Product Reviews

If you've ever thought about how many MP3, video and digital photo files your average household has, you'll appreciate that hard disks can get eaten up extremely quickly. Ideally, you need a large amount of storage connected to your home network so you can save all your shared files in one place.

Buffalo's Terastation does exactly that, offering one terabyte (TB) of storage in a network attached storage (NAS) box. There's no onboard wireless, but there is a gigabit Ethernet network port, so you can connect the device to your existing wired network or a spare port on a wireless router.

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Terastation uses four Western Digital WD2500 ATA100 hard disks, so you have a choice of RAID modes: 0, 1 or 5. We used RAID 5 as it offers better performance and data protection, though it reduces the Terastation's capacity to 750MB. Reconfiguring for this mode took a few hours.

In the event of a hard disk failure, the front control panel lets you know which disk needs changing. This is easier said than done, though, as you practically have to dismantle the entire box to get at the hard disk.

Management is enabled with a simple web interface. As well as creating shared folders, you can create new users and groups to control access. Many of the options can be ignored though, as they're of interest only to network managers. You can configure the four USB2 ports; these can be used to connect more storage, or one can attach a printer using the station as a print server.

It might seem an expensive product, but buying the four hard disks individually would cost around £400. The extra £200 for the Terastation means it's much cheaper than buying a PC to do the same job, and it's easier to use. If you need a lot of shared storage, this is great value for money.