken 250 with a 400, then the 400 will be used as a 250 drive. If you put a drive in that is too small, then the unit will still report a non-redundant array (won't rebuild).

PS - Our unit has two IDE controllers, so all four drives are set as master and have their OWN IDE cable.

Originally posted by yoh-dah
Sorry, I don't mean to hijack the Buffalo thread, but I thought I'd give a little more insight on the ReadyNAS product.

1. The ReadyNAS firmware called RAIDiator is Linux-based.

2. The RAID implementation on the ReadyNAS is hardware-driven to optimize on performance (RAID engine is embedded in the processor core). Other non-performance-critical tasks such as error handling is done in the firmware for better control.

3. There were some comments about hotswap. The ReadyNAS 600 enclosure does not support hotswap, but RAIDiator is designed to work with hotswappable enclosures (i.e. ReadyNAS 1000). Keep in mind that just having hotswappable enclosure won't buy you hotswap. The OS needs to be aware of it and support it.

4. It's actually pretty simple to replace a failed disk. Remove 3 thumbscrews on the enclosure, pop open the top, remove 4 screws to release the drive cage, and remove 4 screws securing the disk.

5. Someone questioned the need for SATA. The ReadyNAS has 4 distinct SATA channels and they all act in master mode. With the disk striping involved in performing RAID operations, it pays to not have to switch between master and slave mode required with shared IDE bus. Also, the thin SATA cabling makes for better airflow, especially important in a small 4-disk enclosure.

6. Several people mentioned what would happen if disks are replaced with larger capacity disks and whether the new capacity can be utilized. The ReadyNAS has full volume management capability to handle this. So if you replace your 250GB HDDs one at a time with 400GB disks, you can create an additional volume with the leftover 150GB space while retaining your original volume.

7. RAIDiator OS is embedded on a compact flash. This means if one day you want to do a complete re-install onto a set of 600GB disks, simply replace your disks, and it'll automatically perform an installation using the new disks. You can start accessing the box in as little as 30 minutes.

8. The ReadyNAS comes with very conservative performance settings to ensure data integrity. But there are performance tweaking options if you're one of those with the need for speed ;-) You can elect to disable journalling and enable disk writecache if for some reason you wanted to double your write performance. Granted you should connect a UPS to ensure you don't lose data in the write cache or you don't want to wait several hours to check the filesystem in the event of power failure, but a fairly basic $30 UPS with a USB monitoring interface is all you need.

9. With regard to plyons10 comment on whether he's comfortable with firmware updates, the guys that designed the ReadyNAS come with enterprise-level RAID background, and they designed the highly integrated network storage processor with a RAID core and tightly coupled that with the embedded firmware. So it's definitely not a fly-by-night operation. And if you ever did want to update the firmware, it takes only 2 mouse clicks.

10. Probably something that folks on this board won't care much about, but the ReadyNAS product was designed more for the small/medium sized office environments, and as such it supports more advanced features such as multiple security options, such as support for domains and Active Directory Service. Someone mentioned the price being a little higher, but if you compared it to other products in the same category, it's less than half as much. Perhaps if there's enough pull, there could be a future ReadyNAS product offering that would be more affordable.

Now back to the main topic...
Very nice product, I haven't played with one but we may have to pick one up and check it out. It is $600 more than the TeraStation so I don't know that they're directly comparable.

Brian, totally understand you point regarding Hot Swap and cost. Yes, it would dramatically increase the price. However it would be nice to have and make it easier for end user. That is the point that I am trying to make. In reviewing the replacement procedures, some of the steps/ diagram would intimiate some folks. I've dealt with quite a few folks who sometime jump on hardware/technologies that they don't have a real clue as to how it works, configure or how to support. As I mentioned in my second post, easier access to the drives would be recommended, as in the ReadyNAS design.

Again, I commend you for this product as it's at the perfect price point and provides some advanced features such as RAID 5 that quite a few other products don't. My comments are to only see this product get better.

Originally posted by cbb77
Brian, totally understand you point regarding Hot Swap and cost. Yes, it would dramatically increase the price. However it would be nice to have and make it easier for end user. That is the point that I am trying to make. In reviewing the replacement procedures, some of the steps/ diagram would intimiate some folks. I've dealt with quite a few folks who sometime jump on hardware/technologies that they don't have a real clue as to how it works, configure or how to support. As I mentioned in my second post, easier access to the drives would be recommended, as in the ReadyNAS design.

Again, I commend you for this product as it's at the perfect price point and provides some advanced features such as RAID 5 that quite a few other products don't. My comments are to only see this product get better.

Yeah, we could look into an even more feature-filled product, but as a whole our company doesn't specialize in medium sized business+ products, this is one of the few products that really has a true SMB market.

BrianV,

When is the PC Cast image/firmware/upgrade/? going to be available?

Also, in a previous post, you mentioned that the "OS" was on a partition. While I don't expect Buffalo to support this, does that mean that the partion could run a Linux build and maybe MythTV... so I can get my USB Tuner support? I just won't let it go... :p

Originally posted by ToadMazter
BrianV,

When is the PC Cast image/firmware/upgrade/? going to be available?

Also, in a previous post, you mentioned that the "OS" was on a partition. While I don't expect Buffalo to support this, does that mean that the partion could run a Linux build and maybe MythTV... so I can get my USB Tuner support? I just won't let it go... :p

Well the system is Linux based so that answers your question. If you could obtain root access then you could do whatever you want, but Buffalo isn't going to provide any SDK or provide any way for customers to get root.

The image will hopefully be available this month, it's the highest priority item for us on TeraStation.

Originally posted by BrianV
If you have the 1TB model (4 x 250) and you replace a broken 250 with a 400, then the 400 will be used as a 250 drive. If you put a drive in that is too small, then the unit will still report a non-redundant array (won't rebuild).

I'm assuming that the remaining space remains unaddressable as a separate volume, then?

The is slightly off topic, but I was wondering how adding external USB drives works woth the Buffalo LinkStation? How many drives can you add and is each physical drive a separate volume? Can you use a USB hub to add more drives? Thanks.

Jay

Originally posted by plyons10
I'm assuming that the remaining space remains unaddressable as a separate volume, then?
You are correct, you cannot use that data for another partition.

Originally posted by jerndl
The is slightly off topic, but I was wondering how adding external USB drives works woth the Buffalo LinkStation? How many drives can you add and is each physical drive a separate volume? Can you use a USB hub to add more drives? Thanks.

Jay

You can add 4 (of any size) and they're available as separate volumes. You CANNOT add them into a RAID array. Thus, if you added 4 300 GB drives, then you would have 4 separate 300 gig volumes in addition to your main configuration. Those drives could be used as extra storage or as backup targets for shares within side of the main array.

I haven't tested this on TeraStation yet, but hooking up a hub is not supported (not saying it won't work). I'm away right now so I can't test this feature, but perhaps I can get a co-worker to try. I know the hardware will address the mass storage devices, but I don't know if the interface will allow you to select/configure any volume after 4. I'll try and get this answer to you in due time.

Originally posted by BrianV
You can add 4 (of any size) and they're available as separate volumes. You CANNOT add them into a RAID array. Thus, if you added 4 300 GB drives, then you would have 4 separate 300 gig volumes in addition to your main configuration. Those drives could be used as extra storage or as backup targets for shares within side of the main array.

I haven't tested this on TeraStation yet, but hooking up a hub is not supported (not saying it won't work). I'm away right now so I can't test this feature, but perhaps I can get a co-worker to try. I know the hardware will address the mass storage devices, but I don't know if the interface will allow you to select/configure any volume after 4. I'll try and get this answer to you in due time. I was asking about the LinkStation. I have since looked in the owner's manual and found this:

LinkStation has two USB 2.0 ports on it. These ports can be used for adding an external USB Hard Drive or a USB Printer. LinkStation will then share the USB device to everyone on the network. There is one port on the front of LinkStation and one port on the back of LinkStation. One printer and one external USB Hard Drive can be added to either of the ports. However, two USB Printers or two USB Hard Drives cannot be added, only one of each device. To connect a USB device to LinkStation, simply plug it into one of the USB Ports and set it up in the LinkStation configuration.So it appears that you can only add one drive unless a USB hub would work. If the Linkstation could support multiple external drives it would be a way to get a decent amount of network storage on the cheap.

