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Buffalo
TeraStation Pro NAS
November 7, 2006
 NAS
- Nikon Acquisition Syndrome? No,
it’s actually Network Attached Storage, although I admit to be
being afflicted with the first definition.
For
many photographers, gone are the days when one had filing cabinets
filled with filmstrips and slides. Nowadays, one may have cabinets
filled with CD-Rs and DVDs, but burning
discs can be a lengthy and tedious process, especially when dealing
with thousands and thousands of files. Until Blu-Ray
achieves significant market penetration, i.e., very low cost,
due to volume, burning to disc would not be my current first choice
for storing my files.
Some
photographers, including me, eschew burning to discs and favour
redundancy and security using multiple hard drives. Hard drives
are not ideal though due to their moving parts and relative fragility.
Drop a CD or DVD, even outside of its jewel case and you’re probably
no worse for wear, but drop a hard drive and you takes your chances
with the data written onto that magnetic platter with atom-like
precision.
However,
there’s no getting around the efficiency of moving large amounts
of data around; hard drives are simply superior compared to discs.
Consider that one 300 GB hard drive, worth about $100, contains
the equivalent of about 59 4.7 GB DVDs (most 300 GB drives actually
only offer about 280 GB of storage capacity, so divide 280 by
4.7 to get 59).
You
can install multiple drives inside your CPU box, but if you have
a bad power supply and it burns out, it could fry all your drives
too. You need redundancy for security, so many use external drives
to provide duplicate and even triplicate copies of their data. The rationale being that while hard drives are
not ideal in storage, it’s unlikely that you will lose a primary
and a secondary drive at the same time, short of something catastrophic
happening such as a fire burning down your home or office. However, catastrophe is why many photographers keep a copy of
their files off site, rotating external drives on a daily, weekly
or monthly basis, depending on their production.
You
can buy ready-made external drives from well-known brands such
as Lacie, Maxtor, and Western Digital amongst others, or you can
build your own for less money. External cases typically sell for
about $50 with USB 2 and Firewire options
(or USB 2 and eSATA) and hard drives
themselves sell for pretty cheap (all $ in Canadian loonies).
$150 gets you going with a nice amount of storage for about 5
minutes of sweat equity in putting the hard drive inside the case
yourself.
I’ve
used several assorted external cases in my time, some with USB
only, USB and Firewire and some with USB and eSATA.
They were all okay for their intended purpose, but USB and Firewire (have not tried eSATA) can be finicky
at times in terms of being found by the computer and speed isn’t
exactly blistering despite all the theoretical claims of so many
Mbps or Kbps (or whatever) throughput.
I’ve
also found that USB can struggle along when connecting the external
drives directly to the computer’s built-in USB ports. There are
times when computer and external drive will simply not see each
other. Using a powered USB 2 hub has been my solution for ensuring
that the computer detects my external drives.
But,
using so many external drives gets a bit tiring after a while
with cables running around everywhere and figuring out which drive
holds what data. An NAS seemed to make a lot sense to me when
I was doing the background research into them. A dedicated case
that conveniently holds multiple drives all powered by a single
outlet, a built-in fan to keep the drives cool, and for most NAS’
the ability to have the drives setup as a RAID. Only needing to
use a single RJ-45 connection is also nice to do away with the
mess of multiple USB or Firewire cables.
NAS
drives, by their name, also imply remote access if you so choose
to setup the NAS for Internet access. I don’t, so I won’t be discussing
this feature.
After
deciding that an NAS was what I wanted, I hooked onto
Buffalo as the brand to buy from and ordered the home version of their
1-TB capacity TeraStation. This unit
looks like a little vault or safe and has four USB connections
on the back for convenient connection of more external drives
if I so desired. What I ended up receiving though was the pro
version of the 1-TB TeraStation. The
price difference wasn’t a huge deal for me, so I kept it.
 The TeraStation Pro is all black, about 5-inches wide and a few
inches shorter than a foot. It’s a few inches deeper than it is
tall and is not too heavy. A backlit, black text on green screen,
LCD is located near the top above the drive bays. This LCD cycles
through basic information such as which hard drives are in use,
how the drives have been setup (e.g. RAID 5), the date and time,
and the network connection speed (e.g. 100 Mbps).
The
back of the TeraStation has the air
vents for the fan unit, which generally runs quietly. Two USB
2 ports, an RJ-45 connection port, and an IEC power outlet round
out the rear of the TeraStation. A network
cable and three-prong IEC power cord come with the TeraStation along with a setup CD. You can obtain additional
and much better specs at the
Buffalo
website.
