Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #784 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Buffalo
• Model: LS-CH1.0TL
• Released on: 2008-10-30
• Platform: Windows 2003 Server
• Dimensions: 6.14" h x 1.77" w x 6.89" l, 2.49 pounds
• Hard Disk: 1000GB

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

Very good product for a home user
Decided to make the purchase after taking a long hard look at the market, and I am very pleased with it.

It's way smaller than I imagined, and very quiet in operation. The 1TB drive space is much bigger than I need, but as the years go by, I'm always finding new excuses to fill drive space... mainly because I hoard downloads.

Super easy setup, and software included is not bad. I'm using it on a home network and plan to open up the full software package to allow other family members to be able to share over the net. It has an easy to use web interface for admin duties, and isn't too technical. User interface is well laid out, and all the setting changes are where you might expect them to be.

It might be a little pricey for some people, but I'm looking at it as a long term investment. I'm often working away from home, and like the fact that I can access my media from anywhere. To be honest, there's loads more an experienced user will get from one of these, but I'm happy with what I bought it for.

My only warning would be not to fiddle too much with the settings. Of course, I did and found myself having to wind-back and reinstall a few features before it worked the way I wanted, but I suppose that's the same with anything of this nature. So, if you do decide to get one of these, just follow the setup instructions and don't go crazy trying to work out what it does before reading the manual.

Overall, I'm very happy with this product, and I'm sure I'll get loads of use from it over the next few years.

A great little NAS for home
What I use it for

As well as storing data files (word documents, visual studio projects, etc) I wanted a NAS with good media serving features. I have an Xbox 360, a Playstation 3 and a Roku Soundbridge that I wanted to be able to stream music, videos and photos to.

My music is an iTunes library of Apple Lossless files (around 30mb a track). I have currently loaded about a third of my CDs into the library which is now approx. 4,000 tracks/102GB. This NAS serves this library flawlessly - I've never had it skip or respond in a slow manor. You can get a momentary pause while loading the track listing for the first time (I tend to find all 4000 tracks take around 3/4 seconds).

I have around 60,000 photos which stream to my Playstation 3 no problem. Many of the photos were taken on my Digital SLR (high quality JPEGs - often around 8/9mb a file). There is a delay (few seconds) when loading these files, but my PS3 is currently operating over wireless, so this is likely to be a big contributor - the JPEGs load quickly on my wired desktop (100Mbit) from the file share.

Videos I don't have many of. The aim is to put a lot of the kids films/tv programmes on here so they don't ruin the original discs! I have yet to do this, but I have put a few test videos in the form of divX files and a couple of high definition camcorder clips. These worked fine on the PS3.

Speed

Being a software developer and IT/gadget geek my family have 3 desktops, a laptop, a Soundbridge, a 360, a PS3 and an iPhone all using this NAS. It seems to manage without problem with the very basic tests I've performed (making all devices stream music, browse shares, etc, at the same time).

When loading my files onto the device it didn't seem overly quick - however not too slow either. I think it was using my 100Mbit network to the max. I am going to upgrade to a 1000Mbit network soon, so I'll have to wait and see how much the NAS will utilise that!

Downsides

The only thing I've found so far which I could complain about is power management. I've enabled schedules to turn the device on a 9am of a day and turn it off again at 10pm weekdays/midnight weekends (you have 3 schedules you can setup). This is fine. The unit goes into a standby mode when outside these hours (hard drive spun down, etc).

However, I came home from work the other day at 5pm. My wife had been out all afternoon, so all network devices were off, and the drive was on and spinning. I've checked a fair few times and it doesn't appear to even spin down the disk when not in use - a little disappointing! I'd have thought this was basic power saving in this day and age.

I haven't tested it much on the 360 yet, but my friends have and they say it's fine.

Summary

Overall I'm very impressed with the unit and would recommend it to any for home use. Other than a few minor criticisms, which are not a big problem for me, the unit does exactly what I want in a small, quiet, attractive casing. I feel that it deserves the five stars, especially when compared to the competition.

I spent a long time looking at other devices which all had horror stories of slow media servers, etc, but a couple of friends recommended this one (they have them). There's not a lot of reviews of this model out there as it's quite new, but so far so good!

Awesome right up until it crashed.
Up until last week, I was completely in love with this thing. The torrent feature is great. It streamed HD content without any real issue to two PS3s, often at the same time. I was really accumulating quite a good collection of music and videos and photos.

And then it stopped booting. Support suggested that I reboot the device 15-20 times (!) in order to send it into "Emergency Mode", but this didn't work, so they're offered to replace it for me. Unfortunately, that means I'll lose all of data. That's not Buffalo's fault, but they said that if I open the box to try to get the data off the drive myself, it will void the warranty. So either I can buy a new LinkStation and try to get the data off the drive, or they will send me a new LinkStation and I'll lose everything forever.

Given this experience, I wish this device had the following feature: EASY BACKUP TO A USB DRIVE. The drive is able to copy data FROM a usb-based drive, but not TO a usb drive. This makes it almost impossible to back up and, therefore, a dangerous place to keep large amounts of data.

So I'm going to crack this baby open and see if I can salvage my data. Then I'm going to buy a similar NAS called a StorCentre ix2 since that comes with two drives in a RAID config. I hope it's as good as the Buffalo was.

Good luck with yours!