Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo 2TB review

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Verdict:

An easy-to-configure NAS that's let down by slow transfer speeds and a flawed disk tray design.

Review Date: 9 Apr 2011

Price when reviewed: £220

Supplier: http://uk.insight.com

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Basic Specifications
Part Code	LS-WV2.0TL/R1-EU
Review Date	9 Apr 2011
Price	£220
Rating

Storage
Capacity	2x 1TB
Formatted capacity	1834GB
Default file system	XFS
Price per gigabyte	£0.11
Interface	SATA II
3.5in drive bays	2
Free 3.5in drive bays	0
RAID modes	RAID 0, RAID 1

Interface
Ethernet ports	1
USB direct access ports (front/rear)	0/0
Other USB ports (front/rear)	0/1
eSATA ports (front/rear)	0/0
Other ports	none

Networking
Ethernet connection speed	10/100/1000Mbit/s
Universal Plug and Play support
UPnP media server
iTunes
Print server
USB disk server
Web server
FTP server
Protocols supported	TCP/IP, SMB/CIFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP, NFS

Miscellaneous
Size	128x87x205mm
Weight	1.7kg
Vertical positioning
Ethernet cable included
Additional features	BitTorrent manager, remote access
Power consumption idle	17W
Power consumption active	22W

Buying Information
Price	£220
Warranty	two years RTB
Supplier	http://uk.insight.com
Details	www.buffalo-technology.com

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User comments

A much, much different experience!

The model that I have is the LinkStation Duo 2TB (LS-WX2.0TL/R1) with firmware revision 1.43. The Duo is slower than the Pro Duo model. My unit came with 2 1TB WD Caviar GreenPower drives. They've been configured as a 1TB RAID 1 array. I have a TP-Link 300N wireless network based on their WR1043ND router. The LinkStation sits on a TP-Link GigaBit desktop switch (SG1008D) that is linked to the wireless network through a TP-Link 300N wireless bridge (WA901ND). The LinkStation Duo is mainly used as a media server and for remote storage. The files I transfer to and from it range from very small (under 1MB), to very large (>20GB). However, my experience is that I average around 25MB/s reads and around 15MB/s writes. The lowest write speed I've seen was 12MB/s when I used XXCOPY to do a verified copy of a 1GB folder with about 80% of it's files being around 1MB and less in size. The main computer I use to read and write to the NAS is just an old P4 3.4GHz with 2GB of memory and a 320GB 7200RPM HD running Windows 7 Ultimate. It is connected to the network by a GigaBit wired connection to the WR1043ND router. In fact my reads and writes seem to be right in line with what SmallNetBuilder has posted on their charts:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/bar/
2-filecopy-read
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/bar/
1-filecopy-write

One will also see in those charts that the Pro Duo is much faster then my Duo model.

Thus, I was wondering how could your review of the Pro Duo yield such low transfer rates?

By TechMind on 12 Aug 2011