Buffalo LinkStation Live 1TB MultiMedia Network Attached Storage with Built-In BitTorrent Client

I brought this product purely for data backup as I have a number of PC's with different user accounts, and a Mac, and I wanted all data on them backed up centrally.

Summary: Overall it's a very good product. I have a number of minor (ish) gripes which if you are looking to do what I wanted to do, you will find annoying.

So, plus points:
It's nice and quiet
Basic operations simple to set up
It has lots of nice features such as web access and FTP
It works out of the box with no fuss. I did update the firmware as soon as I got it though just to ensure I had the latest
The in-built print server (works great with a Canon i865)
The concept behind Memeo's backup software (which comes with it) is really neat. See below though

So what I don't like:
The web admin is rather clunky. It does the job, but isn't pretty and is painfully slow to navigate around it
The only browsers supported today are IE and Firefox. I learnt the hard way using Google Chrome that some vital options simply don't work under Chrome. For example you cannot change read only access to read write/access with it
The idea of being able to access files via a browser appealed. The web access is really really basic and not nice to use. Again, it works, but lacks any kind of polish. Really silly things like no Logout button on the web access once you are authenticated. If you the close the browser down, and then re-start another it simply logs you back in with no authentication. Not good if you want to use on a public browser.
I have not been able to change the admin port of the buffalo off port 80. That means to access your data via the web you need to add a port number (e.g. 9000) which isn't nice if you are trying to tell a non technical person a URL over a phone. You can get around this if your router supports port redirection but my Netgear doesn't. (Most home Netgear's only do port forwarding.)
There have been lots of comments about the speed of these devices. Transfer speed wasn't a key priority for me as it was being used as a backup device. I had approx. 130Gb of data in 74,000 files that I needed to backup on one PC (hard-wired device). Using Memeo (which comes with the device) on a PC it took just over 96 hours to complete it's first backup, and that was as a foreground task. Others were right, it was a very slow device. Because of some limitations of Memeo I installed GFI Languard free home edition backup. That took around 7 hours for the same full backup. Not so bad after all. Not the fastest disk, but OK as a backup device. In my experience the slowness is down to the software used to backup. GFI by the way, at the time of writing has a major issue with incremental backups and actually does a separate full backup each time the backup task runs, and doesn't have the same neat feature as Memeo.

Memeo
What I liked about this is there are versions for the Mac and PC. I loved the concept of their "life agent" too. What this does is eliminate the need for scheduled backups. Once the first full backup is completed it simply sits in the background and as soon as a file has been updated, quietly in the background it pushes a copy of the file to the backup device. This happens straight away. You specify how many versions you want to keep on the backup device so for documents that you have updated a few times you can always roll back to an older one if you need. If you are not updating an item such as an MP3 you only have one copy on your backup device. With a PC with multiple users, theoretically, the agent will run for each user that is logged in and as they update files, the background task pushes those to the backup device. This means there is no scheduled task which kills your PC / Mac while it scans the disks to decide which files have been changed and therefore need backing up again. Also, if I am away, the wife never leaves the PC on long enough for a scheduled task to complete so nothing ever gets backed up.

Problem is....for some reason (on the PC) it ends up duplicating a lot of user data on the backup disk. I have a ticket logged with Memeo about it as I write.** (See footnote) It also has a snag on things like your email files. As these update each time you receive / send an email it is always sending the whole file to the backup device. Yes, you can exclude files / directories from the backup but I want my email backed up!
The GUI for this is annoying as you cannot re-size the window and need to continually scroll around to see stuff you need. Be aware Memeo for a Mac need OS X 4.8 or above.
Again, great concept just needs polishing off, and speeding up a bit on the first full backup.

**Footnote
Since I wrote this Memeo support have responded. The version included with the Buffalo disk is out of date (even though if you ask it to check for updates, it says there are none!) and I have since installed the latest from Memeo. Nearly all the issues above have been ironed out or improved. Initial backup is still slow (36 hours now) but all in all a much better product. No solution for the mail file issue however. (I use Thunderbird) Rating for the device is now 4.5

Would I buy the product again. Yes. Am I still looking for some better backup software. Yes. Am I aware of a better product out there. No, and I have looked hard!

I've had 2 of these units now - the first had a hard disk failure when 2 months old, and was fully refunded. I chose to buy another one as the product really is great to use... but it's now 6 months old and appears to have terminal failure (completely dead). I won't be buying another one - whilst Buffalo support is excellent, I haven't got time to keep on changing the unit and reloading data.

For those who get lucky with a unit that doesn't fail - this is an excellent product. Very easy to setup, works a treat for storage, iTunes server and video streaming. Didn't try it as a print server or for BitTorrent. Adding a USB drive to it allows automated backup via the setup application and/or additional storage space over the network. I'm very disappointed about the reliability issue.

What I use it for

As well as storing data files (word documents, visual studio projects, etc) I wanted a NAS with good media serving features. I have an Xbox 360, a Playstation 3 and a Roku Soundbridge that I wanted to be able to stream music, videos and photos to.

My music is an iTunes library of Apple Lossless files (around 30mb a track). I have currently loaded about a third of my CDs into the library which is now approx. 4,000 tracks/102GB. This NAS serves this library flawlessly - I've never had it skip or respond in a slow manor. You can get a momentary pause while loading the track listing for the first time (I tend to find all 4000 tracks take around 3/4 seconds).

I have around 60,000 photos which stream to my Playstation 3 no problem. Many of the photos were taken on my Digital SLR (high quality JPEGs - often around 8/9mb a file). There is a delay (few seconds) when loading these files, but my PS3 is currently operating over wireless, so this is likely to be a big contributor - the JPEGs load quickly on my wired desktop (100Mbit) from the file share.

Videos I don't have many of. The aim is to put a lot of the kids films/tv programmes on here so they don't ruin the original discs! I have yet to do this, but I have put a few test videos in the form of divX files and a couple of high definition camcorder clips. These worked fine on the PS3.

Speed

Being a software developer and IT/gadget geek my family have 3 desktops, a laptop, a Soundbridge, a 360, a PS3 and an iPhone all using this NAS. It seems to manage without problem with the very basic tests I've performed (making all devices stream music, browse shares, etc, at the same time).

When loading my files onto the device it didn't seem overly quick - however not too slow either. I think it was using my 100Mbit network to the max. I am going to upgrade to a 1000Mbit network soon, so I'll have to wait and see how much the NAS will utilise that!

Downsides

The only thing I've found so far which I could complain about is power management. I've enabled schedules to turn the device on a 9am of a day and turn it off again at 10pm weekdays/midnight weekends (you have 3 schedules you can setup). This is fine. The unit goes into a standby mode when outside these hours (hard drive spun down, etc).

However, I came home from work the other day at 5pm. My wife had been out all afternoon, so all network devices were off, and the drive was on and spinning. I've checked a fair few times and it doesn't appear to even spin down the disk when not in use - a little disappointing! I'd have thought this was basic power saving in this day and age.

I haven't tested it much on the 360 yet, but my friends have and they say it's fine.

Summary

Overall I'm very impressed with the unit and would recommend it to any for home use. Other than a few minor criticisms, which are not a big problem for me, the unit does exactly what I want in a small, quiet, attractive casing. I feel that it deserves the five stars, especially when compared to the competition.

I spent a long time looking at other devices which all had horror stories of slow media servers, etc, but a couple of friends recommended this one (they have them). There's not a lot of reviews of this model out there as it's quite new, but so far so good!