Inside
the Pro version of the 1-TB TeraStation are four 250 GB, 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda hard drives. These
drives can be accessed from the front by pressing in two little
locks on each of the four front covers that swing up to allow
you to pull out the hard drive. Each drive is mounted in a case
that slides in and out of the bay. The hard drives are not hot
swappable, meaning you have to power down the TeraStation to replace hard drives.
The TeraStation comes defaulted to a RAID 5 setup. Without getting
into any technical details (because I don’t know much about RAIDs), this means that three of the four drives are available
for actual storage and the fourth is used as a parity drive to
rebuild the data should any of the three storage drives go down
(what happens if the parity drive failes?)
Each of the drives also has a partition that holds some necessary
data for the TeraStation to rebuild
the data in case of a drive failure (did I just answer the question
about the parity drive?)
After
everything is said and done with the parity drive and partitions
taking their share of the storage capacity, the computer sees
the TeraStation as one big 700 GB drive.
As you copy or move data to the TeraStation,
it saves it to the first drive, then the second and then the third.
Having
never used a RAID and having had it drummed in my head about the
need for security and redundancy, I decided to use the TeraStation in its default RAID 5 mode. You can also use the TeraStation as four logical drives, or as in a RAID 0, or mirrored RAID 1
configuration.
The TeraStation is also available in other capacities such as
640 GB, 1.6 TB, or 2 TB, which uses 160, 400 and 500 GB hard drives
respectively instead of the 250 GB drives in the 1-TB version
I bought.
Installation
into the Network, or Edwin’s Dumbass Assumptions
 So
here I am happy as a pearl inside an oyster now that I finally
have my NAS, but I know absolutely nothing about setting up a
network. After struggling with the TeraStation installation for about half a day, I can now confidently
say that my knowledge has increased to knowing next to nothing
about setting up a network.
First
assumption gone wrong was thinking I could just connect the NAS
directly to the PC via the PC’s built-in
network connection. After connecting the two, I could see linkage
at 1000 Mbps (a gigabit), but no communication.
I
eventually figured out that I needed to use a router to connect
everything up, so I bought a D-Link wired router. I connect the TeraStation and computer to the D-Link
router and wow, success, everything followed the way the
Buffalo
instruction manual laid it out to be. I have connection, I’ve
mapped the NAS to a drive letter, and I now have 700 GB of storage
waiting to be used. I even connect my old PC to the network and
success again; Edwin finally has a home network running and belatedly
realizes that RJ-45 network connections don’t work like USB or Firewire connections.
After
getting everything hooked up and going through the setup process,
I noticed a little line in the
Buffalo
manual that something along the lines of, it is not suggested
that you connect the TeraStation directly
to the PC. Oh, bother you silly old bear!
 Routers
and Switches
So,
everything is connected and seems to working properly, but the
speed is, shall we say, brutal!
At
3 pm on the first Saturday of use, I started copying 200 GB of
data to the TeraStation. 10 pm that evening when I returned home from
a family dinner night out, only 70 GB of data had actually been
copied from the PC. This is MUCH worse performance than using
an external USB 2 case.
Digging
around I found a setting referring to packet sizes and noticed
that the default packet size is all of about 1500 kbps. I set
it for “Jumbo” sized packets of about 7500 kbps and now the speed
is no longer glacial. However, I’m still not happy with the performance.
Looking
more closely at my router and I see that it’s a standard 10/100
Mbps unit, but when I had originally connected the TeraStation directly to the PC, it noted on its LCD that the connection speed
was 1000 Mbps. I bought a D-Link gigabit capable switch and hooked
up everything, including the router to it and now I have a gigabit
network created. I also made sure all of my network cables are Cat 5e rated instead of regular Cat 5 so that
there would be no hardware weaknesses in my chain.
 I
used 1 GB of files as my baseline test and copied 53 Nikon D2X
RAW files from my HP desktop to the TeraStation using the 100 Mbps router by itself and then with the 1000 Mbps
switch.
There
was a very modest improvement in speed with the switch. Using
the router at 100 Mbps, my copy time was around 2:45 minutes,
but with the gigabit switch, my time
was around 2:15 minutes – a 30 second improvement in time, but
hardly worth writing home about.
I
don’t know if it’s appropriate to extrapolate the times, but if
we move up to 10 GB of data, the switch would only save you about
5 minutes, but if we move up to 100 GB of data, there’s the potential
of the gigabit capable switch saving you almost an hour of time,
which seems significant. But then again, saving an hour from having
to do an all-night transfer of data is not going to be of consequence
for anyone. Whether it’s 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps, the TeraStation’s performance is unsatisfactory.
