Buffalo TeraStation Live NAS

This NAS box from Buffalo provides a convenient storage for SOHO

environments. It comes with four 7200 rpm, 250 GB SATA hard drives, which sum up

to 1 TB of storage capacity. The box supports RAID levels 0,1,5 and 10. It has

both Gigabit Ethernet and USB ports to connect it on a network as a NAS or

directly to a PC as a DAS. This TeraStation Live can also be used as a storage

server over the Internet. For this, it has a built in FTP server for easy

exchange of files. Plus, it even allows you to share your files and folders over

the Internet. For this Buffalo has setup a separate website that allows peer to

peer connectivity between different TeraStation Live boxes.

To test the NAS we transferred 100 GB of data between the NAS and a PC with a

400 GB, 7200 rpm HDD. Transfer to the PC took 1 hour and 27 mins, while the

transfer back to the NAS took 1 hour 36 secs. FTP transfer however was much

faster, and took only 57 mins. We also ran NetBench and got a maximum throughput

of 33 MBps with RAID 0, which is pretty average as compared to the cheaper

TeraStation Pro II (reviewed in June 2007). The latter also has a higher

transfer rate.

BottomLine: Choose this if you need a

high capacity NAS box for a small office.