Buffalo LinkStation 421e Diskless Enclosure High Performance RAID NAS Personal Cloud Storage and Media Server (LS421DE)

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Price: $149.99 $149.00   

Product Feature

• Diskless Enclosure
• Shared Storage with Free Personal Cloud Service
• Stream Your Favorite Media
• Automatic Data Protection
• Easy Scheduled Backup
• Exceptional Performance
• LinkStation NAS System

Product Description

Buffalo’s LinkStation 421e Diskless Enclosure provides ultra fast shared storage and backup for all PC and Mac computers on your home network. Simply add hard drives and connect it to your wireless router for high capacity centralized storage and backup, scalable up to 8 TB. Equipped with a high performance processor, LinkStation 421e boasts transfer speeds up to 80 MB/s, twice as fast as a standard NAS or USB drive. Additionally, it’s DLNA Certified and it can be used as an iTunes server for simplified media storage and streaming. While on the go, easy to use Buffalo Link service allows you to create a free personal cloud for easy remote access anytime, anywhere over the Internet, and even on your iPhone, iPad and Android devices. With LinkStation 421e, you can back up multiple computers simultaneously and enjoy uninterrupted access to terabytes of storage anytime, anywhere.

Buffalo LinkStation 421e Diskless Enclosure High Performance RAID NAS Personal Cloud Storage and Media Server (LS421DE) Review

I just bought this unit to replace my Linkstation DUO (LS-WX2.0TL). Which is actually doing fine but has a real low transfer rate across network (max 8Mb/s over wired network).

Buffalo advertised this unit with performance up to 100Mb. I honestly do not believe that this is true but if I get something close to 30 will let me happy considering what I have today.

Just got it, unpacked and to my complete surprise the box says "up to 80Mb/s". I double checked the product code from the box, product and website. The product codes matches. So, looks like there is a mismatch on the ads or maybe the speed increased to 100 due to a firmware upgrade.

Anyways, next step is remove the disks from the old unit and load them on the new one which I'll do during the weekend since I really believe it'll take around 3 to 4 hours to complete the task. I'll leave 3 stars for the false ads and will update later.


BEWARE: remember to erase any disks that you are willing to load specially if they are in RAID. The unit will fail to read the array and will keep flashing white forever. It happened to me when I tried to use my disks (that where on raid 0).

So, lets talk about the unit itself.

<DATA TRANSFER> (Mandatory)
I did this test loading back my backup. I'm using this NAS plugged into a CISCO router and not plugged directly.

-> Transfering Media - Average file size 1GB.
TRANSFER RATE above 49MB/s most of time, increased to 52MB/s when reached folders with 300MB files - Total 111GB - 300 files

It is not as advertised but WAY BETTER than comparing to my old unit which kepth 9MB/s all time.

-> Transfering small files - Average of 150Kb.
TRANSFER RATE 4MB/S with good period at 2MB/S when processing manuals with thousands of 1KB files - Total 24GB - 164.255 files

Terrible if you compare to the add, but twice as fast as my old unit.

Also, I could add that this behaviour with small files is shared with other brands of NAS.

NOTE: STAY AWAY FROM THE SMB2. Crashed the unit 3 times until I managed to disable it.

<Update August, 24th>
-> FTP
I wasn't expecting much on this test, enabled FTP server on my folder and used a filezilla client to test. The results where surprising at least for me. Performance is really good. Specially if you enable multiple connections on your client. In fact this solved the issue I reported above regarding transfer of small files. From now on, backups and big transfers only using FTP.

Note: No SFTP support, which is really bad since I was expecting to use it from internet. I heard you can enable it by root your unit, but I'm not willing to do it... at least for now.

-> Torrent
Nothing special. uTorrent, works good. You can also access your queue remotelly from web sites or mobile apps wich is really nice.

-> Media Server
It works good. A lot of video and audio formats supported. Very good functionality, as long as you don't need transcoding which is not supported, so this functionality will rely on your player been able to play the file format and your network bandwidth.

-> ITunes Library - WORKS.

I'll make tests on WEB ACCESS this week and will update the review.

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