Jay

How is the raid handled in the TeraStation? Is it implemented in hardware or software? Have you guys ran any network performance tests on it, and if so what were the results?

Brent

Originally posted by jerndl
I was asking about the LinkStation. I have since looked in the owner's manual and found this:

So it appears that you can only add one drive unless a USB hub would work. If the Linkstation could support multiple external drives it would be a way to get a decent amount of network storage on the cheap.

Jay

I know for sure LinkStation can't handle more than one USB drive. TeraStation is rated to handle 4, whether it handles more via a USB hub is unknown by me at this point. When I return to the head office, I can check.

Originally posted by cpumagician
How is the raid handled in the TeraStation? Is it implemented in hardware or software? Have you guys ran any network performance tests on it, and if so what were the results?

Brent

It's software RAID; being behind the network interface doesn't provide any real performance advantages for hardware RAID. I did some testing at the office; I can't remember them exactly off the top of my head, but it did 100 megabytes transfer in 6 second on a standard gigabit connection (non jumbo-frame). It was about 13 seconds on a 10/100 interface.

I was just looking at the Buffalo website to research the Linkstation (I keep getting all the products mixed up) and I noticed that the terrastation is also being offered in .6G, 1G and 1.6G configurations using 160, 250 and 400G drives respectively. The .64G can be purchased for about $775 from buy dot com. They regularly have 10 - 15% off cupons that pring the price closer to the $1/gig solutoin. The 1.6G looks to retail for 2k.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/category-detail.php?categoryid=19

Anyway, good to see Buffalo offering more competitive pricing/options by varying the drive sizes.

Is it safe to assume that if you buy the .64g and put 4x400g drives in the device that it will recognize all the volumes for a total of 1.6TB?

Brian, do you know if the price of the unit will drop as hard drive prices continue to fall?

Thanks

Drew

Just got my terastation hooked up, and it really is very cool to not have a PC involved. Works out of the box. Using it to store HD TS Files.

Things that worked great....
-Setup was extremely simple via web interface
-Playback of HD TS files also worked very well

Issues
-Can't record and playback HD files at the same time. I am thinking this is probably a result of the 10/100 network limitations. May need to upgrade to a gigbit switch to do this
-Attached a Maxtor Onetouch II 300 GB USB drive to the terastation via USB. The terastation recognizes the drive fine. However, when I attempt to play the files they stutter very badly. These files play fine when attached directly to my pc via USB.

Hoping I can get this resolved as I would really like to have the drive attached to the terastaion and not directly on the PC.

Darin

Originally posted by dj7675
Just got my terastation hooked up, and it really is very cool to not have a PC involved. Works out of the box. Using it to store HD TS Files.

Things that worked great....
-Setup was extremely simple via web interface
-Playback of HD TS files also worked very well

Issues
-Can't record and playback HD files at the same time. I am thinking this is probably a result of the 10/100 network limitations. May need to upgrade to a gigbit switch to do this
-Attached a Maxtor Onetouch II 300 GB USB drive to the terastation via USB. The terastation recognizes the drive fine. However, when I attempt to play the files they stutter very badly. These files play fine when attached directly to my pc via USB.

Hoping I can get this resolved as I would really like to have the drive attached to the terastaion and not directly on the PC.

Darin

We're looking into the USB performance issue as we speak.

Originally posted by drew138
I was just looking at the Buffalo website to research the Linkstation (I keep getting all the products mixed up) and I noticed that the terrastation is also being offered in .6G, 1G and 1.6G configurations using 160, 250 and 400G drives respectively. The .64G can be purchased for about $775 from buy dot com. They regularly have 10 - 15% off cupons that pring the price closer to the $1/gig solutoin. The 1.6G looks to retail for 2k.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/category-detail.php?categoryid=19

Anyway, good to see Buffalo offering more competitive pricing/options by varying the drive sizes.

Is it safe to assume that if you buy the .64g and put 4x400g drives in the device that it will recognize all the volumes for a total of 1.6TB?

Brian, do you know if the price of the unit will drop as hard drive prices continue to fall?

Thanks

Drew

Prices will move with drive prices and new versions will come out as well. Removing the 160's and putting 400's in will just make the 400's use 160 gigs of their available storage.

It really is great to have a company that participates here and that is so responsive on issues. Thanks again....Darin

I agree. It's great to finally see a company listening to users.

Darin, I think you might be the first person on the board with the box. Can you comment on noise level under a performance load. How was the volume when the box streaming the TS flies.

Lastly, do devices like the Terastation get firmware/software updates similar to the LinkTheater that could solve performance issues like the usb drive support.

Ok, really lastly, I wonder if there would be any legitimate interest in a Powerbuy for the TS and LT direct from Buffalo?

Drew

Originally posted by drew138
I agree. It's great to finally see a company listening to users.

Darin, I think you might be the first person on the board with the box. Can you comment on noise level under a performance load. How was the volume when the box streaming the TS flies.

Lastly, do devices like the Terastation get firmware/software updates similar to the LinkTheater that could solve performance issues like the usb drive support.

Ok, really lastly, I wonder if there would be any legitimate interest in a Powerbuy for the TS and LT direct from Buffalo?

Drew

If a bundle buy happens it would likely be setup as an individual sku with both products in them or certain resellers would combine them.

The TeraStations firmware update will be a downloadable application that you download to your PC, run, and update. It'll be similar to LinkStations.

The thing is VERY quiet for what it is, I'll wait for a purchasing user to comment on that.

Originally posted by drew138
I agree. It's great to finally see a company listening to users.

Darin, I think you might be the first person on the board with the box. Can you comment on noise level under a performance load. How was the volume when the box streaming the TS flies.

Lastly, do devices like the Terastation get firmware/software updates similar to the LinkTheater that could solve performance issues like the usb drive support.

Ok, really lastly, I wonder if there would be any legitimate interest in a Powerbuy for the TS and LT direct from Buffalo?

Drew

-Later tonight I will pay attention to the sound level. It is in my A/V closet, so I wasn't paying much attention to it.

BrianV,

Do you think iff I upgrade to a gigbit network, I would be able to record and play at the same time from th e Terastation? I can currently do this when the Maxtor USB drive is connected directly to the PC.

Thanks,

Darin

Brian, are you going to have more online vendors for these soon? I've been waiting for a little more choice, but if I wait much longer I'm in danger of falling out of the Early Adopters Club.

The usb drive performance may be due to a kernel bug described here:

http://www.revogear.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=90

if the Tera is derived from the Kuro/Linkstation. Basically there is a printk call which eats cpu time and fills syslogs on usb read/writes. It imposes about a 33% hit on usb drive performance.

See the wiki for more information on this as it relates to Kuro/Linkstation:

http://www.kurobox.com/online/tiki-index.php?page=HardDrivePerformance

It is possible to fix it by commenting out the offending printk call in transport.c. Unfortunately it's in the kernel (not a module) itself so you have to flash the rom which is risky and can leave you with a brick. This problem which affects kuro, kuro-hg, and linkstation was noted in Oct and there is still no kernel update addressing it from Buffalo.

Of course it's possible the Tera has a different kernel than the other Buffalo NAS's - does anyone know for sure?

Originally posted by BrianV
You can add 4 (of any size) and they're available as separate volumes. You CANNOT add them into a RAID array. Thus, if you added 4 300 GB drives, then you would have 4 separate 300 gig volumes in addition to your main configuration. Those drives could be used as extra storage or as backup targets for shares within side of the main array.

I haven't tested this on TeraStation yet, but hooking up a hub is not supported (not saying it won't work). I'm away right now so I can't test this feature, but perhaps I can get a co-worker to try. I know the hardware will address the mass storage devices, but I don't know if the interface will allow you to select/configure any volume after 4. I'll try and get this answer to you in due time.

The controller regonizes the devices on the hub, but as I thought the interface and software only allows use for 4 USB drives.

Originally posted by jerndl
I was asking about the LinkStation. I have since looked in the owner's manual and found this:

So it appears that you can only add one drive unless a USB hub would work. If the Linkstation could support multiple external drives it would be a way to get a decent amount of network storage on the cheap.

