Product Reviews

Buffalo's LinkStation is a novel idea: a tiny network attached storage device for small businesses. Packed into a box roughly 19x18x6cm, it provides 120GB of storage space and has two USB ports for adding extra storage or connecting a printer to the network.

Setting up the LinkStation is easy. After plugging it into your network and the mains you simply run the installation CD and in a few minutes it is visible as a mapped network drive with its own drive letter. A separate utility lets you change its network address, but all

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other configuration changes can be made through a web browser.

It's slower than any USB Hi-Speed external hard disk we've seen recently - in our large file test write speeds reached 5.65MB/s and read speeds 7.24MB/s, but results with small test files were slower, reaching 0.39MB/s writing and 2.11MB/s reading.

The LinkStation can also be used as a simple print server - just plug a printer into one of its two USB ports, set up some drivers on the client PC and you have a network printer. You can also add an external hard disk using a USB port and use it as an extra shared folder, or even set the LinkStation to back up its own hard drive to the external disk according to a schedule. The only limitation is that the LinkStation must format the external hard disk itself for it to work.

The LinkStation is a clever product that's perfect for a small group of users. If you just want extra storage space, it's expensive compared to a simple external hard disk. If, on the other hand, you need a file server for a small network and will also use its print server, you could find its simplicity worth the cost.