Buffalo Linkstation Pro

On a gigabit network, you can set up jumbo frame sizes, up to 9694 bytes; we did our speed testing using standard (1518 byte) frames. When writing a single large file, we managed a write speed of 25.5Mbytes/second, which is quite respectable, and means backups won’t take too forever.

Easy to configure with plenty of useful options

Reading the same file, we achieved a rate of 29Mbytes/second, which is adequate, but exceeded by quite a few other drives that have been tested here recently. And with large groups of files, performance dropped quite a lot from that – a 290MB folder of 10,000 files managed only around 4Mbytes/second reading and writing, though much of that is undoubtedly OS overhead – even so, that’s still only around a minute for 10,000 files.

Finally, there’s a useful email warning facility, that can provide you with status updates, plus a disk power down option, and scheduled sleep facility – though that seemed to go to sleep even though we were in the middle of a TimeMachine backup – to help save energy.

Verdict

All in all, it’s a neat package, with a good range of options. It won’t suit the more technical user, perhaps, but the interface is clear and straightforward enough for casual users, without over complicating things. ®

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