I bought a Linkstation Quad a couple of weeks ago. I have not been too impressed with it. I thought buying the Buffalo name would be a safe bet. I decided to buy another NAS - TheCus 4100Pro and have both connected to my home network. I am going to post my opinions and results to hopefully give assistance for anyone looking to buy a NAS. I have no affiliation with any hardware or software company. Both NAS's were about the same price, I paid $360 for the 4100 and $385 for the QUAD. The QUAD did come with four 250gig drives which I swapped out for larger 1TB drives.
First day setups the N4100 Pro is clear winner. You can use your own disks and the firmware is in FLASH RAM. The Buffalo stores it's code on the hard drives making it a very painful process to use your own disks. Both the Quad and 4100 have removable drive caddies. Installing the drives is very easy. One plus for the 4100 is the caddies have a keylock for each caddy. I don't find that useful but I am sure someone could.
The 4100 has a backlit LCD display. It shows you the boot process of the NAS. The Buffalo has no panel, if something is wrong you have to guess. The 4100 shows you the IP addresses, date/time, fan speed, temperature, RAID status (healthy, build percentage) and other info.
The Buffalo setup CD could not find the device. I was able to locate it in my router DHCP log and just used the web interface for the setup. The N4100 comes with a default IP of 192.168.1.100 which is compatible with my network. So I did not try their setup CD. The Buffalo web interface is painfully slow and the 4100 is no speed demon either but is much faster. I also hate the aggressive timeout on the Buffalo web interface, during the email setup and looking up my gmail POP information the Buffalo timed me out on the form. There is no parameter that I can find to change it's timeout. The 4100 so far has not timed me out on any screen.
Overall the 4100 is better made, less plastic. I do like the faceplate on the Buffalo better, it is held with magnets and uses no door like hinge. The 4100 has a fatal design flaw, the LED's for each hard drive are blocked with the faceplate closed. When I inserted some used 1TB drives in the 4100 I had no idea it found an issue with one of the drives because the red LED was lit but blocked by the faceplate (photo enclosed). I only found the error later on when surfing around the web interface.
The power supply is internal on the 4100 and the QUAD uses a power brick. I prefer the power brick, if the power supply goes it will be an easy replacement.
Now I know the Buffalo comes with drives and they don't say you can use your own disks but they also don't say you cannot. Swapping the drives was an adventure. I pulled the drives and swapped in my 1TB drives. The unit would not boot. Having no LCD like the 4100 makes it a guessing game as to what's wrong. I later found out on the Buffalo forums the OS is installed on the drives. I had to reinstall their drives and swap one of my drives in at a time and do a rebuild to migrate the disks in. That took 4 hours per disk for a total of 16 hours but the RAID is not smart enough to grow the RAID 5 requiring dropping the config and creating a new RAID volume. That took an additional 24 hours, all tolled 40 hours to use your own disks.
The 4100 you install your drives and the unit boots up in under 2 minutes. You configure your RAID type (I choose RAID 5) and it took 16 hours to prep the drives. I had an issue with one WD drive where the disk status showed a warning on the SMARTINFO. I had a 'current pending sector' of 1 which causes the warning. The manual documents the error and suggests replacing the drive. I choose to continue and see what happens. The drive should remap the error so I was not sure why there was an issue. After the RAID finished the SMARTINFO showed 0 for current pending sector but the red LED was still lit. I had to reboot the NAS to clear the LED.
Firmware updates the 4100 wins easily. It works like any typical router, you download the firmware from the manufacturers site and browse to it from the web interface. The Buffalo is in the stone ages requiring a TFTP server setup to upgrade the firmware. You also must change the IP on your PC prior to upgrading the firmware.
Here are some photos, I will post the Buffalo shots in the next post. Take note the front photo of the 4100 has a red LED error but you cannot see it with the faceplate closed unless you look at the unit from an extreme angle.
First day setups the N4100 Pro is clear winner. You can use your own disks and the firmware is in FLASH RAM. The Buffalo stores it's code on the hard drives making it a very painful process to use your own disks. Both the Quad and 4100 have removable drive caddies. Installing the drives is very easy. One plus for the 4100 is the caddies have a keylock for each caddy. I don't find that useful but I am sure someone could.
The 4100 has a backlit LCD display. It shows you the boot process of the NAS. The Buffalo has no panel, if something is wrong you have to guess. The 4100 shows you the IP addresses, date/time, fan speed, temperature, RAID status (healthy, build percentage) and other info.
The Buffalo setup CD could not find the device. I was able to locate it in my router DHCP log and just used the web interface for the setup. The N4100 comes with a default IP of 192.168.1.100 which is compatible with my network. So I did not try their setup CD. The Buffalo web interface is painfully slow and the 4100 is no speed demon either but is much faster. I also hate the aggressive timeout on the Buffalo web interface, during the email setup and looking up my gmail POP information the Buffalo timed me out on the form. There is no parameter that I can find to change it's timeout. The 4100 so far has not timed me out on any screen.
Overall the 4100 is better made, less plastic. I do like the faceplate on the Buffalo better, it is held with magnets and uses no door like hinge. The 4100 has a fatal design flaw, the LED's for each hard drive are blocked with the faceplate closed. When I inserted some used 1TB drives in the 4100 I had no idea it found an issue with one of the drives because the red LED was lit but blocked by the faceplate (photo enclosed). I only found the error later on when surfing around the web interface.
The power supply is internal on the 4100 and the QUAD uses a power brick. I prefer the power brick, if the power supply goes it will be an easy replacement.
Now I know the Buffalo comes with drives and they don't say you can use your own disks but they also don't say you cannot. Swapping the drives was an adventure. I pulled the drives and swapped in my 1TB drives. The unit would not boot. Having no LCD like the 4100 makes it a guessing game as to what's wrong. I later found out on the Buffalo forums the OS is installed on the drives. I had to reinstall their drives and swap one of my drives in at a time and do a rebuild to migrate the disks in. That took 4 hours per disk for a total of 16 hours but the RAID is not smart enough to grow the RAID 5 requiring dropping the config and creating a new RAID volume. That took an additional 24 hours, all tolled 40 hours to use your own disks.
The 4100 you install your drives and the unit boots up in under 2 minutes. You configure your RAID type (I choose RAID 5) and it took 16 hours to prep the drives. I had an issue with one WD drive where the disk status showed a warning on the SMARTINFO. I had a 'current pending sector' of 1 which causes the warning. The manual documents the error and suggests replacing the drive. I choose to continue and see what happens. The drive should remap the error so I was not sure why there was an issue. After the RAID finished the SMARTINFO showed 0 for current pending sector but the red LED was still lit. I had to reboot the NAS to clear the LED.
Firmware updates the 4100 wins easily. It works like any typical router, you download the firmware from the manufacturers site and browse to it from the web interface. The Buffalo is in the stone ages requiring a TFTP server setup to upgrade the firmware. You also must change the IP on your PC prior to upgrading the firmware.
Here are some photos, I will post the Buffalo shots in the next post. Take note the front photo of the 4100 has a red LED error but you cannot see it with the faceplate closed unless you look at the unit from an extreme angle.
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