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An uncomplicated Buffalo in SOHO: The LinkStation 441D 4-bay NAS box

Cheap at twice the price

Review Buffalo’s latest addition to the LinkStation family of consumer NAS boxes is the 4-bay LS441D. It’s available off-the-shelf in a number of capacities starting at 4TB and increasing in 4TB increments to 16TB. The unit I’m looking at here is the bare enclosure – the LS441DE. Out of the box all the units are set to a default RAID 5 mode.

Buffalo LinkStation 441D 4-bay NAS box

Buffalo LinkStation 441D 4-bay NAS box

It’s powered by a Marvell Armada 370 SoC – a single core chip clocked at 1.2GHz with 256KB of L2 cache and backed by with 512MB of DDR3 memory. The L441DE supports drives up to 4TB capacity in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD arrays.

Looking at that price tag and looking at the unit in front of me, you can see where Buffalo has cut back on some details. The drive bay cover door has no lock and just pulls off. The drive trays themselves have a bit of flex to them to say the least, but of course, screwing a drive in place gives them a lot more rigidity.

Buffalo LinkStation 441D 4-bay NAS box

No locks on the front panel

Having unhindered access to the drives might be fine for the home user but as Buffalo is also aiming the LS441 at the small office environment, it might be more of a concern that malevolent fingers can easily get at the disks.

The unit has three USB ports: 2 x USB3.0 and a single USB 2.0. One of the USB 3.0 ports is usefully built into the front, so if you tuck the unit out of the way somewhere, you won’t have to fumble around the back of it to attach an external drive etc.

Buffalo LinkStation 441D 4-bay NAS box

Basic but functional drive bay caddies

Feature-wise, the LS441 comes with built in FTP, print and iTunes servers, Twonky DLNA/UPnP media server and a BitTorrent client. For the office side of things, the LinkStation 441D comes with five licences of NovaStor’s NovaBackup Professional software and you can schedule backups to another LinkStation on the network or to an external device via USB. It also supports TimeMachine and Bonjour.

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