Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4512 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Buffalo
• Model: LS-CH500L
• Released on: 2008-10-30
• Platform: Windows 2003 Server
• Dimensions: 6.14" h x 1.77" w x 6.89" l, 2.42 pounds
• Memory: 2MB DRAM
• Hard Disk: 500GB
• Processors: 1
• Display size: 669.2913385827

Manufacturer's Description
Dependable, silent, and easy to install. Seamlessly store and share your music, photos, and videos with LinkStation Live with Bittorrent. Easily stream your favorite music and videos directly from LinkStation Live to a PC, Mac, or DLNA media player. Password protect files for added security and use Memeo to automatically backup precious data for ultimate protection. Share a printer with other users or add a DriveStation for increased capacity. Access and share your multimedia collections from anywhere at anytime using Web Access. The user-friendly LinkStation Live makes sharing simple.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Neat and well made but a bit slow
Very neat and well made. Easy to install providing plenty of storage on the network. So far I've only used it as a filestore so can't comment on the iTunes or bitTorrent capability.

Overall, very pleased but with a couple of small disappointments.

SPEED
=====
Did some write tests and a 130MB file was transferred in 14sec which works out at 80 mbps. As a comparison, writing the same file locally on my PC takes 4sec. Obviously, my 100M network was a bottleneck so I spent more money upgrading it and the the PCs to gigabit. I redid the test and was very disappointed to see it still take 14secs. So the write limit is the NAS, not the network. Reading is better, but even on Gigabit this only gets to around 180Mbps.

So be prepared for the performance and don't rush out to upgrade your network based on it's 'Gigabit' credentials.

POWER
=====
I was hoping to make use of the auto power-down. The box makes a big deal of the NAS being 'ECO Minded'. It has a switch on the back which can be switched to OFF, ON or AUTO. Reading the manual in detail, I found that the AUTO only works if the NAS is connected directly to your PC. To me this defeats the point of a NAS - you'd be better off with a USB drive (cheaper and faster). If you leave it on a network on AUTO then it will power-down when not used okay but can't receive the wake up signal. So to bring it back to life you have to use the switch on the back to turn it OFF and then ON. So the AUTO is pretty pointless and that pretty much destroys Buffalo's 'ECO Minded' claim.

Cracking piece of kit
After much research I went for the Buffalo 0.5TB LinkStation from Amazon. Thus far I'm very impressed.

Set up was a breeze, I installed the NAS Navi software on both our laptops and set the linkstation to Auto and it turns on when we power up the laptops (not instantly I might add, but it gets there). Adding extra shared folders etc was easy as was setting up the drive for external web access.

I read lots of reviews of NAS drives and the Buffalo was the only one that didn't seem to have major drawbacks (getting too hot, only FAT32 etc etc).

Oh, and Amazon was by far the cheapest source.

5/5 for me!

Great so far
I've been moved enough by this product to write an 'in progress' review before I've tried all the functions in depth. Whacked it onto my home network last night, installed the software, and there it was with 500GB of brand new space all ready to be used.

I agree with the previous reviewer that transfer times for large files or groups of files is not as good as you think it should be with the write-up Buffalo has given it, but for a reasonably priced home NAS device it's not bad.

I'm never going to be a heavyweight user of this sort of device (if I were there are many more 'professional' NAS solutions available) and I only want certain things from it: (i) easy to set up, (ii) decent interface so I know what's possible even if I never use all the functions, (iii) backup facility, (iv) multiple user/computer access to shared files, and (v) media server.

It was really the media side of things that sold this to me, and there it's looking really good. It and my XBox recognised each other straight away and streamed very nicely indeed over the wireless connection. It also linked up well with iTunes on my laptop, and again streamed away quite happily. Lastly, receiving downloads straight from the internet was no problem, although I'm yet to try the bittorrent functions.

A couple of small (very small) negatives. First, the 'auto' power function sounds like a great idea, and unlike one of the other reviewers it does work for me, but when my laptop went into sleep mode the NAS decided to turn itself off and not come on again when the laptop woke up. Also it doesn't work with the XBox (you need the software on a computer), so you're back to manual powering up on both counts. Second, and this might just be me having to adjust the settings, Windows and the NAS got a little confused over assignment of drive letter.

Overall, and I hope I'm not tempting fate here, a great product. Once I've tried a few more of the functions, and if it hasn't fallen over, I'll see if it's worthy of upgrading to 5 stars. If you're looking for a simple home network NAS solution with media server then seriously consider this.