Buffalo Terastation Pro II is a low cost, entry level NAS mainly meant for
the SMB section. It runs on Linux Samba and has a simple Web interface. It's
shipped with 4 hard disks of 250 GB running at 7200 rpm. It comes pre-configured
with RAID 5, which reduces the total capacity of 1 TB to 700 GB. Other than RAID
5, you can also configure RAID 0/1/10 or JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disk). The LCD
display at the front, provides vital information, like what is the RAID
configuration, IP address, which disks are being used, etc. It has a single
Gigabit Ethernet port and 2 USB ports mainly to connect external storage
devices. It has quick swap hard disk tray, so in case one of the disks goes for
a toss, you can just unplug it and put a new one, though you need to wait for
the replacement HDD which comes from Buffalo only, which may take sometime. It
supports almost all types of protocols, like TCP/IP, SMB, FTP, LDAP, HTTP, NTP
etc. Performance wise it wasn't any thing exceptional. We ran NetBench and got a
maximum throughput of 50 Mbps, which is decent. This was though expected as this
one mainly caters to SMBs and it will be unfair to compare it with any of the
enterprise class NAS we have reviewed earlier.
Bottom Line: Good Choice for SMB though the price is on the higher
side.
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