Good NAS with a few quirks

With all of my music, photos and documents that I've gathered over the years, I wanted a central storage to connect all six of my computers so I could access them from anywhere in the house, and even on my back porch if need be. I was very familiar with the Buffalo name, as I've helped others purchase their portables and attach them to their systems, with no complaints. After reading the reviews on this model, I decided to use some of the money I got on my birthday to purchase this device.

Out of the box, this is a breeze to set up. The device comes with a flat Ethernet cord that is about 20 feet (My setup didn't require this cord, so I used one of my own cords, and have theirs as a backup), power supply. I installed the drive on my network through my router, (you need a free wired port), and installed their software to begin the setup.

I do recommend that you use their software to do the initial setup, as it helps you with naming the drive, similar to a shared drive on a server in a corporate network. Once this is complete, you can map this drive manually, or with Buffalo's software. You can also setup multiple shares on this drive, if you need to do that as well. I've been told you can also set it up with a home theater and play MP3's from it, although I personally find that a bit much.

Once you get this setup on your computers, transferring files on wired computers is pretty fast. I moved about 13GB of MP3 files in about 15 minutes. I play music from this drive on my computer, with very little lag at all. It opens other files with ease. I store all my school work on here, as well as all my business files and invoices. Wireless access is dependent on your signal strength, and wireless speed.

One nice feature on this drive that I've used is the ability to access your files from the web. You sign up for an account with Buffalo, which is free, set up a url to access your drive, and use the username and password you used when you set up the drive. I feel the interface could be a bit more intutive, as it looks more like a FTP site, but it's a nice feature to have if you are working on something and forget to send it to yourself at work.

With the drive being 500gb, it's a size that will take quite some time to fill up. I'm not an avid video downloader, and I've slowed down with my music, so it'll be some time before I get this drive half filled.

Two quirks that I've noticed on this device. One is the cooling feature. Like most drives, they get hot. There is a fan on here that moves heat away from the drive, but I've had to shut it down a couple of times due to excessive heat. It is located on part of my desk that has good space to allow heat to escape.

The second is power surges. I came down one day after the breaker had been tripped that this (and my other computer equipment) is located on. After booting up my computer and this drive, I could not access the drive. I called tech support, and they confirmed to me that the firmware on the Buffalo Drive had been wiped out. After two hours of attempting to install the firmware, I finally succeeded and I didn't lose any data. This drive is located on a surge protector, and I'm seriously considering investing in a Battery backup for this drive, to prevent this from happening again. The Tech rep told me that this drive does have some issues with power surges. This is not to say it's happened every time I've lost power, but the possibilty exisits.

Bottom line on this drive is that is a great investment if you want a central location that all computers in your household can access. Even setting up the drive is a breeze with the included software.