Jay

LinkStation can only handle one drive PERIOD.

Originally posted by dj7675
-Later tonight I will pay attention to the sound level. It is in my A/V closet, so I wasn't paying much attention to it.

BrianV,

Do you think iff I upgrade to a gigbit network, I would be able to record and play at the same time from th e Terastation? I can currently do this when the Maxtor USB drive is connected directly to the PC.

Thanks,

Darin

I can't gurantee anything because every network and component is different, and I haven't tested your case, but overall transfer rates are more than twice as fast in regular Gigabit mode.

Originally posted by zonegray
Brian, are you going to have more online vendors for these soon? I've been waiting for a little more choice, but if I wait much longer I'm in danger of falling out of the Early Adopters Club.

The 0.6 and 1.6 should be available now or within days from regular e-sellers. The initial lot of 1.0's went to CDW and Fry's, the next batch will go through regular distribution. You should be able to get them with relative ease in the next week or so.

Originally posted by thommason
The usb drive performance may be due to a kernel bug described here:

http://www.revogear.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=90

if the Tera is derived from the Kuro/Linkstation. Basically there is a printk call which eats cpu time and fills syslogs on usb read/writes. It imposes about a 33% hit on usb drive performance.

See the wiki for more information on this as it relates to Kuro/Linkstation:

http://www.kurobox.com/online/tiki-index.php?page=HardDrivePerformance

It is possible to fix it by commenting out the offending printk call in transport.c. Unfortunately it's in the kernel (not a module) itself so you have to flash the rom which is risky and can leave you with a brick. This problem which affects kuro, kuro-hg, and linkstation was noted in Oct and there is still no kernel update addressing it from Buffalo.

Of course it's possible the Tera has a different kernel than the other Buffalo NAS's - does anyone know for sure?

They use the same kernel, but they're taking it seriously on getting it fixed in Tera. LinkStation is a slower device so the performance isn't a huge deal, and Kuro is open-source and is offered with no support. TeraStation requires this issue to be fixed.

Good to hear the issue will be fixed. I really like being able to attach USB drives directly to the terastating and not a PC. Keep us posted.

DJ7675,

You mentioned that you are using the TeraStation to record. Can you give me a brief overview of how that is setup? ie, CableTV STB--->Firewire-->PC--->Ethernet--->Terastation.... or, Antenna--->HDTVWonder in WindowsMCE2k5--->Ethernet--->TeraStation, or??? Thanks for your help!

Adam

I am using an r5000 to record hd. The modify your dish,dirctv,Bell,starchoice, or 4dtv system and you can record directly to pc. Info at www.r5000hd.com. Works perfect.

Originally posted by BrianV
They use the same kernel, but they're taking it seriously on getting it fixed in Tera. LinkStation is a slower device so the performance isn't a huge deal, and Kuro is open-source and is offered with no support. TeraStation requires this issue to be fixed.

Given that it has a ~33% impact on real world read performance I'm not sure I'd characterize it as "not a huge deal" on the Linkstation. For streaming HDTV via samba (which is clearly a basic functionality of the LS) this is important. It's true the Kuro might be expected to have a lower level of support but it was, after all the Kuro community that identified the bug and the trivial change in the kernel needed to fix it. Surely you can do better than that...

I hope the fixed kernel (firmware) will be avialble for the non-Tera's also!

Hello,

This product looks really nice. I have some n00b questions here as I only have an academic knowledge of RAID.

My main question is how does this handle the problem of multiple drive failures? From some reading I've done, people suggest that RAID5 is not good for doing backups (though maybe if you use a spare) because of the way in which drives fail. If all drives in the array are of similar enough build, ie. very similar MTBF characteristics or are a part of the same batch, then it is likely that multiple drives will fail within hours of each other. Is this problem addressed in some way by this product? Can you use a spare with it?

I suppose you could buy 2 extra 250Gb drives and rotate them through once a year or something.

Thanks for any help.

Gowry

To be more specific, does the unit have an auto-shutdown in the event of a drive failure?

Originally posted by thommason
Given that it has a ~33% impact on real world read performance I'm not sure I'd characterize it as "not a huge deal" on the Linkstation. For streaming HDTV via samba (which is clearly a basic functionality of the LS) this is important. It's true the Kuro might be expected to have a lower level of support but it was, after all the Kuro community that identified the bug and the trivial change in the kernel needed to fix it. Surely you can do better than that...

I hope the fixed kernel (firmware) will be avialble for the non-Tera's also!

The LinkStation has a total throughput of like 29 Mbps, and it's been shipping for over 1.5 years with no formal complaints on it. To date, it really hasn't been a concern, but it is on Tera.

Originally posted by Gowry
Hello,

This product looks really nice. I have some n00b questions here as I only have an academic knowledge of RAID.

My main question is how does this handle the problem of multiple drive failures? From some reading I've done, people suggest that RAID5 is not good for doing backups (though maybe if you use a spare) because of the way in which drives fail. If all drives in the array are of similar enough build, ie. very similar MTBF characteristics or are a part of the same batch, then it is likely that multiple drives will fail within hours of each other. Is this problem addressed in some way by this product? Can you use a spare with it?

I suppose you could buy 2 extra 250Gb drives and rotate them through once a year or something.

Thanks for any help.

Gowry

RAID 5 is the best all around solution for backup. Enterprise servers use it more often than not. Your thoughts of the drives all failing at the same time are somewhat inaccurate. That would be like buying two Honda Accords and assuming their headlights are going to go out within minutes of each other or their transmissions will go out.

Originally posted by plyons10
To be more specific, does the unit have an auto-shutdown in the event of a drive failure?

Yes it shuts down in the event a drive failure.

I'm so darn torn on this. Bouncing back and forth between this, a Linkstation, and building a server.

The Linkstation is 300Gigs which is just barely enough for my future music needs, but will suffice. I don't store tons of video and can use my PC for that.

The Terastation is expensive and when I think about it I lean towards building a server with 4x250Gigs in RAID5, just so I'll understand it better if something goes wrong. But then I price that out and it's like $1,000 to build a box once you factor in the drives and a decent RAID card.

Nick.... This is just my two cents...

There is some discussion in this thread, and much more on other boards that I've read about building your own RAID server, about the amount of technical detail and tweaking it takes to truly establish a secure build.

It's pretty easy to get the basic setup going, no doubt. But I personally worry about things like matching the power supply and drive / RIAD card compatibility, among other things, that I believe it truly is worth it to have a product whose integration and reliability has been designed in from the very beginning as (presumably) has undergone some stress testing.

Think about power management alone... this NAS has fully sutomizable options for drive spin-down etc. I'm sure this box will save you $$$ on your electric bill versus a home brew solution. How much is that worth over the expected lifetime of the product?


Sounds like you should wait for the smaller unit to come out.

Originally posted by BrianV
RAID 5 is the best all around solution for backup. Enterprise servers use it more often than not. Your thoughts of the drives all failing at the same time are somewhat inaccurate. That would be like buying two Honda Accords and assuming their headlights are going to go out within minutes of each other or their transmissions will go out.

I've seen it happen. I had a batch of three Dell PC's a few years back that were all purchased at the same time, and all their hard drives all had physical failures within a week of each other. Many times PC's are typically on 24/7, which makes it a different issue than a car that probably doesn't match wear and tear between different instances.

But since the thing is smart enough to shut down in case of a drive failure (VERY NICE!), I'm not that worried about it.

(And yes I know 3 isn't a big sample to draw conclusions from, but that's all that was bought at the same time, I'll never now if I had 5 or 6 if I would have had the same problem or not).

Perhaps this is a better question for a new thread, but I'm wondering how people are claiming that they can build a Terabyte RAID system on their own for roughly (or under) $1,000.

If I were to build one myself, I would want to use SATA drives. 250 Gig Drives are going for roughly $150. Add a case, MB, CPU, memory and a hardware RAID card capable of RAID 5 and you are hard pressed to hit $1,000. Also, if I were to build one myself, I would also add a hot swap drive cage that added roughly $100 to the price.

Add gigabit ethernet, an OS and your time to dial-in this setup and I can't see how one can setup their own RAID system at a similar price point.

