Buffalo HS-DH2.0TGL/R5 Terastation Live 2 TB RAID5 NAS Multimedia Storage Server

Do NOT buy this product as a backup or safe data storage. It is apparently not designed for data safety, despite its RAID capabilities. I have been using mine for approx 4 months when one of my drives went out. As expected, the system went on working fine, warning me that I had a bad drive. After 6 (six!!) unanswered emails to techsupport about a drive replacement, another drive started getting bad sectors. In RAID 5, one bad drive is fine but two is a crisis. In theory, that's highly statistically improbably. Finally, after multiple more emails Buffalo answered with "we'll send you an entire new unit." Fine, I'll just swap out the drives I need.

So, before the unit arrives I start backup up my data from the TeraStation. It was hard finding a place for 2 terabytes worth of data but I'm very, very glad I did. More on that in a moment.

Unit arrives and I easily swap out the bad drive and let the array rebuild. I'm giddy with excitement. It takes a while but after it's complete, I do the same with disk two. Fantastic, I think. Disks swapped for new good ones, auto-rebuild of the array and we are off and running.

I access the share subdir on the Terastation to check on my precious data but for some reason I no longer have permission to access that folder. I reboot the Terrastation (because I've been trained by Windows - when in doubt, reboot.) No effect. I mess with other setting all to no avail.

Finally, I email techsupport who says reset the unit to factory defaults and claims that this won't cause any loss of data. Shudder, I think, but fine. I've got my data backed up anyway. Reset - no good.

Techsupport responds: "if you delete the array and recreate it should give you access to the share subdir." I'll repeat that one more time: "delete the array and recreate to get access to the share subdir"!!! The array, containing the data I consider sooo precious that I bought a stand-alone unit that runs RAID5 for safety, I'm supposed to delete it! So I can have access to the folder again!??

Wow, not only have they failed miserably for tech support, they completely failed to stand up to what their product was DESIGNED TO DO - store data safely and reliably. I'll quote this right off their web page:
"Massive storage for your home or SOHO network, all with the peace of mind of RAID 5. RAID 5 continually provides redundancy, protecting your data from a drive failure."

From what I've experienced, if you lose one drive, you've lost all your data because the Terrastation will never give you access to that data again after you replace a drive.

"....quick-swap SATA hard drives...."
Yes, it was quick and easy to swap the drive but consider the total time spent:
> 1 month from 1st contact with tech support
~1 week until box arrived
~1 hour to replace first drive
~6 hours to rebuild drive (done automatic)
~1 hour to replace second drive
~6 hours to rebuild drive (done automatic)
All that effort, and then I don't have access to my data so the whole process fails, in my opinion!

QUICK was not a word with which I'd describe this experience. And overall, they have completely failed in their mission to keep my data safe.

I now have two terastations sitting on the shelf collecting dust.

I bought the terastation live 2tb because of the attractive price. I placed the NAS on a 1 gigabit network with a few macs for clients. I reviewed the manuals and the admin interface and optimized for the mac environment as instructed. The resulting, optimized, file transfer speeds were so slow as to be unworkable for anything other than late night backups.

After a few days I purchased a readynas (also through amazon) and have found this to be a *much* faster system.

Definitely consider this issue before you buy.

I've had this product for about a month now and so far it's performed as advertised. 1.36tb at raid 5 is damn nice. I haven't tried all the fancy media features that previous reviews claimed didn't work accept the cool itunes sharing which does work great. That means I can store all my music on the tera station and share it in iTunes across any computer in my network...Windows or Mac

The setup could be a little more user friendly but nothing a few google searches didn't clear up like "what's jumbo frames?". Turns out you have to turn that on to be able to use this product in a gigabit networking environment. It's not without it's minor bugs. I've gotten a few dialog boxes in Japanese. Apparently this product was released in Japan first and it doesn't seem like they cleaned out all of the Japanese pages in the internal configuration website and for some reason the date and time has trouble sticking but who cares. I need a huge amount of storage and I've already used about 700gb so far.

I've used it with both my Mac and my windows machines with little incident. I can even get in running windows on my mac via paralles with no problems at all. The size is decent. A little taller than half the height of a regular atx tower and slightly shallower. When all 4 hard drives are cranking away you hear a little bit of hd tick but not much else and it's not terribly distracting. The LCD is a nice touch.

One hint...it cycles through information about the unit and if your's says 100Mbps then you aren't running in full gigabit mode. Turn on jumbo frames in the config and get yourself a gigabit switch or router and a computer with gigabit ethernet and you'll see the display change to 1000Mbps and the transfer rates shorten.

I didn't give this product 5 stars only because it seems like they rushed it to the American market without getting the little Japanese gremlins out. Other than that the unit works great. If you have the need for this amount of storage the price is hard to beat.

Well, in the space of about 2 weeks, I have gone through 1 Terastation Live (1TB), and FOUR Terastation 2TB units, after they failed, one by one. One of them refused to work RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX! And just when I thought the LAST ONE was the LUCKY ONE ... BOOM it dies the same death the FIRST unit did ... first refusing network requests, then refusing to allow accessing any menu items in the web browser, then being completely unable to complete booting up.

I've had it with the poor quality of Terastation products. I can't believe the company stays in business putting out expensive cr*p like this?

My reasons for wanting one in the first place was to not only have a SAFE PLACE to store our vast collection of personal photographs (kids, vacations, graduations, birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), but also to serve as a RELIABLE place to back up our computers to.

But I wouldn't trust a Terastation unit to hold Looney Tunes MP3's! Heck, I might as well leave my house wide open, and post my address on the internet inviting theives to come take whatever they want! That's how safe and secure my data has been.

And wouldn't you know, RIGHT AFTER this unit failed, I had a serious drive failure in one of my PC's and WAS UNABLE TO RECOVER because this unit was not responding to requests from my network.

So, if you are looking for network storage, I suggest building your own. At least you know the quality that went into it.

I will never own a Terastation again in my lifetime if I can avoid it.

Hope this helps in your purchasing decision!

This is the 2nd Buffalo product I've purcahsed, and I couldn't be less satisfied with their products. I am however, trying to achieve a specific result - music streaming.

Though this device is listed as DNLA certified I can not get it to work. I've searched the mfg website and there is almost nothing documenting the mediaserver. The documents that come with the device provide almost no information whatsoever. From doing hours of research on the web it would seem nobody has any success using this as a DNLA Media Server - works OK with their own product but not much else. I've posted a question to the mfg's tech support but haven't heard anything in response.

As a pure NAS device it works fine, but if that's all you're trying to do they make other products that provide that. DO NOT purchase this device if you're trying to do any kind of media streaming, and intend to do so with something other than a Buffalo product.

BTW - the Twonky and the Firefly media server products currently do not work on this specific device so even 3rd part hacking isn't an option.