This
may not be fair, but consider that copying 100 GB of data from
one internal hard drive to another internal hard drive inside
your PC would only take a little over 30 minutes and you begin
to understand just how slow the TeraStation is for performance – the TeraStation would take several hours. My obvious assumption is that the TeraStation design is not meant for speed and no matter what the linkage is like, it will be the bottleneck in being able to move large
amounts of data in your network.
Usage
 Copying
or moving large amounts of data to the TeraStation is a huge disappointment, but once the TeraStation does have your data, how does it fare? Not that badly actually.
Copying or moving files is one thing, but access is another and here the speed
limitations may not be as brutal.
I
did an editing session with a friend with one of his engagement
shoots and we were working on files saved to the TeraStation.
First was viewing via NikonView to do
a first round of sorting to pick the best shots, then using Nikon
Capture to do some basic edits and without taking note of formal
times for tasks completed, I didn’t notice any significant lag
in the jobs (Nikon Capture isn’t known for its speed either).
So on a day-to-day basis of just accessing files, the TeraStation seems to fare okay. Also, during the whole editing session, I
was also using iTunes to access music files saved on the TeraStation and playing it back through my computer-based sound system (external
M-Audio sound card into a Rotel integrated amp being used as a
pre-amp, feeding my powered Behringer monitors).
I’ve
also accessed files from the TeraStation on one computer while moving files to it with the other and it
also seems to handle this double-duty okay too, but up until it
finishes a job, it will slow down.
Alternatives
 The
TeraStation beside the external hard drives it replaced >>
Given
how much a TeraStation Pro (or even
Home version) costs, you should also consider some other alternatives.
Not least of which would be Buffalo's competitor, Infrant
Technologies.
There
are also eSATA options that may provide superior performance.
Check out FirmTek for two and four hard drive boxes similar to the TeraStation.
Instead of a switch and/or router, you need an eSATA host adapter card to connect the computer to the external box.
There
are limitations to eSATA though, as
the cables may need to be shielded and they cannot be very long
(six feet or less), so the box has to be fairly close to your
computer. You also need a SATA port for every hard drive in your
box, so for a four-drive box, you need a host adapter with four
ports. However, there is a possibility of achieving 3 Gbps throughput if you use the latest SATA hard drives and host controller
cards and even the slowest still offer 1.5 Gbps potential.
You
might also consider a second PC stuffed with hard drives and then
networking it to your main PC. I’m sure many of us have older
PCs lying around and this could be a way to make use of it while
also allowing you to maintain some security. Even if you don’t
have an old PC, buying a new entry-level one is pretty cheap these
days and I suspect that you could easily build a 1 TB capacity
PC for the same or less money than a TeraStation.
After
configuring the old PC, you can use a crossover network cable
to connect the two computers directly without the need for a router
or switch and create a mini home network. More than two PCs would
require a router, but make sure that your network is gigabit capable,
because 100 Mpbs just doesn’t cut it
for moving large amounts of data.
Lastly,
you may just find that continuing to use an external case (with
a fan built-in to keep things cool) with a very high capacity
drive (500 GB or more) is all you need and keeps life simple,
if less secure without a RAID or a backup to a backup solution.
Recommendation?
Now
that I have a TeraStation, I cannot
say that I would purchase another one again. I do acknowledge
that it’s nicely made and it's a convenient single box storage
solution with nary a need to be technically inclined to use it
as a RAID 5, however, if I wanted another NAS unit, I would look
for one with much better performance specifications such as those
from Infrant.
In
the course of computer upgrading and moving parts to and fro,
I took out one of my 74 GB Raptor drives (10,000 rpm speed) from
my old PC and installed it in one of my external cases. The performance
from standard USB 2.0 blows the TeraStation out of the water.
However,
because the TeraStation is now part
of my storage system (more out of default than desire after discovering
how slow it is), it is changing the way I’m backing up my files.
Most of my old external drives with 300 GB per, will now be stored
off site for added security and rotated as needed with the TeraStation being my primary backup system. It just means having to do overnight
file transfers to work around the rather brutal performance. And
as things stand, 700 GB doesn’t go too far when you’re archiving
all of your digital files for the past five years. I may be in
search of another solution sooner than expected.
Link
to Buffalo
Technology
Readers'
Comments:
December
21, 2006
Commenting
on your recent disk drive failure.
I
have worked in the computer industry since 1969. The one, hard-learned,
lesson in all that time is backups. One of my co-workers ( now
deceased) stated it perfectly years
ago: There's no such thing as too many backups.
