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The Buffalo Terastation Duo arrives in a plain brown box – ours obviously came direct from the company so retail packaging may very well be different.
Buffalo supply a European and a UK power connector, as well as a LAN cable. There is also a quick start guide.
The TeraStation Duo is an attractive NAS system with a lockable front drive door, which is dust filtered. The unit supports 10/100/1000 Mbps and offers maximum data transfer of up to 480 Mbps in ‘high speed' mode. It is 6.7 x 6.6 x 9.1 inches (WxHxD) and weighs 5.40kg with the drives in place.
The rear offers connectivity for two RJ45 ports, two USB ports and a serial connector. There is a large cooling fan at the rear – a direct front to back airflow is always best for a NAS as it ensures air is passing continually over the drives. Sadly there is no eSATA port which was one of the reasons we liked the Synology DS710+ so much when we reviewed it a while ago.
The USB ports can be used to connect USB flash and hard drives for expansion or backup features. UPS synchronisation is handled via the serial port.
Underneath are rubber tipped feet which help stop movement and vibration.
The door opens with a supplied key, giving access to both drives. The image above right shows the filtered front section to ensure low levels of dust pass through the internals.
Both drives are removable via a smooth bay based system. Our unit arrived with 2x 500GB drives, but you can pay extra for 2.0TB or 4.0TB configurations (2x1TB or 2x2TB hard drives). The drives in our sample were Samsung units, the same manufacturer as the last Buffalo review we published.
After removing both drives we can see that the daughtercard for the hard drives is a standard sata unit, much as we expected. This means that they can easily be replaced or upgraded later. We would recommend if you do however to use two drives of the same size and make.
Internally, the power transformer is set on top of the hard drive bay and the motherboard is at the very bottom. Although it is not listed anywhere this NAS is using the Marvell MV78100-A0 C080 Single core ARMv5TE complaint Feroceon clocked at 800mhz. This is paired up with a Marvell Sata II controller. There is 512mb of ram on board and 512mb of flash. Dual Marvell 88E1118s provide the two Gigabit ethernet ports that support Jumob frames up to 9k. The NEC UPD78F0513 8 bit single chip handles the front LCD panel and buttons.
When the system is first powered on, it checks the ROM is undamaged.
My friend bought this last week for work, and its very good, it can get a bit congested under a lot of accessing but the value for money factor is high.
Seems like a good product, but I would like slightly more performance out of it, then again 2.0TB for just over 300 including the unit is very good value for money.
I like Buffalo, they are big here, easy to buy, offer good support and are well priced. I agree they dont seem to be the fastest for NAS, but the price is too good to ignore.
Do they sell high end units to compete with QNAP?
The 710+ Synology seems better, but its quite a bit more expensive. If you have two hard drives at home though it would be my first choice. its smaller too.
Buffalo are often in PC WORLD here and they seem well priced, although ive noticed PCWORLD overcharge when you look online at prices. Good NAS systems, very well made.
That 2.0TB seems well worth the £30 more.
2.0TB is a great price. I think the naked drives are just under £100, so its making the unit around £220. pretty good considering the PSU and motherboard etc.
This is ideal for me, im not a guy who copies over massive files, but id like a backup system with software that seems good and that free addition of the backup software seems very good, its worth about £30-50
very nice package and it looks like its built out of heavy duty metal, very good product. Shame about the performance, but the price is whats its all about at the end of the day.
Their software is normally quite slow running, is this one any faster?
Hazrig, yes the CPU in this one is much more responsive, its quite nippy. even formatting is faster