Buffalo TeraStation Pro II Pro Reviews

This system offers a huge amount of storage for the money – up to 4TB per system at today’s capacities – and enough data and hardware redundancy to suit most users. We’d choose it every time over the more general-purpose PC-based SAN systems on offer. Performance is okay through the single Gigabit Ethernet port, and disk I/O was satisfactory. But fussing about details isn’t what the sub-£1,000 SAN is about. It’s about reforming storage, putting it into a grown-up rack and developing a rational policy towards backup, archiving and availability. Go beyond the usual obsession with storage and think what a SAN basic would would be like to set up, manage and use every day. It's one place to put everything but it's also one place for problems to occur.

Available in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB formats, the Pro II is faster than its predecessor, with a new processor plus enhanced Raid protection, expansion and backup facilities.

Buffalo's new iSCSI appliance looks an unfinished project as the web interface is scrappy, the LVM feature hits performance hard and the user manual is abysmal. Performance is quite reasonable but for the price we would have expected a far more sophisticated IP SAN solution from this NAS specialist.

The TeraStation Pro II is a quick and easy way to add a terabyte of reliable, fast storage to any network. It's plug and play with an easy to use, Web-based front-end, plus there's free Memeo backup software to handle most users' backup needs. It comes with a two-year warranty.

The TeraStation Pro II doesn’t offer a huge improvement over its predecessor but the faster processor certainly makes it presence felt in the performance stakes, RAID options have been increased and backup facilities look even better.