Buffalo LinkStation Home Server 300GB review

Buffalo was one of the first companies to get in on the act with inexpensive consumer NAS, with its LinkStation devices picking up a couple of Recommended awards last year. This year's additions to the range bring a number of improvements.

This device supports DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) interoperability standards - an extension of protocols such as UPnP. That may not mean much right now, but it guarantees the device will work far more easily with other devices conforming to the protocol once they become available. That would include being able to communicate with music players without a PC, for example, as well as sharing support for common media formats.

Other differences are incremental but welcome, such as the addition of Gigabit Ethernet: academic if your router, like most, is still stuck at 10/100, but it provides a level of future-proofing. There's support for Jumbo Ethernet frames, which can increase the data rate significantly, so long as all the involved devices also support it.

The install routine automatically finds the device on your network and allows you to change the unit's name and IP address, after which you can use the web interface to start configuring.

You can set user-access privileges, but, again, it's long-winded to navigate through the requisite steps, requiring several different and confusing pages to configure. You can't set quotas for individual users or shared folders either, and there's no way of configuring read-only access.

Tanagra's Memeo Zero-Touch software is included, which will track changes to file types being monitored even when the backup destination is offline and back them up at the first opportunity. You can also use another networked LinkStation to back up its contents, or a USB hard disk attached to the rear USB socket. The latter can be used to expand storage capacity. Drives show up as a shared folder on the network and don't even need formatting before use. The USB ports can also be used with the integrated print server.

Our biggest complaint with the Home Server stems from the noise the unit makes. With the integrated PSU, you'll have one less black box to clutter up your floor, but the temperature-controlled fan is easily audible in a quiet room. And while we like the Sleep function, which can shut the unit down between a set period, we'd prefer an option that did it automatically after a period of inactivity.

We'd still recommend plumping for the more comprehensive features - like the eSATA port and Ethernet router - from the cheaper Freecom FSG-3 Storage Gateway. Nonetheless, depsite the few grumbles, the Home Server remains an attractive option if you want forward-looking storageyou're your media files

Author: Ross Burridge