My second gadget of the week has arrived. This time it is in the shape of Buffalo Technology’s Linkstation Mini 1TB (that’ll be a Terabyte… 1000GB, 1000000MB) NAS. It’s a comparatively tiny device as you can see from the picture to the left yet it contains two 500GB 2.5″ hard drives. I have set these up as a Raid 1 array giving me 500GB of total storage space. RAID, for those not in the know stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks and RAID level 1 (RAID 1) simply mirrors the contents of one disk on to another. So.. in theory, should one of the hard drives in the Linkstation die, my data should be safe and sound on the other one. This little device is currently sitting in my study running completely silent as data from my server copies across the network. It has not fans and consumes a measly 10W of power (I’ve not tested that yet… I’ll check later). It also has a USB port on the back which can turn the device in to a print server, or just allow you to plug in more external hard drives for extra storage. Now, as my media files were still copying across, I’ve not had chance to test the DLNA streaming to my PS3 yet. My sister’s boyfriend has a Linkstation NAS and mentioned that he has the odd problem with it not refreshing the database.. I’m hoping that the newer firmware released a few weeks ago addresses this problem as for the price of this toy there is nothing at all comparable around. More features I have yet to test include an auto-power on/off when you access it, FTP server, web access. and built-in remote backup routines to another NAS if you have one.

Once all my data has copied over and I’ve verified it works exactly as required… I’ll be turning off my server for good (dum dum duuuum), well, for the moment anyway. The one feature missing is the ability to download a torrent direct to the NAS. Other Linkstations have this facility so I’m hoping it is added in future firmware updates as I know the hardware can cope with this. For the geeks amongst you (.. well, you must be one if you are still reading this far in to the post) the file system it runs is XFS, and in theory that means it could support snapshots (a bit like ‘previous versions’ in Windows). There’s plenty of potentional here for developers, and I know there are already a number of homebrew ROMs available taking advantage of this silent little server’s untapped power. I’m reluctant to use the cracks though, hoping instead that an official release will surface sometime soon.

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• Buffalo LinkStation Duo
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Tags: Gadgets, Linkstation Mini