Buffalo Technology TeraSation TS3400R review

Using a RAID5 volume, our SMB throughput test produced a result of 54.7MB/s in our large file write test and 101.5MB/s in our large file write test, averaging 78.1MB/s. In small file tests, we got a write speed of 10.1MB/s and a read speed of 20MB/s for an average of 15.1MB/s. This is remarkably slow, making this NAS one of the slowest we’ve reviewed in the last year. We ran the same tests on a RAID6 volume. Our large file test produced a write speed of 43.5MB/s. a read speed of 92.9MB/s and an average of 68.2MB/s. Small file throughput was again incredibly slow, with a write speed of 10.1MB/s, read speed of 21.2MB/s and an average of 15.7MB/s.

We also tested the TS3400R’s iSCSI throughput speeds. iSCSI allows space on a NAS to be mounted by another system on the network as though it was a local hard disk, and typically produces faster transfer speeds. Using a RAID5 volume, the TS3400R produced a large file write speed of 79.2MB/s and a read speed of 50MB/s. Small files were written at 32.5MB/s and read at 30MB/s. With a RAID6 volume, large file speeds averaged 58.1MB/s and small ones 31MB/s.

Buffalo’s own iSCSI connection tool, supplied on the accompanying software disc, means you don’t have to wrangle with Windows’ own ageing iSCSI Initiator program, although the latter must still be set up in order to enable the Windows iSCSI service. You can then use Windows’ disk management tools to assign it a drive letter and use it just as you would a physical hard disk connected to your PC. We really wish more NAS devices came with their own iSCSI tools like this one, as it made it mounting an iSCSI partition much less awkward than usual.

However, the NAS itself has some quirks when defining iSCSI volumes. By default, you can only define a single iSCSI target, occupying the entire RAID volume. To create additional iSCSI volumes, you’ll first have to enable Logical Volume Management, which lets you create and adjust the size of disk volumes flexibly. The NAS’s interface warns that enabling LVM can reduce performance. Our tests showed this to be the case, but the decrease in average read/write speeds was less than 1MB/s in our small file throughput tests and around 4MB/s in our large file tests.

Although it’s easy to use, has a good range of features and is very cheap for its form factor and capacity, the TS3400R fails catastrophically at the most important feature required of a NAS: fast throughput speeds. If you need a large, relatively inexpensive NAS, we recommend instead opting for a lower-cost free-standing model such as the Lacie 5big Pro 10TB.