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.

IT Pro 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.

By Dave Mitchell

published 18 August 2011

in Reviews

During share creation you can decide which network services will be supported and apply user and group access restrictions.

Quotas for controlling disk space usage are applied to users as they are created. A soft quota warns them when they are getting close to their limits and a hard quota stops them from copying anything else to the appliance.

CIFS, NFS and FTP access can be activated individually on selected shares and secure FTP transfers are also supported. An unusual feature is the ability to enable the various network services on specific network ports only.

If you want IP SANs then Buffalo would like you to use its separate TeraStation iSCSI appliance. They are not available on the TeraStation Pro, so if you want a NAS appliance with IP SAN support then consider products from QNap and Synology. These vendors' appliances all support NAS shares and iSCSI targets in the same array, iSCSI thin provisioning and CHAP access authentication.

Buffalo scores better for business backup features. The appliance comes as standard with a 10-user license for the bundled NovaBackup Business Essentials software which supports Windows workstations and servers.

It runs scheduled backups of local folders to selected shares on the appliance and can manage a combination of full, incremental and differential backups. Disaster recovery is also available as it can create boot media and run bare metal restores from the appliance.

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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.