Buffalo TeraStation Pro 8 Bay review

The bundled NovaBackup software supports Windows servers and workstations and the price includes a 10 user license.

The Atom processor and extra memory make this appliance much faster than the Marvell equipped TeraStation III, but speeds are still well short of those delivered by QNap and Synology. We used a Dell PowerEdge R515 server running Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit and saw drag and drop copies to a mapped share return read and write speeds of 83MB/s and 36MB/s.

FTP operations were better with the FileZilla utility reporting speeds of 99MB/s and 40MB/s respectively. Our 17.4GB collection of 10,500 small files proved to be handful as this was copied to the appliance at an average of only 20MB/s.

In contrast, the same folder was written to QNap's five-bay TS-559 Pro II at a rate of 65MB/s. We also clocked it at 107MB/s and 96MB/s for read and write operations in our single file transfer tests.

The TeraStation Pro 8 Bay is significantly faster than its predecessor and the 8TB version is cheaper than rival appliances fitted with the same capacity hard disks.. However, the TeraStation's average performance compared to rival appliances and general lack of features makes it a poor choice if you want more than basic NAS services from your appliance.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

As a basic, high capacity NAS appliance, Buffalo's new TeraStation Pro 8 Bay is a lot cheaper than much of the competition. However, it comes up short for features when stacked up against the likes of QNap, Synology and Netgear, performance isn’t great and it doesn’t support IP SANs either.

Chassis: Desktop CPU: 1.66GHz Intel Atom D510 Memory: 2GB DDR2 Storage: 8 x 1TB Samsung HD103SI 3Gbps SATA hard disk in hot-swap carriers RAID: Software managed Array support: RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 51, 60, 61, JBOD Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Other ports: 2 x USB2 Management: Web browser Software: Buffalo NAS Navigator 2 and NovaBackup Business Essentials Backup (10 licenses) Part code: TS-8VH8.0TL/R6EU