Buffalo TeraStation Pro 8 Bay review
Buffalo has been lagging behind the competition in the business NAS market, but its latest TeraStation Pro has been revamped. There's an Atom processor and more memory all at a surprisingly reasonable price, but Dave Mitchell doesn't think these are enough. Read this review to find out why.
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.

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.
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
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Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.
Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.
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