Buffalo LinkStation Live 500GB review

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are a convenient way of sharing lots of files between several computers on your network, but they can often be much more expensive than a USB external hard disk.

Buffalo's 500GB LinkStation Live shows that this doesn't have to be the case - it only costs 46p per gigabyte, so it's an affordable way of adding lots of shared storage to your network.

The LinkStation's web management interface is easily accessible using the included setup utility. It's generally easy to follow, but the interface that ensures only approved users have access to certain shared folders could be much more straightforward. The LinkStation Live doesn't support Windows file attributes, so files marked as read-only or hidden in Windows Explorer will become writable and visible when stored on the LinkStation.

The LinkStation wrote large files to its disk at 11.19MB/s and read them back at 10.94MB/s. That's not the fastest we've seen, but it's reasonably quick. It was much slower when writing small files though, only managing a meagre 0.95MB/s, but was a bit quicker reading them at 2.16MB/s. While using the LinkStation to back up large files such as movies and Photoshop documents is feasible, backing up small files will be frustratingly slow.

Buffalo claims the LinkStation can be used as an iTunes music server, but we were unable to play music stored on it with any version of iTunes from 4.9 up to 7.0.1. We were also unable to play music and video files stored on the device using three different UPnP network media players. Buffalo told us that only DLNA-certified players are supported, but the one we tried didn't work either. Thankfully, we had no trouble using the LinkStation Live as an FTP and USB disk server, although it would only recognise USB hard disks and not USB flash drives.

The LinkStation Live is affordable, spacious and is reasonably quick transferring large files, but since many of its features don't seem to work properly, it's not a particularly good buy.

Author: Alan Lu