Well, avale, you're on the mark, the only caveat being that the Terrastation probably uses software RAID, so that reduces the cost. Shucks, I have a Promise SX150 card sitting around and I'm not inclined to try it.

Not to mention.... if you want to stuff four hard drives into an ATX case, you have to choose it carefully... or go with a monster-sized tower.

Some bad news regarding the terastation and attaching external USB 2 drives to it. I have a Maxtor Onetouch USB 2.0 drive that had some HD TS files on them. These play back fine when attached directly to my pc and played via a MyHD 120 card. I attach the same drive to the Terastation and expected to be able to play these same files. I found it could not, so I called customer support and they looked into it for a few days. Today, I received a call back and was informed that it will not be able to work. Specifically, I was told that because it is software Raid, which takes processing power, that it can't keep up transfering the files via USB and then sending them over a network.
From MikeV's and others comments it seemed that this issue was going to be solved. It is very disappointing that it doesn't sound like it will. I was looking forward to simply attaching up to 4 external USB drives to the Terastation and not having to rely on any PC's for storage. This unit seemed built for being able to attach more storage and being expandable and I am very surprised that it cannot.
MikeV have you heard the same thing with attached USB storage on the Terastation?

Darin

I was wondering how people thought this compared to the LaCie Biggest F800 Terabyte Raid array.

From what I can tell the LaCie offers:

Hardware Raid
1TB, 1.6TB and 2TB capacities
Hot Swappable
Firewire and USB capabilities

Thoughts

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10595

Originally posted by BrianV
The LinkStation has a total throughput of like 29 Mbps, and it's been shipping for over 1.5 years with no formal complaints on it. To date, it really hasn't been a concern, but it is on Tera.

29 MB/s is the throughput from an IDE drive for a Linkstation. It is 7.5 MB/s from usb2 and 10 MB/s from usb2 if you fix the kernel bug. The kernel bug also has a big (~24%) cpu utilization hit associated with all the syslog activity it generates.

Originally posted by PeterS
I was wondering how people thought this compared to the LaCie Biggest F800 Terabyte Raid array.

From what I can tell the LaCie offers:

Hardware Raid
1TB, 1.6TB and 2TB capacities
Hot Swappable
Firewire and USB capabilities

Thoughts

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10595

Different market. It's not a NAS: no Ethernet port.
You'd still need to run a PC continuously.
Seems like you could build your own for $1500.

LaCie does (or soon will) sell network drives:
Ethernet Disk mini (http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10592)
Ethernet Disk (http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10587)

Originally posted by dj7675
Some bad news regarding the terastation and attaching external USB 2 drives to it. I have a Maxtor Onetouch USB 2.0 drive that had some HD TS files on them. These play back fine when attached directly to my pc and played via a MyHD 120 card. I attach the same drive to the Terastation and expected to be able to play these same files. I found it could not, so I called customer support and they looked into it for a few days. Today, I received a call back and was informed that it will not be able to work. Specifically, I was told that because it is software Raid, which takes processing power, that it can't keep up transfering the files via USB and then sending them over a network.
From MikeV's and others comments it seemed that this issue was going to be solved. It is very disappointing that it doesn't sound like it will. I was looking forward to simply attaching up to 4 external USB drives to the Terastation and not having to rely on any PC's for storage. This unit seemed built for being able to attach more storage and being expandable and I am very surprised that it cannot.
MikeV have you heard the same thing with attached USB storage on the Terastation?

Darin

That information is wrong, it has to do with the USB kernel flaw in the product. It's not something we can't overcome.

I'm a little confused about this whole issue. Why is it so important to be able to use attached storage with this device? You know there is going to be some type of performance hit, and the data on the attached storage is not going to be protected by RAID. Maybe I'm looking at this product from a different angle, but I see it as a way to keep my huge library of media files on a device that has some redundancy, and I know I have to buy it big from the start because the expandability through USB2 is a non-issue because of lack of redundancy.

I'm not trying to be difficult, I honestly don't understand the concept. I guess portability is one advantage, but I just don't see that being a big deal in my situation.

Originally posted by dj7675
From MikeV's and others comments it seemed that this issue was going to be solved. It is very disappointing that it doesn't sound like it will. I was looking forward to simply attaching up to 4 external USB drives to the Terastation and not having to rely on any PC's for storage. This unit seemed built for being able to attach more storage and being expandable and I am very surprised that it cannot.

Originally posted by turls
I'm a little confused about this whole issue. Why is it so important to be able to use attached storage with this device? You know there is going to be some type of performance hit, and the data on the attached storage is not going to be protected by RAID. Maybe I'm looking at this product from a different angle, but I see it as a way to keep my huge library of media files on a device that has some redundancy, and I know I have to buy it big from the start because the expandability through USB2 is a non-issue because of lack of redundancy.

I'm not trying to be difficult, I honestly don't understand the concept. I guess portability is one advantage, but I just don't see that being a big deal in my situation.

Portability really isn't an advantage here either since TeraStation formats the drives as EXT3. It can use a FAT16/32 drive but then you have limited file sizes and limited folder/file name depths.

Originally posted by BrianV
Portability really isn't an advantage here either since TeraStation formats the drives as EXT3. It can use a FAT16/32 drive but then you have limited file sizes and limited folder/file name depths.

Brian,

Just to be clear: Are you speaking of the internal drives here, or the external, USB-connected drives?

Originally posted by turls
I'm a little confused about this whole issue. Why is it so important to be able to use attached storage with this device? You know there is going to be some type of performance hit, and the data on the attached storage is not going to be protected by RAID. Maybe I'm looking at this product from a different angle, but I see it as a way to keep my huge library of media files on a device that has some redundancy, and I know I have to buy it big from the start because the expandability through USB2 is a non-issue because of lack of redundancy.

I'm not trying to be difficult, I honestly don't understand the concept. I guess portability is one advantage, but I just don't see that being a big deal in my situation.

Redundancy is great, but not everything is critical and needs protected via raid. The USB 2 ports are advertised as a quick way to attach more storage. I am just using it to store HD recordings, primarily movies, which take up about 20GB per movie. By attaching 4 400 GB drives for future storage that is an additional 1.6TB of storage. The USB ports aren't very useful if they can't be used for playback in my case which, at least for me, is a nice feature of the terastation. I do look forward to this being fixed pretty soon.
MikeV, thanks for your reply. I am just a bit confused when I talked directly to a tech support person (Sergio I believe) and he was very sure that it was something that wasn't "fixable" and a limitation of the processor.
The terastation really is working great in all other regards. I really like the fact that is only used as a storage device and not a pc with all of the headaches that implies. And thanks again to MikeV for participating.

I do hope the external drive issue gets fixed, if, as Brian says, it can.

But I think it's important to note that for most users, this throughput constraint wouldn't become an issue. I personally would only envision the external drives as backups for the most critical data I have. Backups that could safely be taken off-site.

All the primary access for myself would be done via the main array.

Originally posted by lsarver
Brian,

Just to be clear: Are you speaking of the internal drives here, or the external, USB-connected drives?
External

Originally posted by dj7675
Redundancy is great, but not everything is critical and needs protected via raid. The USB 2 ports are advertised as a quick way to attach more storage. I am just using it to store HD recordings, primarily movies, which take up about 20GB per movie. By attaching 4 400 GB drives for future storage that is an additional 1.6TB of storage. The USB ports aren't very useful if they can't be used for playback in my case which, at least for me, is a nice feature of the terastation. I do look forward to this being fixed pretty soon.
MikeV, thanks for your reply. I am just a bit confused when I talked directly to a tech support person (Sergio I believe) and he was very sure that it was something that wasn't "fixable" and a limitation of the processor.
The terastation really is working great in all other regards. I really like the fact that is only used as a storage device and not a pc with all of the headaches that implies. And thanks again to MikeV for participating.

I'll talk to Sergio and figure out what he knows that I don't know. Sergio is our highest technical support rep and he knows the inner-workings of LinkStation really well. Based on what I know from the Kurobox world the performance isn't CPU related it's a bug in USB altogether that causes unnecessary SYSLOG traffic slowing down the processor significantly. Also, TeraStation has a much faster CPU than LinkStation and the original KuroBox.

