Buffalo Technologies

[f21970]

Avoid the Terastation Pro II like the plague - it advertises that it integrates with AD to use groups & users, but, quite simply, it doesn't. Network file transfer performance is also totally dire.
A call to Buffalo's 'tech' support (national rate mind) proved useless, with them saying that there was something wrong with my AD (hmm...think I would have noticed before now) and that my switches and network cards needed reconfiguring (isn't it supposed to be plug&play?) Their best suggestion was to use the setup which is clearly and substantially stated in the manual as unsupported - direct connection to network card. However, even this, on a large data transfer 300Gb say, fails.
I have discovered that this is only an issue when the drives are set up in RAID5 configuration, another selling feature of the box (getting the picture yet?!) However, when set up to mirror drives, only half of the capacity of the box is available (it contains 4 hard drives each 500Gb, but will only mirror two of them, giving a total capacity of 1tb). So your available options is RAID5 (terrible performance), or lose half the space.

If you want performance and AD integration, suggest looking at rival Infrant. I think I'm going to use the sata drives out of the Buffalo to put in PC's. That's how much use it is.

[Geoff]

You AD integration, raid and network performance issues can be fixed with a firmware flash.

http://www.terastation.org/wiki/TeraStationPro#v1.04

[plexer]

Of course if it's got 4 x 500gb drives and you set them as a mirror you lose half the capacity that's how a mirror works.

If it had 2 x 1tb drives and you mirrored them you'd only have 1tb available.

Ben

[mrtechsystems]

Interesting we have purchased 2TB TERASTATION PRO using it to backup

Have not checked the firmware yet

We are also using it to backup ghost images

Got a 1TB version here and find it does what I want it to. Admittedly I'm not using AD intergration but as an storgae device for my ghost images, software for deployment, and thing like digital photos and video I can't fault it.

[Hecate]

We are using 2 as back up storage and are more than satisfied but we aren't trying to integrate them with AD

[f21970]

Will check out that firmware upgrade, but have upgraded to v1.13 latest already. Tried using TSII to perform backups using supplied software Memeo. Set running 7pm Friday night & was still running at 9am Monday morning - only trying to back up 200Gb. Perhaps I am expecting too much - On a measure over the network it performs at 4mbps - I would have expected 20+.

[f21970]

Hi Geoff, thanks for that link, but have a terastation Pro II - different firmware than the normal Pro version apparently, as Pro II latest is 1.13.

[f21970]

Re: Plexer - I mistyped my original post - when you use mirroring it only seems to mirror mirror one 500Gb disk (using 1Tb total, with 1Tb redundant)

[wilfy]

All I can say on this subject is that we have purchased 2 x 3 TB units and both work fine, they find AD no problem are both running raid 5 the firmware on our units is V1.10. maybe the new versions have been updated now?