Buffalo TeraStation Pro: striking fear into the hearts of men

By Chris Stevens on 13 March 2006, 12:39pm

One point six terrifying bytes of terror got plugged into our network this morning at Crave. This is the new Buffalo TeraStation Pro -- we've previously had the amateur edition in, the plain old TeraStation, but this newer one is mortifyingly good.

It packs 1.6TB of firepower via four 400GB drives. You can set the TeraStation Pro up to cater for little Timmy spilling Shreddies into up to three of the four drives in the unit, and still have your data preserved. There's parity mode (RAID 5) giving you 1.2TB, or a 'Spanning Disk Array' mode, giving you the full shebang of 1.6TB. There's also a range of other RAID options with varying redundancy.

There were none of the set-up hassles we had when we checked out the previous version. The TeraStation Pro's LCD screen let us know precisely what its IP address was. Last time we spent hours hunting around the network like scavengers armed with harpoons looking for an errant seal puppy -- this time we logged onto the server in seconds. Well done Buffalo, you've made our lives 10 per cent better this morning.

Once the TeraStation was plugged into an ethernet port, we logged into its Web-based admin system using a standard browser (no annoying platform-dependent software for Mr Station here). You can then give the server a name ('Tickles') and configure guest access through a series of a-child-could-do-this menus.

If you're a movie fan, the £1,150 TeraStation Pro could house a monumental collection of DVDs at full resolution. Or, if you're one of those fiendishly ahead-of-your-time HD DV editors, you can give the TeraStation Pro a pounding by setting it up as one of your editing drives in Final Cut Pro or Premier. There's also the possibility that you just want a 400GB storage solution that will not under almost any circumstances, save for the destruction of the entire planet, corrupt your data. -CS