Brian or anybody using TeraStation,

I couldn't figure out how to use a NTP server to pull the time from the internet, it would always refuse the web address I gave it. If anyone can shed some light on that, I would really appreciate. Some default time servers options might be useful there...

Also, is there any security risk involved in letting the TeraStation pull the clock time from the web ? I surely don't want to expose a terabyte of data or even my internal network out in the open...

Thierry

It's pretty safe to use NTP to update a client such as the Terrastation. You're just making a single outbound connection to a known server. I even use it on Windows servers ;)

Running a public reference server is slightly risky, but even then, I've only seen one security flaw published in the last 3-4 years.

Possible problems you may be having include the usual... if the Terrastation can't do a DNS lookup of your NTP host... firewall possible blocking outbound connections.

Originally posted by zonegray
It's pretty safe to use NTP to update a client such as the Terrastation. You're just making a single outbound connection to a known server. I even use it on Windows servers ;)

Running a public reference server is slightly risky, but even then, I've only seen one security flaw published in the last 3-4 years.

Possible problems you may be having include the usual... if the Terrastation can't do a DNS lookup of your NTP host... firewall possible blocking outbound connections.

Yeah TeraStaiton isn't configured with DNS information, thus the problem is one of two things:

TeraStation was given a static address and not a gateway. Without a gateway it can't get out.

-OR-

TeraStation isn't resolving DNS (which it won't), so you need to enter the NTP's IP Address not the hostname. To do this, open command prompt and ping the NTP hostname.

For instance:

ping time.nist.gov

Result = 192.43.244.18

Use that IP as your NTP server address.

Originally posted by BrianV
Yeah TeraStaiton isn't configured with DNS information, thus the problem is one of two things:

TeraStation was given a static address and not a gateway. Without a gateway it can't get out.

-OR-

TeraStation isn't resolving DNS (which it won't), so you need to enter the NTP's IP Address not the hostname. To do this, open command prompt and ping the NTP hostname.

For instance:

ping time.nist.gov

Result = 192.43.244.18

Use that IP as your NTP server address.

I tried this yesterday and even using the IP address doesn't work. I am also pretty sure that DNS is working, 'cause the unit was able to resolve my smtp server name in order to send me a test email.

So far, NTP not working on two different networks. 'System Information' says:

Enabled (Failed renew)

greg

Originally posted by gregz
I tried this yesterday and even using the IP address doesn't work. I am also pretty sure that DNS is working, 'cause the unit was able to resolve my smtp server name in order to send me a test email.

So far, NTP not working on two different networks. 'System Information' says:

Enabled (Failed renew)

greg

You're right it does use DNS, LinkStation does not so that's where I got confused. I'll see if I can get NTP to work on my TeraStation.

Originally posted by BrianV
I'll talk to Sergio and figure out what he knows that I don't know. Sergio is our highest technical support rep and he knows the inner-workings of LinkStation really well. Based on what I know from the Kurobox world the performance isn't CPU related it's a bug in USB altogether that causes unnecessary SYSLOG traffic slowing down the processor significantly. Also, TeraStation has a much faster CPU than LinkStation and the original KuroBox.

Brian,

Any further word on this?

Thanks,

Darin

Originally posted by dj7675
Brian,

Any further word on this?

Thanks,

Darin

Checked with the head engineer of Tera and Kuro and he said it's definitely from unnecessary SYSLOG traffic while using USB. He said it's fixable in the same way it is with Kuro.

Thanks for the update. It is great that it is fixable. Any idea when it may be fixed? It won't be too long until I fill up the Terastation, and would love to add a couple of 300G drives to it.
It would be helpful to know what kind of throughput is possible from an external USB drive. That way terastation owners could what kind of media they could store on it. Not sure if it is possible or not, but could prove to be helpful. Or if it is going to be fixed soon, it is a non issue.

Thanks again.

Darin

Here is a good review from none other than "trusted review". They give it an editors choice award.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=1213

The gang at Buffalo should be comended for building this box! It really is quite awesome. I'll be getting one in a few months.

Drew

Originally posted by drew138
Here is a good review from none other than "trusted review". They give it an editors choice award.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=1213

The gang at Buffalo should be comended for building this box! It really is quite awesome. I'll be getting one in a few months.

Drew

Thanks, I sent that link to the Buffalo US team!

Originally posted by BrianV
Thanks, I sent that link to the Buffalo US team!

No problem! Just doing my part to promote a great product. PM me for my address where you can send my promotional box for my work ;)

keep up the great work.


Drew

Well since it was a UK ad, you could hit up the UK office and see if they're willing to send you a free unit for your work, but if I were you I wouldn't bother ;)

We already have every editor in the world asking for a TeraStation, and we've only allocated a small amount of hardware for editorial reviews.

Originally posted by BrianV
Well since it was a UK ad, you could hit up the UK office and see if they're willing to send you a free unit for your work, but if I were you I wouldn't bother ;)

We already have every editor in the world asking for a TeraStation, and we've only allocated a small amount of hardware for editorial reviews.

As is only proper. You've got plenty of buzz going already. I'd rather see the price fall another $50 bucks for us schmoos, than 100 hardware reviewers get their free boxes.

Brian, just to touch on the power of reviews, they seem to be especially influentiual among the digital photo crowd. Two examples, HP isn't agressive about getting their printers reviewed, and so they haven't penetrated the digital photog hobbyists & pros nearly as much as they should, Canon and Epson own the space. Their Designjet series has gone virtually unnoticed, despite some very happy customers.

Also, the Epson P2000 disk wallet got a couple of rave reviews, such as this one:

http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/accessories/P-2000.shtml

And for the next two months, you couldn't get your hands on one. That same site also reviewed the ReadyNAS, though it hasn't generated as much buzz.

Some reviews are wasteful and some are very influential. The photo crowd seems to talk to each other a lot, and the pros and freelancers would seem to be prime candidates for TStation.

Zone:

Thanks for the advice, we're focusing a lot of attention on the photo channel.

There seem to be about a half-dozen sites that drive the photo hobby. Luminous Landscape, DPReview, DigitalOutback, Steve's Digicams, Rob Galbraith. Galbraith doesn't do many reviews, but he has mostly pros and freelancers on his forums.

There are zillions of other photo sites that remain under the radar, and perhaps a couple of other influential ones that I failed to mention.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled Home Theater programming. ;)

Anything to drive more volume, lower disk prices and increased end user support to drive costs down!

Drew

We have created the 0.6TB version (4x160) for those purposes. The discount to create a 4x120 isn't significant and starts eating into the LinkStation market. It's unlikely the TeraStation will ever be less than $700 because we have our LinkStation line to serve that pricepoint. TeraStation pricing will remain pretty consistent over time, just capacities will go up over time.

Originally posted by BrianV
We have created the 0.6TB version (4x160) for those purposes. The discount to create a 4x120 isn't significant and starts eating into the LinkStation market. It's unlikely the TeraStation will ever be less than $700 because we have our LinkStation line to serve that pricepoint. TeraStation pricing will remain pretty consistent over time, just capacities will go up over time.

Very good points. More reasons to buy now. :-)

Price per gigabite is probably the better metric to measure.

Drew

Has anyone seen this review on amazon.com?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0007MHF1I/qid=1112294705/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-3210158-7858335?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846

BlackFire, we get this a lot. It takes 2+ hours to fully build the RAID array, but the device itself lets you access, read, and write to the array before it's completed building.

Most users do performance tests shortly after they get the RAID going, in the RAID5 case they're performance testing against an array that's still building. That's why the numbers are significantly slower. If you wait for the array to rebuild it'll be faster.

That users comments about usable space are inaccurate too. A marketed 120 GB drive actually only has 110 GB of space on it (due to the 1024MB equals an actual gig). The drive manufacturers label their disks this way, not us.

Originally posted by dj7675
Issues
-Can't record and playback HD files at the same time. I am thinking this is probably a result of the 10/100 network limitations. May need to upgrade to a gigbit switch to do this


Has anyone determined whether this issue is fixed with an upgrade to GB ethernet?

DW, I'm anxiously awaiting this too as I don't have the capability of real-time HD recording to TeraStation.

Another question to add to the test is whether JumboFrame 7K helps on top of standard 1000.

Does anyone have these in stock yet? I mean at a reasonable dealer, with reasonable pricing?

