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Initial unit setup is made easy thanks to the bundled NAS Navigator software – which is incidentally also available from the Buffalo Tech website if you don’t happen to have an optical drive handy.
This software tracks down any Buffalo related drive on your network and offers shortcuts to both the device web interface and to the mapping of the storage within. You can bypass this software and use a direct IP login once you ascertain the IP via your router interface.
We simply browsed to the IP of the device in our browser and accessed the software via the default login of ‘admin/password'.
The main screen details the name of the unit, firmware version and the IP address of the NAS as well as the storage Raid Array configuration (if any). Our unit arrived preconfigured as RAID 1.
The Buffalo Terastation Duo offers three configurations for dual drives. You can run them individually without RAID, or you can configure them as RAID 0 or RAID 1. RAID 1 offers redundancy with the downside that you lose half of the storage. For example this unit was offering 500GB out of the box. RAID 0 uses both drives to stripe data which offers speed benefits and the full storage capacity … 1TB in this case. The downside with RAID 0 is that if one of the drives fails, then you lose everything. If neither mode appeals to you, then break the array and use each drive as a mapped unit over the network.
We wanted to test how easy it was to switch modes, so we told the software to destroy the RAID 1 configuration.
We wanted to configure Raid 0, and the popdown menu offered both modes as a new configuration.
As a security measure the software demands a confirmation code be typed into the window as seen in the image above. Remember if you accidentally hit this button you would lose all your files.
In a few minutes the operation completes and we have both drives now set into a RAID 0 array which offers the full storage capacity with speed benefits. Obviously if the files on this unit are extremely important then we suggest a RAID 1 configuration, just be aware you only get half of the full storage capacity.
Setting up a shared folder is straightforward enough, there are options for read only, read and write and support for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Terasearch is a handy option if you need to find files quickly as it adds files and folders to search indexing.
Once a shared folder is setup, its easy to check accessibility within the Windows or Macintosh operating systems.
Our shared folder was immediately available in Windows and we recorded no issues with this configuration. Even a beginner could handle this easy enough.
Jumbo frames are fully supported… this is a very important setting for network performance as bigger files can be transfered faster, bearing in mind that the rest of the network, such as switches must be compliant. Port Trunking is supported … this is also refered to as link aggregation or IEEE 802.1AX-2008, a computer networking term which describes using multiple network cables/ports in parallel to increase the link speed beyond the limits of any one single cable or port, and to increase the redundancy for higher availability.
The rest of the interface offer many options for Webaccess, file sharing, FTP access, Media, PrintServer, Bittorrent and even Macintosh Time Machine options via the ‘Extensions' menu interface.
The system menu is fully featured however we were slightly disappointed to see no hardware overview. No listing of hardware, fan speeds or current temperatures. This is one thing we like about QNAP systems, the detailed software schematic of how all the internals are running. It is ideal to monitor for any potential upcoming issues.
There is a good method for backup – which lets you create a backup job ‘task' and to mirror the internal data to an external drive. Full replication is also supported which is useful.
We jumped in our seats after pressing the ‘locate' button to hear the NAS system as it started to play a tune. I can not see anyone ‘losing' a NAS system on their network, but maybe someone will find a use for it.
