Buffalo TeraStation III 4-Bay 8 TB (4 X 2 TB) RAID 1U Rack Mountable Network Attached Storage (NAS) - TS-RX8.0TL/R5

I own a forensic consulting business. We have gone about 90% paperless over the past few years and this unit has been key to our success. In the forensics business, safe storage of evidence is crucial. Most of our evidence these days is in electronic form (photos, program data files, reports, scanned paper files, etc), so a failure of a unit can be devastating. At one time, we stored "completed" case files on DVD's and even Blu-Ray disks, but soon discovered these can be adversely affected by environmental problems while in storage, and sometimes fail completely.We just added another Terastation III 4.0 TB to our array to replace an old Buffalo unit (probably one of their first units ever to hit the market!). What an improvement a little time makes. Unlike the old unit, these are very quiet, comparatively fast (1Gb vs 100Mb) and sport much better diagnostics and utilities. For intensive graphic files (i.e. video rendering and such) we use the large hard drive on the computers for speed, but transfer to the Terrastation when work is completed. One Terrastation is dedicated to just computer hard-drive backups using Norton Ghost 15.0; that has saved us a few times, too.Setup is a breeze. Plug it in, map the drive(s) to your system, and away you go. It is already configured for RAID 5, which we prefer, but can be changed easily with the included utilities. With RAID 5, you will get about 2.8 TB of storage. The firmware is also set up to provide a recoverable "trash bin" which older units did not have.A great product at a very good price and proven reliable.

The hard drives in these units do not last long... Service from them manufacturer is great during warranty but after that you are on your own.

Seems to work good but we had to waste 3 weeks of having server promlems to get 1 that worked.We got 1 and installed it. It took us about a week before we realized it wasn't working properly. So we ordered another one so we could stay running when we sent it back. Got the second 1 and it worked great so sent the first one back for a replacement. Got the third one and it didn't work either. So we had to send it back. Now we are on the fourth one and just got it installed yesterday. It seems to be working properly.Not sure how I feel about all the down time we had with no compensation for our troubles.

I bought this TeraStation to use as a network backup device for my domain controller / file server at home (yeah, I'm a geek - I maintain SOHO level stuff at home to keep my sysadmin skills from getting dusty).At any rate, I've got 5 TB of storage on the server and I use the Buffalo as a backup. The network throughput is quite snappy - that's saying something considering that Low to Mid range NAS solutions usually don't really have the processing horsepower to deliver on the full bandwidth of their network adapters.One of the things I really like about this device is that it's got dual Gigabit NICs. You can even configure them to team if your switch gear supports it.It doesn't fully support joining a Windows Domain, but it has the ability (if provided the appropriate credentials) to go out to your Active Directory and mirror your user account structure which makes it fairly easy to set up very windows-frendly SMB shares.It runs very quietly and doesn't use a terribly huge amount of power.On the down-side, it does take quite a while to boot up, and it took me a bit to find the option to shut down in the browser-based user interface (turns out that holding the power button for a few seconds will also begin the shutdown process)All in all, this is a very capable little box and I'm really glad I bought it. I'd have no qualms about getting another one should my storage/backup needs demand it.

This is the first time I've ever taken the time to write a review, but I'm here to buy yet another one of these units, and I felt compelled to respond to a couple of the negative reviews here.First off, this is the Terastation III, not the Pro as referenced in another review. Additionally, I own a medium sized video and animation facility, with up to 7 artists accessing one of our three Terastation IIIs at all times for video, animation, and rendering, and this unit IS compatible with Apple OS. Configuration is done via a web browser, not a PC. We're cross platform here, and PC vs. Mac has nothing to do with this unit. As for Mac, since it doesn't use drive lettering, you do have to know how to set it up as a server, by IP address, in MAC OS. PC is much easier in terms of mapping the drive, but either way it works fine regardless of platform.These drives are fast, particularly if you set up port trunking, which is a very high end feature for a NAS in this price range. By using port trunking (which uses 2 network ports to effectively double the network connection speed), we have been able to eliminate several of our NAS units in favor of just a few Terastation IIIs. Multiple users can access the drive simultaneously with no problems.As for reliability, we did have one DOA unit, which Amazon promptly replaced at no cost (not even shipping). Other than that, we've had absolutely no problems. Having said that, we ALWAYS back up nightly (that's an easy thing to set up in the web browser based config panel), and there's no substitute for that no matter what kind of NAS you buy.As for Buffalo in general, we have used several different models of Terastations and Linkstations, some of which ran continuously for 4 and 5 years without failing before we removed them from service. In fact, the only Terastation that has failed on us, wasn't even the unit itself; it was one of the drives. 5 years isn't an unusual life span for a hard drive that runs day and night.So I give this 5 stars, and Buffalo tech support is pretty much the best I've experienced. When you call, the phone is answered by a real person at Buffalo's service center (in Texas, I believe), and they always know pretty much everything about their products without having to read it from a computer screen. Hold times vary, but support is top notch.