Thanks

I was one of the first to buy one of these, also at Fry's. I took it back two weeks later, not because it didn't work but because it was too slow to upload. In RAID 5 configuration, I only got about 4.8 MB/s to the device. Down was better, about
10.5 MB/s. Read my review at CNET:

http://reviews.cnet.com/Buffalo_TeraStation_Network_Attached_Storage_1_0TB/4505-3382_7-31299300.html

I changed my mind about keeping it and in the end, I got an Infrant ReadyNAS 600 and put 4 WD250JD drives in it. I also had to add an external 10cm fan to keep the unit cool. I may relocate it all in a microATX case with better cooling.

The RedayNAS gets upload rates of about 8.5 MB/s and downloads at about 23MB/s or much faster than the Buffalo. Also, the ReadyNAS lets you switch off journaling which appears to really increase write times. To protect against power failures you need a small UPS to power the ReadyNAS so that it can shut down gracefully.

I also learned that packing four 250GB disks in a box generates a lot of heat. The
TeraStation uses the low power WD Caviar drives that run much cooler than the Maxtor or regular WD drives I tried.

hkgee,

You bought the Readynas w/o drives, that is, seperately from the drives?

hkgee... I'm confused too. I've only seen the Ready NAS with drives, and that costs nearly SIXTY PERCENT MORE than the Buffalo box!!!!!!

They are available without drives. On eBay see: 5764596270.

Another way to build the same thing at low cost is to use a reByte. Attach it as the boot drive on a motherboard with a dual IDE controller. Add three identical drives, boot and setup a RAID 5 array, assign an IP address, and put it on your network. This is the setup I had originally and it worked fine. I just wanted more drives. Total cost with a cheap mobo, case and power supply, using 250 GB drives should be under $800 and give you about 600 GB of NAS storage. See: h**p://www.rebyte.com/ for details.

HKGEE,

How long did you wait before performing your speed tests? According to Brian, it takes 2 hours to initially build the full RAID 5 setup. If you tested before it was complete, then you were getting a significant speed hit.

Thanks

Peter

Here are some performance numbers:

Test Notes:
RAID-5 Mode
All figures are in megaBYTES per second.
1 MB = 1,024,000 KB (NOT 1,000,000)
Gigabit Mode is standard 10/100/1000 (not Jumbo)

LinkStation (10/100):
Upload Speed - 4.8 MB / sec
Download Speed - 7.8 MB / sec

TeraStation (10/100):
Upload Speed - 4.1 MB / sec
Download Speed - 7.8 MB / sec

TeraStation (Gigabit):
Upload Speed - 5.4 MB / sec
Download Speed - 11.4 MB / sec

If you copy while rebuilding an array you get sub 2 MB / sec numbers.

So the ReadyNAS is really twice as fast as the Buffalo Terastation then.

Given that you can buy the ReadyNAS without drives for about $600, and the 4 250gb drives (Raid Edition WD Caviar) for about $550, then you are looking only at a $150 premium on the ReadyNAS.

Anyone else looking at this like this?

PeterS

Yes, I did my testing over several days. Your comments about the $150 is the way I see it too. To be fair to the TeraStation, it is quite small, very quiet, and the drives do run cooler than the drives in my ReadyNAS. When you are backing up 20-30 GB of data, the extra upload speed is a benefit. If you do it overnight with the TeraStation, it might not matter to you.

One point I forgot to mention that is really nice about both systems is that they can be setup to send you emails to let you know how they're doing. It was useful to get daily status reports about drive capacity from the TeraStation. With the ReadyNAS, I really appreciated knowing that my drives were getting too warm before I installed the extre cooling fan. I doubt you'll have heating problems if you buy their system complete with drives installed.

One other really great thing about ReadyNAS is that Infrant has an active users forum on their site. The turn around time for technical questions was only a day.

I assume with the WD Caviar SATA 250 Raid Edition drives, that heat will not be a problem. I would also purchase it and add my own drives. I am also assuming that I could put 400 gb drives into it at a later date as well.

Can you tell me about how easy it is to get at the drives vs. the Terastation?

PeterS

As described earlier in this thread, much easier to get to the drives in the ReadyNAS. Just remove the four front panel screws. Then you are looking right
at the drive bay. Remove the four drive bay mounting screws and pull forward.
Attach the two drive rails to each drive. Slide the drive into the bay and fasten with two screws per drive. Repeat 3 more times. Remove case cover (3 screws) to gain access to the SATA data and power cables, plug them onto the drives, slide drive bay back into the case. Fasten down with 4 screws. Fasten front panel, 4 screws, reattach chassis cover 3 screws. Whole process shouldn't take more than 15 minutes if you know which end of a screwdriver to use ;<)

Originally posted by hkgee
PeterS

As described earlier in this thread, much easier to get to the drives in the ReadyNAS. Just remove the four front panel screws. Then you are looking right
at the drive bay. Remove the four drive bay mounting screws and pull forward.
Attach the two drive rails to each drive. Slide the drive into the bay and fasten with two screws per drive. Repeat 3 more times. Remove case cover (3 screws) to gain access to the SATA data and power cables, plug them onto the drives, slide drive bay back into the case. Fasten down with 4 screws. Fasten front panel, 4 screws, reattach chassis cover 3 screws. Whole process shouldn't take more than 15 minutes if you know which end of a screwdriver to use ;<)

Loading a TeraStation full of drives (or replacing all four) shouldn't take more than 10 minutes if you know what a screwdriver is. Ours is similar to theirs except we have more screws (17 total I think).

Does anyone know if the ReadyNAS's USB ports will support external HDs? It is not mentioned in their literature (Printer, Wireless, etc.) but I couldn't see why not.

Thanks

Not for nothing... but wouldn't it be more proper to start a ReadyNas thread?

PeterS

The ReadyNas ports don't support external USB drives. One is used for the UPS and the other for a USB printer.

I'm all for a ReadyNas thread. The forum at Infrant is likely to be more informative though since it's moderated by their support personnel.

Buffalo Terastation - Very Slow Ethernet Speeds

BrianV & other folks,

I bought a 1 TB TeraStation and hooked it up a couple of days back. Here is my setup:

My networking hub is a Netgear GS105 gigabit switch.

I have hooked up the following to the above switch using the same types of cables (cat5k):
- a desktop PC with a gigabit ethernet card
- laptop with gigabit ethernet connection
- Buffalo Terastation (1TB).

I setup the Terastation in "standard mode" (non-RAIDed mode). I can see this on the Terastation status web page. All the four disks show up as available and empty.

I took a ~92 MB file currently stored on my desktop PC and transferred it to the Buffalo TeraStation folder. The transfer took ~47 seconds (16 Mbps).

I took the same 92 MB file currently stored on my desktop PC and transferred it to my laptop connected to the same gigabit switch. The transfer took only ~5 seconds (~150 Mbps).

I repeated this test using other files and saw similar results. TeraStation is very slow.

I called up the tech support and spoke to a representative. He said he was unaware of any speed issues. I have seen other users in this forum complaining about slow network speeds.

The Buffalo Tech representative told me that one problem could be that the Terastation may not be negotiating the right speed with the autosensing port on the gigabit switch. He suggested that I should try locking up the port speed on the switch to 1 Gb. I dont have a managed switch (it is way more expensive than what I can afford for my home network).

Any ideas? What can I do to speed up transfers? Given that I am not configuring my RAID or anything of that sort, why is it so slo? Is it a defective unit?

Thanks.
-bmasti

PS: I mistakenly posted this in a separate thread - I was unable to undo it - apoligies!

I'll test those same conditions and let you know what I see. I haven't played around much with the Tera in non-RAID5 but I recall the performance being real nice.

ALSO, I'm out of the office this entire week on business travel so I won't be replying as quickly. Thanks!

I finally got my TS, and I have yet to see anything approaching Gigabit speeds. Still testing, but it does seem that the link is negotiated properly, the array is fully built and checked. I can't seem to get above 50Kbit on writes and about 90Kbit on reads.

That said, even when two PC's on my net talk to each other, I rarely approach Gigabit speeds, but it's usually around 300Kbit. The TS is slower, but I'm not really sure if it's an Ethernet issue or a TS system issue. More testing is required, obviously.

