Sadly this isn’t my new toy: it belongs to the Father-in-law whose aging Freecom NAS was no longer up to the job. The brief was reasonably simple on the surface of things, to be able to store a large music collection and enabling that collection to be streamed to a wireless music player, whilst also being accessible from a laptop both online and offline. Well, seeing the LinkStation Duo 2TB available for a comparatively low price on Amazon I suggested he go for it. Why the Pro Duo version and not the standard Live? Mainly because the 2TB Duo NAS consists of two 1TB drives and lets you run them mirrored (RAID1) for resiliency. If one drive were to fail, your data is safe and sound on the other one – all you need to do is buy a new 1TB drive and swap it over with the faulty one. The NAS should then rebuild the array and resiliency is once again restored. It’s a simple but effective concept which I have relied on for many years and protects you against the failure of a single hard drive at any one time. It doesn’t of course replace the need for regular backups off-site somewhere which will be the subject of a future blog I’m sure.

After plugging the NAS in, ignoring the supplied CD, I went straight to the web interface. Setting the hostname and giving it a static IP address was simple enough, but a word of advice to anyone deciding to run the automatic firmware update process: don’t. The upgrade was about 250MB, with no progress bar whilst the download or install took place. I’d suggest you browse to the Buffalo Tech web site and download the firmware manually that way first, then apply it to the NAS afterwards. Once I had updated it, I proceeded to the RAID configuration. This could be simpler in my opinion, but I figured out how to remove the default RAID0 (striped) partition, and then create a new mirrored one afterwards.

Creating folders is the easiest task of all to complete and I won’t discuss that here, and creating new user accounts to protect those folders is also pretty simple. Keep in mind that by default a user is given read-only access to each folder and you’ll have to make sure you select read-write in the appropriate drop-down list if that is what’s needed. Another general tip for NAS users is to make sure you create user accounts exactly in-line with the user accounts you log on to Windows with. If you click on an icon labelled ‘Bob’ and then type in a password to get in to Windows, make sure you create a user account called ‘Bob’ (note the capital) with the same password to enable seamless access.

The NAS supports Windows offline folders, which is handy for laptop users, and also boasts DLNA capabilities (works okay if a little un-customisable) and acts as an iTunes server (I didn’t test this one). More interestingly though is the bittorrent server built in to the firmware – this is becoming a standard feature of many NASs lately and allows you to download, from a legitimate source of course, peer-to-peer hosted files without leaving a computer on. Just think of all those Ubuntu source disks you can easily acquire in that manner. An even more useful feature, which I’d often thought was daft not to include on all NASs, is a web server and database server! Your NAS is running a web server anyway, so why not allow you to upload your own custom files in a virtual folder on that web server? I couldn’t suggest using the NAS as a production web server, but for test and development it should be ideal.

Physically, the NAS is not one of the smallest around, but then again it does pack in two standard 3.5" drives and a hefty processor by comparison. It’s a sleek black unit with three bright LEDs on the front and in operation it is remarkably quiet. I’ve been advised that it can make quite a noise on occasions which I have tracked down to being drive re-synchronisation – basically, don’t power the NAS off unless you’ve done a graceful shutdown by sliding the off switch at the rear of the unit and waited for the lights to go out. If you need to replace a hard drive, you just pop the front cover off and slide one out – simples.

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Tags: Buffalo LinkStation Duo, Gadgets, NAS, Review, Reviews