Buffalo Technology LinkStation Mini 500 GB Compact Shared Network Attached Storage LS-WS500GL/R1 (Black)
From BUFFALO
The LinkStation Mini is the first Network Attached Storage product in the world using 2.5" hard disks! With 60% lower power consumption, small size, fanless operation and low noise it makes an ideal storage solution for anywhere in your home. Auto Power on/off function enables the LinkStation to turn off automatically when you shut down the last PC or laptop with installed NAS Navigator software. feature, you can access your digital library simply, and from anywhere.Small, silent, low power consumption, LinkStation Mini is the most feature rich, complete, compact and advanced consumer NAS solution.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #19446 in Consumer Electronics
- Brand: Buffalo
- Model: LS-WS500GL/R1
- Platform: Windows
- Format: CD
- Dimensions: 5.88" h x 8.63" w x 3.06" l, 2.00 pounds
- Memory: 128000MB DRAM
- Hard Disk: 250GB
- Processors: 1
- Native resolution: 640x480
- Display size: 669.2913385827
Small, Silent, and Powerful
The LinkStation Mini from Buffalo is a fully loaded network attached storage device (NAS) with a slew of great features and options. The only downside is you pay more per GB than you would for similar units, but for home use the extra cash you spend is worth it.
HARDWARE
The LinkStation Mini comes with a slim ethernet cable and power supply. The brick of the power supply has one of the smaller footprints I've seen for an AC plug. They both fit well with the mini theme of the device.
The LinkStation unit itself is unbelievably small. There are two laptop-sized hard drives in the black enclosure. The case is vented on multiple sides, has an ethernet jack, USB jack, power supply jack, and an On-Off-Auto switch on the back with a couple small LED lights on the front. The sleek black shell with blue LED design allows you to put it in your living room, office, or bedroom--especially since there is no fan in the unit and therefore virtually zero noise.
INSTALLATION
The LinkStation Mini comes with an install disc for your computer(s). Just pop in the disc, follow the simple directions, and you'll be able to hook up your LinkStation to your router and have your computer(s) be able to drag, drop, and copy files on it with no problem. If this is all you want to do, you will only need basic computer skills for this set up. As a side note, the LinkStation Mini has a USB port on it, but that is not used for a direct USB connection to your computer as you can only read/write the files on the LinkStation through the ethernet cable. The USB port is there to add additional USB storage drives to the LinkStation later.
If you want to use some of the more advanced features, you will need to have an intermediate to advanced level of networking knowledge to set up the LinkStation. If you have a Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) router the set up steps might be easier, but my UPnP router didn't work with the LinkStation. This is most likely because I have a cheap-O, free DSL modem-router combo unit from my internet service provider. I needed to go through and set up my advanced networking features manually. So if you don't know what terms like UPnP, port forwarding, DLNA, FTP, and SSL are, you'll probably have a difficult time setting up all the advanced features without enlisting the help of a computer geek.
USABILITY AND FEATURES
At its core, the LinkStation is a NAS, or networked hard drive. The advantage is that multiple computers in your house can all access the one hard drive instead of moving a USB hard drive from computer to computer. The two laptop-sized hard drives within the single unit can be set to be used as one continuous, 500 GB hard drive, or be set to mirror each other as two 250 GB hard drives that constantly back each other up. You can also set the rear switch to be On all the time, Off all the time, or Automatically turn on when a computer accesses the LAN network. After that basic functionality, you can have the LinkStation do all kinds of neat stuff.
If you have a static IP address you can open up the ports on your LinkStation and set it to act as an FTP. My DSL provider gives me a dynamic IP address, so I can't set that up with any long term success. However, Buffalo has a website that mediates a free peer-to-peer connection with your LinkStation from anywhere in the world as long as you have internet access. You have to open a few ports on your router, but it works very well for reading photos and music files. The website even opens your music files within an Adobe Flash environment complete with mp3 playback, so you can play your music files straight from a webpage on any computer in the world without having to download your files. The peer-to-peer webpage takes a little while to load, but works very well, especially if you group 50 files or less into separate folders.