Throughput really does matter, I don't expect to get full Gigabit transfers, but copying multi-gig files just takes too long at 100Kbit speeds.

Are you sure the array has really been built? How long did that take?

Initial checking of the array took several hours, there's a status indication on the management screen. But it eventually hit 100%, and that was a day or so before I started copying. So I can probably rule that out.

It would seem to be ethernet-related, based on the shapes of the throughput graphs... they do seem to "flat-top" at a certain level with no intermittent peaks. (disclaimer: I'm just using the networking meter in task manager for coarse measurement). On the other hand, reads seem to go faster than writes, which suggests it's not ethernet-bound.

Hmmm, when you say you reach 300Kbit over 2 PC's with gigE, it definitely sounds like your network may have some issues. One thing to try is to direct connect your 2 PC's (you may need to use a cross-over cable if your NICs are not auto-MDX) and bypass your switch. You should be able to get around 10MB/sec on large file transfer.

You may also want to check your gigE NICs in your PCs. Perhaps you may need to upgrade your drivers. While you're at it, check your network cabling and connectors. You may be encountering some noise that might be causing packet retransmission.

Zonegray,

I have seen a lot of auto-negotiation issues between GigE NIC's and switches. If you can't manage your switch, try setting the NIC's on your PC and the TS to 100MB full duplex (or maybe even 10MB just for grins).

Adam
____________________
Cisco Systems, Inc
CCIE #14132

Well, if I get 300K sustained throughput, then that means they're both negotiating Gigabit, right? Next step down should be 100Mbit. It's sure faster than it was when I ran 100MBit. Anyway, I obviously need to spend some time tracking down the bottlenecks, and I'll get to that... sometime.

In the meantime, it's worth noting that the TS is transfering at around 50Kbit to/from either PC, while the two PC's can speak 300Kbit to each other.

Why do you believe that it's negotiating at Gigabit if you're only sustaining 300 Kilobytes (or is it Kilobits) per second?

It's 300Kbit, which is greater than 100Kbit. If I understand it correctly, Ethernet will negotiate to 10Kbit, 100Kbit, or 1000Kbit, nothing in between.

zonegray, I think you have your K and M mixed up ;-) Ethernet will negotiate at 10Mbit (megabit), 100Mbit, and 1000Mbit (gigabit).

Sheesh, yeah. Well, I know what I'm talking about, just not what I'm saying.

Okay, forget the units. Between two PC's, it goes 300, which is faster than 100 but slower than 1000. Between a PC and the TS, it only goes 50, which is faster than 10 but slower than 100.

MegaKilobitBytes.

No problem :-) OK, now that we have the units straightened out, it looks like you're getting roughly 37MB (megabytes) per sec between your 2 PC's which is actually pretty good. To the TS, you're getting roughly 6MB/sec (50Mbit/sec) on writes and 11MB/sec (90Mbit/sec) on reads, which is in the ballpark of what's expected. This is what BrianV noted in an earlier post regarding TS expected performance:

Upload Speed - 5.4 MB / sec
Download Speed - 11.4 MB / sec

yoh-dah, you write that the TS upload speeds are:

Upload Speed - 5.4 MB / sec
Download Speed - 11.4 MB / sec.

Is this applicable for all configurations (RAID and non-RAID)? Any figures for non-RAID (standard) mode?

The numbers I posted were straight from Buffalo for RAID 5. From experience, non-RAID write (upload) speed will generally be faster since it doesn't have to do parity calculations and read (download) speed will be slower since no disk striping is done, which results in parallel I/O across the data drives. Of course, efficiency in actual implementation matters a lot.

Why don't they allow telnet/root access wth a terastation? Of course if someone starts hacking around, adding uPNP software etc, then this is clearly not supported, but I don't see why buffalo should go out of their way to prevent it.

Having the ability to extend/expand can only serve to sell more units.

Jonathan

Because MOST people don't need/want telnet access and thus their box would be more vulnerable to be hacked itself.

We had this same discussion with LinkStation. Hopefully we'll carry a product under the revogear.com site that may have that kind of feature.

so can i use this as a network server to stream hi-def movies (.ts files) that require 30meg throughput speeds?

Do you mean 30 Mbps or 30 MBPS?

actually it's more like 10-20 Mbps using tsreader on a handful of files i checked. if this box is too slo i guess i'll have to go with a Medea raid setup but they cost much more. think your Buffalo box can get it done?

It can do 30 Mbps no problem.

If you are using a Roku HD1000 then the problem will be the Roku over SMB and not the Terastation. I have this combination. The Roku can only manage 24Mbps which is fine for a number of HD material, but has problems with others (e.g Pioneer 1080i HDTV demo).

If only the terastation supported NFS....things work much faster then!

Jonathan

Simple little review from a user... talks about performance on a gigabit network...

http://www.cspry.co.uk/computing/TeraStation.html

Hi,
Can you please confirm that the product guide is accurate in that the following are still known limitations of the TeraStation for Macintosh 10.3/10.4 clients?

1) The writing of files greater than or equal to 2 GB is prevented due to operating system limitations with Mac (AppleTalk) operating systems.

2) The following characters are not allowed to be included in the name used for a file or Shared Folder when using Mac OS (AppleTalk) devices with the TeraStation. ? [ ] / \ = + < > ; : ” , | *

3) Mac OS X can not see files on the network with names made up of over 32 characters.

4) File names and folder names should not contain more than 120 characters in their entire directory path to prevent errors when attempting to copy to them.

5) TeraStation does not support the Hidden File attribute.

6) When using Mac OS X (post 10.2 with AppleTalk) without SMB, do not use Japanese characters in folder or file names to prevent errors accessing the data over a network

---

Where do these problems stem from, because I had read:

"The latest changes to the protocol, called "AFP 3.1", were added with the release of Panther (Mac OS X 10.3). AFP3 brought some big changes. For the first time, AppleShare Clients can use filenames up to 255 characters (actually 255 bytes leading to 85-255 chars depending on the glyphs used), UTF-8 is used on the wire and large files (>4GB) are supported."

Also what version of netatalk is used in the TeraStation? Perhaps I can follow up with the netatalk folks.
Thank you.

Hello,
Great Forum here.
I have a TeraStation too, the 1 GB Version. I have enabeld the serial console. Is there anybody out here who knows the password for the root?
In end of May my order, the LinkTheater will arrive.
Greetings from Bavaria.
Stefan

Originally posted by BrianV
Well the system is Linux based so that answers your question. If you could obtain root access then you could do whatever you want, but Buffalo isn't going to provide any SDK or provide any way for customers to get root.

The image will hopefully be available this month, it's the highest priority item for us on TeraStation.


This from an earlier post, Stefan....

I know this thread is a little long, but there's alot of information in it.

SMB throughput for 1TB TeraStation (firmware 1.07b) in RAID5 w/7k frames on switched gigabit ethernet:

Write: 8.33MB/s
Read: 11.62MB/s

Measurements done with 1GB file; interestingly, the same numbers (within 1%) were obtained on two different TeraStations. Equally interesting is TeraStation to TeraStation SMB copying (through PC):

Read(#1) + write(#2): 7.68MB/s

With firmware <1.03 (Japan-only, I think) I got higher write numbers but repeated crashes. In other words, the TeraStations appear to regulate their throughput in software.

Has anyone considered this device?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833124202

Jumping in here rather late, but I recently saw this product on a website and thought it would be a great alternative to building my own RAID5 file server. I read through the previous pages, but might have missed a post about this already.

My goal would be to use this box as a video server for my MythTV systems. While I doubt I would have any problems streming my DVD collection, are there any issues with streaming a HD-resolution file over a 100Mbps network? I currently do not have gigabit ethernet in my home, but would consider upgrading if necessary.

For the price, this can't really be beat. Hopefully I'll be adding one to my network soon!

Wow, this thread is still going. I upgraded my Linux "server". Ubuntu Hoary, with Samba installed. The server has a $85 Chaintech VFN4 Ultra motherboard with gigabit LAN, a $113 Winny 3000+ AMD CPU, $80gig of RAM, 2 160 gig Hitachi SATAII drives $89 each from ZZF. Existing case and PSU. You could use a cheap $50 Nvidia turbo cache video card in this setup, I didn't want to share RAM and bought a Gigabyte 6600 for $113, total overkill. Total cost is about $569.

