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Buffalo Linkstation Pro

Buffalo Linkstation Pro

No nonsense Nas box?

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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.

Buffalo Linkstation Pro

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.

Buffalo Linkstation Pro

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.

Latest Comments

Nothing so elusive as perfection

Does this suffer from the same path length restriction that plagues the older models?

Web 2.0, as we're talking about un-lived-up-to expectations here.

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@No mention of RAID

I too have a ReadyNAS Duo, though only with 2x500GB. Still it does CIFS, AFP, NFS, FTP, HTTP, DLNA streaming (to PS3 in my case) and even rsync! Plus once rooted you can SSH on, and I've also thrown on Transmission as my torrent client of choice. Pretty easy to use and I've made tweaks to make sure that it only torrents between midnight and 8am when I don't get monitored for bandwidth usage. All in all, I'm extremely happy with it.

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Seagate inside?

'Cos if it is, they can cram it where the sun don't shine ...

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DLNA , don't make me laugh

What does "DLNA-certified media streamer" mean.

I have various bits of kit that are all officialy DLNA certified ( v 1.5)

will they talk to eahc other, wil they heck,

the latest is sony, who now say they are DLNA , but only between Sony kit.

Ha

what a laugh

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Mistake?

The included software does not find LINKSYS products on the network, it finds BUFFALO products on the network!

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