I’m
also looking for a new storage and found your Terastation review
very useful. Just a couple of things to add.
First, RAID 5 spreads data and control blocks across all four
drives in a way that allows to restore data if any of your disks
fails. So, it doesn’t matter which disk fails, the remaining
three would have all required data sufficient for a complete recovery.
In the worst case scenario you will just buy one extra drive and
replace a faulty one. More over, Terastation won’t stop
working with one drive failed, it will continue to deliver correct
data, but of course, you should not do any writes and replace
the faulty drive as soon as possible.
Second,
Buffalo just introduced a
new TS-HTGL/R5 Terastation advertising at least three times
transfer speed increase comparing to the old one reviewed in your
article.
After perusing
through the Japanese language site that Engadget pulled the news
from, I'm encouraged by the promised increase in transmission speed
by three times. However, even a three times increase in speed is
still too slow for copying files from the NAS back to the computer.
November
26, 2006
Edwin,
In the November/December 2006 issue of the magazine "Digital
PhotoPro" there is an article "Safe keeping part 1:
Dealing with the long-term storage challenges that every pro will
face" where they review the TeraStation, the Yellow Machine
P400T, Iomega StorCenter, the Infrant Ready NAS and, at the unobtainium
end, an Apple Xserve "...[that] can cost anywhere from $10,000
up to $25,000 or more."
They
were only running ethernet at 10/100 which, on the TeraStation,
copied a 1.5GB file in about 7 minutes (read speed was 4 minutes).
To quote: "Buffalo noted that, if you own a gigabit router,
read and write speeds over a network will increase by about 30%..."
For the Infrant, "The 1.5 GB read and write tests took only
3 minutes each.... Interestingly, even as the speed leader, the
ReadyNAS still couldn't compete with our "reference test."
We copied the 1.5 GB file to an external SATA hard disk, which
took all of 55 seconds..."
It
looks like you're right about the Infrant. How does their TeraStation
1.5 GB file copy in 7 minutes compare to your experience?
Tom Bullard
I just
completed some timed tests using 1.51 GB of data to try and mirror
the magazine's test.
- Copying
80 D2X files from an internal SATA to an internal IDE drive (both
7200 rpm) took 50 seconds.
- Copying
the files from the internal IDE to an internal 10k rpm Raptor
SATA took 33 seconds.
- Copying
the files from an internal 7200 rpm SATA to the internal 10k Raptor
took 31 seconds.
- Copying
from an internal 7200 SATA drive to an external 7200 SATA drive
took 1:09 minutes.
- Copying
from the internal 10k Raptor to the Buffalo over a 1-gigabit connection
took 3:23 minutes.
- Copying
from the Buffalo back to the 10k Raptor - did not complete because
it was going to take almost an hour to complete!
Even
taking into account that my network is 1-gigabit, it would appear
that my network betters the times by more than 30-percent. However,
trying to copy the files from the Buffalo back to the computer is
absolutely and astonishingly brutal in how slow it is. I don't know
enough networks or hard drive technology to understand how it could
be bearable one way, but so slow the other way around.
November
10, 2006
I'd
just like to point out that the main reason people go for NAS
(appart from being on a network) is that most (but not all) NAS
systems idle down the hard drive when not in use. Using your standard
IEEE or USB drive enclosures means the drive will run constantly
unless turned off. This is fine for backup purposes (as the Maxtor
and Lacie drives are aimed for) but not for network access as
you need to leave them on 24/7 (generally) and over the course
of time will kill your disks.
November
9, 2006
I
read with interest your review. I got the impression that the
device in some respects is overkill. What software did you use
for the backup? Or did you just move the files with Windows Explorer?
I
have been using two external drives to backup my photo files.
The files are all stored on a 250 gig drive which at this point
is about half used. One is a USB 2.0 Maxtor 200 gig and a Lacie
160 firewire. I want to get another large external which I will
use as a backup. I will probably use the other two externals as
disks to manipulate the files.
I
am considering the 1T Maxtor or Seagate. What do you suggest?
Thanks.
Craig
You
don't need to use any special software with the TeraStation, as
it's just seen as a big hard drive by the OS. Just use Windows Explorer
to copy or move files to it.
If
you don't need constant access to your files then it may well be
overkill and using USB or Firewire drives may still be a viable
option.
I like
Seagate drives, as they run cooler than the Maxtors I have now,
but Seagate just bought Maxtor, so the product line may eventually
become streamlined.
I don't
know if any are available yet, but I'd look for a Firewire 800 capable
drive and install a Firewire 800 card inside the PC to get faster
speed. |
