Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo LS-W2.0TGL/R1

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Very fast
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Ease of use	Easy
Reliability	Good
Value For Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Very fast, high capacity .
Disadvantages:	Pricey, may be outlived by long - life Blu - ray discs .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

As our latest project comes to a close and we face losing any unused capital we again raise the idea of network storage with the boss. It's something we have mentioned repeatedly and suddenly find ourselves with an offer of whatever we can get for £1000. Taking our initiative from the US government we decide why buy one device when we could buy two of these? Thus we have one for our network project and finally a decent sized device for our own backups.

I have to say I'm quite impressed so far. The unit is surprisingly compact and although it may look like a midi-sized PC case in the picture it is actually a lot smaller measuring a little over 6 inches high and only 4 inches wide. The back of the case has 2 USB sockets (one to connect to a PC, the other to network a printer). There's also a standard auto-sensing LAN port (10/100/1000 megabit compatible), an on/off switch (which also has an auto setting) and a rather curious, possibly James Brown inspired "Func" button. There's also a ghettoblaster style mains socket and a 40-50mm fan grill. The fan is a little bit noisy but you wouldn't notice it in our server room. It's also drowned out by the sound of the drives when their in operation. There's also a wonderful silver panel on the front of the unit with ultra-low profile status indicators for power and network.

A quick look under the hood reveals two Hitachi deskstar 1TB drives which are mounted at the front of the case. This is a joy to see as Hitachi drives are my personal favourites after a review I saw showed they were almost on a par with Western Digitals Raptors in terms of speed, but with decent capacity and a lower price tag. The drives are linked by a single moulded power and data cable to the drive controller card under the right side of the case. That second drive could be a bit tricky to replace due to the strange curvy plastic indicator rods which light up that front status panel. They stretch out over the front of the second drive bay. Removing a single screw releases the drive mounting clips and there are two more screws fixing the clip to the actual drive. Fantastic, who wants to undo more screws than necessary when you're in a hurry to get the device up and running again. At this point I realise that to change a drive I would only have to undo the screws in the front feet of the device. Putting it back together I notice the shock hazard warning below the top screw on the back of the case and can't help thinking they should have made that bigger and stuck a big label on it somewhere which says "To replace drives, unscrew front feet and remove front panel". Luckily I know better than to go prodding capacitors.

Once the Linkstation is powered up it's configuration time and this involves installing the NASNavigator2 package or using the web-interface. The Navigator package is probably the easier option unless you have the option of allocating a known IP address to the devices mac address somewhere in your router configuration. Still the navigator program is actually a joy to use and will let you configure a static IP for the device if necessary. It also displays the devices IP address, subnet mask, gateway, mac address and firmware version in its display panel; along with the devices raid status, used space and total capacity. This package will also show other linkstations on your network (we got 2 remember) which makes it very easy for tired, stressed sysadmins to find all this information when required.

Out of the box, the device is set for raid zero, ie it has a total of 2TB of storage space (Thats's 2048GB unformatted which is equivalent to 435 blank DVD's or over 2800 blank CD's). Of course there's little point using the drive in this way when you can set it up as raid one. This means you have two drives, one of which is a mirror image of the other. If one drive dies, hopefully everything will still be intact on the other and will get copied to the newly replaced drive.

Meanwhile back in real life it's far more likely that both drives will begin to develop a few bad sectors at the same time but hopefully they won't be the same bad sectors on both drives. This means you can copy the data to a fresh drive, replace both internal drives and then copy the data back. Sounds expensive? Well by the time both drives need replacing they will hopefully have dropped to less than half their current price possibly driven by us all wanting to have ultra-quiet, ultra compact, energy efficient solid state drives.

Still it was at this point that I discovered the Achilles heel of this device. It's the time taken to set up the raid array and reformat the drives (which brings your storage capacity down from 2TB to 923.8GB fully formatted and took about 16 hours to complete). How useful this device is now depends on how much data you have. Use a 1TB drive in your desktop and you should be able to back it up entirely, even having space free if you use something like Ghost to compress your drive image first. Have 2TB of data to backup and you will probably need to leave it as raid zero.

So would I buy this drive unit for myself for home use? I can't actually say that I would. Partly because I don't yet have the high volume of data to need it and for the price I could just buy the drives and set up an equivalent raid array via my motherboard. There's also the question of how long will the drives last and will you still be able to buy replacements when they're needed? Replacing both at the same time would also keep repair costs high so it may be wise to replace them singly at fixed periods, so for example replace drive one in two years time, then drive two in another two years, or sooner if the device is used heavily. This should minimise replacement costs and provide a fairly robust backup system.

However before I would buy one of these devices I would have to research a blu-ray alternative. A while back I read about a company called Delkin producing blu-ray discs which were guaranteed to keep their data for 200 years. The discs may cost around £13 to store only 25GB but there are other things to consider. In the past decade hard drives have gone from the IDE interface to SATA/SATA2 but you can still read a CD in a DVD-rewriter drive. Given that internal blu-ray drives can now be bought for less than £100 you only have the capacity requirements to factor in.

Thirty-seven discs should be enough to equate to the 925GB of raid1 data storage at a price of around £480. It sounds pricey but not if it really does work for 200+ years. This unit may require an awful lot of replacement drives in that time and there will come a point when they're no longer made. Of course it's great to have all that storage space on your network and for small/home offices the linkstation may be the way to go. I am however reminded of a comment from one of my colleagues way back when I started here... "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a guy on a motorbike with a box of CD's". The idea of a blu-ray drive also appeals because of all the hi-def films coming out in that format.

So to conclude; a fantastic backup device but don't rush out until you've seen what blu-ray has to offer. If you can't split your important data into 25GB chunks then you won't go wrong with one of these although it's pricey compared to installing two fresh internal drives.