Now if I add 2 more $89 drives, configure mobo BIOS to RAID 0+1, and add a $50 SMC gigabit ethernet switch it will make a heck of a setup. Cost would be up to $797. Ganted I would ONLY would have 320gigs, but the thing would be fast, reliable, and drives should be hotswappable too. I have a full blown computer, not just a box with drives too. You want bigger drives, put 'em in.

I did try the Hitachi tool to change drives to "300" mode but WinXP and Sandra bencharks said 53meg/sec as I recall, same as in "150" mode. Non-Raided, individual drive test.

All computers with WinXP Pro (haven't tried Home) or Ubuntu can easily conect to the server and access the particians I set up for Music and Downloads, mapped drives in XP. The server is serving up nonstop music as I type. 8>)

The same thing with a PIII 800 worked very well too. I was going to upgrade the motherboard to a new one that would use current RAM and go beyond the 512meg limit and decided it was time for an upgrade and donate the old box instead.

Hello. I am a happy owner of a TS until this moment, great unit at this price. I use it just for audio and i am ripping and moving all my cds & audio files to the TS.
BUT i am having problems with many files, problems that make me feel very worried. Always these problems happens with the same files/folders.

When i copy as example this file from my pc (Windows XP)

01. Apparition de l'église universelle.mpc

to the TS folder

\audio\clasico\Messiaen, Olivier (1908-1992)\Complete Organ Works - Latry\CD1- La Nativité

i get TWO files, one inside the folder and other outside it, both with the name

CD1- La Nativité\01. Apparition de l'église universelle.mpc

These filee can´t be deleted, so i have to use an ftp client to rename and delete them.
What is happening!? I can´t be confidence now with my music files as i copy them to the TS. Anyone has got similar problems?

Thanks in advance

the problem seems to be with folders like

CD1- La Nativité

any file copied into this folder (at any level) will produce that effect. :eek: :confused:

------------------------------

finally, the problem seems to be with the accent,

CD1- La Nativité

so, accents are not fully supported by the TS.
why can´t i read this in the manual? :(

Originally posted by BrianV
Checked with the head engineer of Tera and Kuro and he said it's definitely from unnecessary SYSLOG traffic while using USB. He said it's fixable in the same way it is with Kuro.

BrianV,

In March we were discussing the performance problem of the attached USB 2.0 drives. You had mentioned this was going to be fixed so that USB drives could handle such this as playing HDTV TS files (which play great on the terastation). It is now May and getting nearly full already and would like to attach a few 400G USB 2.0 drives to the Terastation and be able to play from those external drives. Is there an estimate on when we should expect this to be fixed?

Thanks

Darin

Originally posted by najames
Wow, this thread is still going. I upgraded my Linux "server". Ubuntu Hoary, with Samba installed. The server has a $85 Chaintech VFN4 Ultra motherboard with gigabit LAN, a $113 Winny 3000+ AMD CPU, $80gig of RAM, 2 160 gig Hitachi SATAII drives $89 each from ZZF. Existing case and PSU. You could use a cheap $50 Nvidia turbo cache video card in this setup, I didn't want to share RAM and bought a Gigabyte 6600 for $113, total overkill. Total cost is about $569.

Now if I add 2 more $89 drives, configure mobo BIOS to RAID 0+1, and add a $50 SMC gigabit ethernet switch it will make a heck of a setup. Cost would be up to $797. Ganted I would ONLY would have 320gigs, but the thing would be fast, reliable, and drives should be hotswappable too. I have a full blown computer, not just a box with drives too. You want bigger drives, put 'em in.

I did try the Hitachi tool to change drives to "300" mode but WinXP and Sandra bencharks said 53meg/sec as I recall, same as in "150" mode. Non-Raided, individual drive test.

All computers with WinXP Pro (haven't tried Home) or Ubuntu can easily conect to the server and access the particians I set up for Music and Downloads, mapped drives in XP. The server is serving up nonstop music as I type. 8>)

The same thing with a PIII 800 worked very well too. I was going to upgrade the motherboard to a new one that would use current RAM and go beyond the 512meg limit and decided it was time for an upgrade and donate the old box instead.

Good for you dude. IMO your post strikes nya-nya tone.

Some folks don't wan't to muck about with yet another PC to make their raid array.

Some folks want to use their old mobos & cases for kiddy pcs.

Originally posted by ryoanji
finally, the problem seems to be with the accent,

CD1- La Nativité

so, accents are not fully supported by the TS.
why can´t i read this in the manual? :(

This should not be an issue in 2005!
However, seems like it should be solvable in firmware.
(Otherwise, it's a deal-killer.)

If you have two terrastations would each acquire a different IP address or do you have a potential for IP conflict as both units will have same IP address?
My 1.6 Terrastation is full and I am contemplating getting the 2nd one.
FYI - Fry's in Houston this Friday had one day sale 1G terrastationfor $799 same as 0.6G - isit a sign that a higher capacity Terrastation is in the horizon!
Ash

Review at Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-200-ProdID-TERASTA.php

The important thing to note is that while the TeraStation's gigabit LAN mode does significantly help boost performance (about 40% for write and around 60% for read), maximum read rates rise only about to the maximum supported by a 100Mbps connection! This really isn't that surprising, however, given the relatively slow (at least by today's standards) 266MHz clock rate of the TeraStation's PowerPC CPU. But hey, 40 to 60% speed improvement is still helpful!

The ReadyNAS 600 is mentioned in the Tom's Hardware article as well.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1819272,00.asp

Interesting thing about the Infrant box is that it isn't much more expensive than Buffalo in a 1.6TB version, and it is also supposed to be available in bare bones but I haven't found anybody actually selling the bare version.

I wish ExtremeTech or Tom's would compare these 2 directly.

Review at Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-200-ProdID-TERASTA.php

Thanks for posting this. Saved me some bucks, as I'll now be getting the ReadyNAS system instead.

The appealing thing to me (in theory which Tom's Hardware proved otherwise) was the USB ports and how you could add additional USB hard drives. That would have been an easy way for me to recycle some smaller drives for additional storage. But lack of NTFS formatting plus what was reported as teh PITA set up steered me away. Bummer, was about to pull the trigger.

I opted for the ReadyNAS after reading about the two products. I can say from experience, that it is trivial to setup, and also to get FTP running. As for the USB ports, if you read in the other threads, they are working on an update to enable them as well for expansion drives.

The ReadyNAS 600 is mentioned in the Tom's Hardware article as well.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1819272,00.asp

Interesting thing about the Infrant box is that it isn't much more expensive than Buffalo in a 1.6TB version, and it is also supposed to be available in bare bones but I haven't found anybody actually selling the bare version.

I wish ExtremeTech or Tom's would compare these 2 directly.

Empty ReadyNAS on Ebay. :D
http://cgi.*********/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5777841336&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&rd=1

Does anyone know if the 100 watt rating on the ReadyNAS includes the four hard drives or not? I'm wondering for UPS reasons.

Yes it does.

Does anyone know if the 100 watt rating on the ReadyNAS includes the four hard drives or not? I'm wondering for UPS reasons.

Just saw that there is a software upgrade for the Terastation. I could not find what it addresses, or what advantages there are to an upgrade. Anyone upgrade yet? I won't be able to until next week.

http://buffalotech.com/support/downloads-product.php

Infrant has a "ready to go" NAS board on their website under products (the IT71004).

You just add memory, hard drives, fans, power supply and case and it's ready to run.
Does anyone know where to buy this, how much it costs, or have any experience building one?

eviltazz, the IT71004 board is available only to our OEM partners. It's probably best if you got the barebones system that comes with everything you need except for drives. See: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=549560

There is no detail about the firmware update as you said. However, I have upgraded and I have one definite observation that it now supports PCast (for link to a LinkTheater), and I think there are some additional features around using one terastation to back-up another.

Jonathan


Just saw that there is a software upgrade for the Terastation. I could not find what it addresses, or what advantages there are to an upgrade. Anyone upgrade yet? I won't be able to until next week.

http://buffalotech.com/support/downloads-product.php