Buffalo TeraStation NAS box

In 25 years, desktop storage has jumped from the IBM PC with a 360K-byte floppy drive to Buffalo Technology's TeraStation, which offers 1T byte of capacity. We can make a good case for small businesses, workgroups at larger businesses, and even upscale home networks (digital video fans gobble gigabytes like candy) to plop down $1,000 for a terabyte of disk storage.

While Buffalo says the TeraStation combines ease of use with enterprise-class features, we were a bit skeptical. True, the installation of the network-attached storage (NAS) box was quick and easy, and you can apply the enterprise label because of the terabyte capacity. But any enterprise-class storage device should include more management tools, directory integration and hot-swappable disk drives, all lacking in the TeraStation.

Installation included automatically finding an open IP address upon booting (once we gave the administrator password to enable client DHCP settings) and making an easy connection from a Windows client running the management utility from an enclosed CD. TeraStation only supports Linux connections via Server Message Block Windows networking, but our Xandros 3.0 Linux Desktop had no problem accessing the unit that way. Default settings include enabling AppleShare but not FTP (having anonymous FTP access on by default isn't secure), and the four Western Digital 243G-byte disk drives are set to spanning mode, pooling all the disk space into one huge volume.

You can run the system in Standard Mode, where each disk becomes a separate volume; Mirroring Mode, where pairs of disks match up in a RAID-1 mirror configuration, which gives you two fault-tolerant 500M-byte volumes; or RAID-5 mode, which cuts the disk space by 25%, to 750G bytes, but increases performance and fault tolerance to survive a failure of any one disk. A journaling file system also improves reliability, mounting speed and failure recovery. These are high-end storage features, and if the drives were hot-swappable we wouldn't argue about the enterprise label.

Although usable space only showed 928G bytes after installation, the TeraStation still had more capacity to fill than our lab could cram onto it. Performance matched the lower-end NAS products we've tried because the four drives are Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) rather than SCSI, spin at 7,200 rpm, and have only a 2M-byte buffer. As the price of Serial ATA drives drop, Buffalo could improve performance by upgrading its Ultra ATA/100 drives to SATA and leveraging the 8M-byte buffers standard with drives using that interface. The lone Ethernet port on the TeraStation auto-senses between 10M-, 100M- and 1G-bit speeds, and supports Jumbo Frames. Again, this was an interesting mix of high- and low-end features.

A client-based management utility shows status and lets you change the IP address of a TeraStation, but is really useful only to launch the browser-based administration utility. The Web utility does all the heavy lifting, including setup, network configuration, disk maintenance, user and group management, print server management and status screens. The TeraStation can respond to smart UPS shutdown commands, and also can e-mail up to five addresses with a limited number of status messages (such as an OK message every 24 hours, system backup completion and emergencies). User and group management options strictly follow Windows workgroup or domain network rules, limiting their effectiveness in larger installations that rely on Microsoft's Active Directory or any other directory service, but allowing enough control for small businesses and workgroups.