Review Buffalo has been making NAS boxes for years and the LinkStation Pro is its latest iteration for home and small office use. Housed in a sleek and shiny black unit, the model we tested includes 1TB hard drive – other options are 1.5 and 2TB.

An easy option? Buffalo's Linkstation Pro

The front has a blue LED at the top and a ‘Function’ button near the bottom. On the rear panel there is Gigabit Ethernet, a USB port, power switch and socket with an external PSU.

As you’d expect in a network hard drive, there’s support for sharing files using CIFS/SMB, and also with AFP, and an FTP server is provided too. Additional features include printer sharing from the USB port on the rear, a DLNA-certified media streamer, iTunes server, BitTorrent client, plus support for Apple’s Time Machine and remote access to your files.

Set up is pretty straightforward, when hooked up and powered on, in a minute or so the drive will appear on your network. The supplied NAS Navigator software, for both PC and Mac, will detect Linksys storage devices on the network, and let you open the web page to configure them, as well as updating the time or making it easy to connect to the shares.

There’s one pre-defined share on the LinkStation Pro, but creating others is easy from the web interface, which is much improved and more responsive than previous versions. The user and group level access control, makes even fairly complex configuration simple, and the web interface is – on the whole – quite straightforward.

Gigabit Ethernet, USB printing and Apple Time Machine support

You can delegate authentication to an external SMB server, if you have a domain controller on your LAN. Yet it’s a shame that the FAQ link on most pages is only very general, and not specific to the section you’re looking at. Thankfully there’s a link to download the PDF manual on each page.