PC World and Collect@Store - Bargain!

15:56.13 - Friday 22nd July 2005 (Link to This Entry)

This can't be right. I'm looking to pick up a Gigabit switch for the office and decided to check PCWorld's prices. The very first item I looked at was a NetGear GS605 for £49.99 in-store, or £38.76 if ordered over the net. I noticed that they don't actually deliver this item - you could only collect it from the store, but... you still paid the Web Exclusive (!!!) price.

So let's get this straight: If I drive to the shop and buy this switch it costs me £49.99
If I print out a piece of paper and drive to the shop and buy this switch, it costs me £38.76.

O-kaaaay.
*prints out piece of paper*

Buffalo TeraStation 1.0TB Network Attached Storage Review

20:22.23 - Friday 22nd July 2005 (Link to This Entry)

£628 inc VAT from eDirectory.co.uk

One of the things we were sorely missing in the office was some network attached storage. After much hunting around the Internet and general cussing at the price of these things, we were pleasantly suprised to find the affordable TeraStation from Buffalo - the distant musclebound cousin of the LinkStation I reviewed earlier. This model sporte more USBs, Gigabit Ethernet and four - four - 250GB harddrives for a monster 1TB capacity.

The unit arrived nested inside two carboard boxes and further padded out at the sides. It's in no way lightweight, as I found when I had to carry it in, but this gives an air of solidity. Even so, considering there are four drives, a PSU and some controlling electronics in there, this is a pretty hefty beastie.

The finish is a lovely silver colour that matches the Apple stuff in the office quite nicely - you can just see a Cinema Screen in the background of the first two pics if you squint. The Disk Information circle sports eight green LEDs (4 power, 4 Activity) and there are three further LEDs just below it for Diagnostics, Power and Network Activity.

Handsome wee beastie, no?	Yo, shake dat ass!
Four 250GB drives lurk within...	Logo seems... familiar.

As with the LinkStation, there's a power button on the front to wake the machine up, but not to shut it down - this has to be done via the web interface just like the smaller units. There are two USB ports to the front for connecting USB drives or printers. Not to be outdone by its smaller brethren, there are two more USBs on the back, plus a 9-pin D connector for hooking up your UPS, allowing the TeraStation can shut down safely in case of power failure. A standard PC Fan and PSU makes up the rest of the rear.

The software that comes on CD-Rom is full of classic Engrish, which is odd since the actual printed 'Getting Started' guide seems pretty good. There's nothing too confusing however, and it took only a minute to decide on how we wanted to set up the drives. You are given four options as follows:

All four drives appear seperately.
RAID 0: All four drives appear as one big drive.
RAID 1: Drives are split into two mirrored pairs.
RAID 5: The drives appear as one, with the quarter used as a checksum.

After a brief discussion we opted for RAID 5, since this gives us some data protection at the expense of only one drive's-worth of space. As this will mainly be used for keeping up-to-date copies of current work (finished projects will be backed up to CD-R/DVD-R) it's unlikely that we'll fill it, but we'd still like as much space as possible with some redundancy. RAID 5 it is, then.

USB Ports to the Front...	USB Ports to the Rear...
UPS Plug-in-able, too.	Model, Serial and MAC Address.

Although it took only two minutes to set up the drive, it actually took over four hours to partition and format. At this point we went off and did some work.

Eventually, the only red LED on the whole unit - the Diag. light - finished blinking and the TeraStation was ready to use. We accessed the machine using both Windows 2000 and OSX Tiger machine, neither of which had a problem, and we were copying files to the thing will-nilly. The machine had no problems accepting files from three different machines at once, but we were limited in this respect by the 100Mbit network we're running on. I've since acquired a Gigabit Ethernet switch (see today's other entry) and will be giving it a workout later.

As mentioned before, the TeraStation is pretty much the same as the LinkStation I have at home, so visit that view for a rundown on the kind of thing you can do with this unit. I'll be adding to this review and giving a final score over the next week or two as I test out various aspects of the TeraStation, so be sure to check for updates.