You can also use the LinkStation as a DLNA server for movies, music, and photos. I'm able to have my Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 find the LinkStation and stream music and videos straight from the disc. Combined with the "remote play" feature using the Playstation 3 and PlayStation Portable (PSP) with my LinkStation Mini and surround sound receiver, I can use my PSP as a remote control with a screen to browse and play my whole music library on my stereo system--all without booting up a computer or using my TV. It's similar to having a Sonos or SqueezeBox player in your house. A very, very cool feature with the LinkStation if you already have the video game consoles.
The software that comes with the install CD gives you an easy desktop icon to click to find your network shared folders on your Mini. It also provides a dedicated way to access the settings for your Mini. In addition, there is a licensed program, Memeo, included to help you schedule file back-ups between your computer and the LinkStation.
PROBLEMS/DOWNSIDES
The only downsides are the price and speed. Since there are two 5400 rpm laptop-sized hard drives in the unit, it's a little slower than larger units (with fans) that have 7200rpm hard drives. But the speed isn't that bad. In a RAID 0 configuration ("one" continuous 500 GB hard drive) I was able to move 500 MB of multiple files to the LinkStation in about 1 minute. For my home needs, this is enough speed. You will also be paying more dollars per GB for the LinkStation Mini compared to other units out there. Therefore, if you are putting it in an office at work, I might opt for a cheaper, faster NAS.
OVERALL
Personally, I think the LinkStation Mini is great and suits my needs perfectly. It's fine for the office/work environment, but perfect for the home because: 1) there is a very low electricity drain so you can leave it on all the time, 2) it doesn't have a fan so it barely makes any noise, 3) plays nice with Vista, XP, and Mac, and 4) you'd be hard pressed to find so many useful NAS features in such a small package. I highly recommend it.
(P.S. If you found this review helpful please click yes below so other prospective shoppers will read it. I place a lot of weight on Amazon reviews before I make a purchase too. Thanks!)
Best home NAS drive
It's awesome - small, fast, quiet, can be configured as a 250 gig RAID, has gigabit support, has Mac support, auto power-down green mode. Killer for dumping your data to. If you have the money, they offer a 1TB version also. I didn't install the software (but I hear the sofware is decent).
The unit is silent, even when copying files onto it. It's smaller than I expected (a little larger than two iPhones stacked), you can easily carry it with you if needed. The options on this unit are great, especially that it is two 250 gig drives that can be configured in RAID. The unit comes configured as one 500 gig storage, but using the web interface it's easy to reconfigure for a 250 gig RAID failsafe config. The unit allows you to create any number of shared shared folders, and make them individually public read-only, public read-write, or assign users to the individual shared folders for security. It has user management, where you create any number of login names/passwords and assign permissions to each user to allow for read-only or read-write permissions, and which shared folders they have access to.
In this price range you can't find a reliable NAS product that is silent, with two hard drives, gigabit networking, user security, and all these other features. There are some cheaper products, and they have bad reviews.
Slow webaccess
The setup took some time. But works as described.
The biggest PROBLEM is the WebAccess GUI (graphical user interface). Very poorly designed and extremely slow. When doing "preview" of a photo which is about 3 megabytes it takes good 5 to 7 seconds to show the picture. Once you have one picture up in the preview mode you can click next (if you have more then one photo) and that also takes 5 to 7 seconds to show up.
Thumbnail preview is not available either so you end up looking at file names like (DSC_0041.jpg).
It has "MultiMedia" feature which I have not tried yet. May be that will give me thumbnail pic of a file.
The NAS itself has a web-based administration which you can access if your pc is on same subnet (private) as your pc, but I could not access it from outside (public)using WebAccess.
Tried calling support because I had few questions. Automated system told me that technicians were busy and its better to send an email. Since I wanted to talk to a live rep. to see if they know the product ended up waiting on the phone. For an hour no one picked up so I listened to music on hold "Mozart" which put me to sleep. No joke.
One more thing to add to poorly written Webaccess GUI. Once you login to see your files you can't logout because there is no button to do so. You have to close the browser to be logged out.
