A few months ago, the nice folks at Buffalo reached out to me and asked if I wanted to review their Buffalo LinkStation 420, a small two-drive NAS. At the time, I was doing a lot of NAS testing, so I thought it would be interesting.
They sent me the device and I immediately yanked out the two 1TB drives that it came with and slapped in two 4TB drives. I powered it up, and, well, bad news (although there's good news later in this post).
When I attempted to replace the 1TB drives with 4TB drives, I found it impossible to do. I made three calls to very friendly tech support folks, and we determined that (a) Buffalo specifically does not support replacing the drives with larger drives, and (b) it doesn’t work even if you try it.
Worse, apparently the device is only supported running the specific drives it was designed for and while it may work with other manufacturers' drives, once again Buffalo support said that the practice was unsupported.
I found that to be unacceptable for a mirrored RAID device. The entire reasoning for a mirrored RAID is that if a drive fails, you can easily swap it out with another drive to continue running the RAID. The need to be sure that the drive used as a replacement is a match for the originally shipped drives severely limits the appeal of the unit.
As it turns out, many RAID devices have the matching drive limitation. I'm so spoiled with the substantially more expensive (but incredibly easy to work with) Drobos, that my tolerance for perfectly matched drives has substantially diminished.
Third, the RAID firmware doesn’t live on the unit, but on one of the drives. According to Buffalo support, it specifically boots off the firmware on drive 1 (and specifically not off drive 2). That makes for another issue in terms of reliability. Basically, the box is dumb and not available for recovery in any sort of situation where drive 1 gets sick.
Fortunately, there was a nice bit of good news. I sent back the LinkStation 420, and they sent me a LinkStation 421e ($169.99). This unit is designed as an enclosure where you're supposed to add in your own drives. I once again slid in my 4TB friends, and this time the system ran like a charm.
Although I'd almost always recommend going with a Drobo if you want to spend the cash (and have the space -- the Buffalo is about a third the size), the Buffalo LinkStation 421e is a very sweet little device that does what it's supposed to do. It will be a welcome addition to any DIY-ITers network.
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