Craig's Musings

Okay, I admit I bought my Buffalo TeraStation without doing enough research. A friend of mine (who I've known for years, lives in Seattle, and shall remain nameless) bought one and loved it, so I did some digging and thought "perfect". The sweet spot for price was the 4x250GB drive configuration, which with RAID 5 would give 750GB of storage - which is perfect for a backup solution. Once you eliminate DVD backups & tv shows from my storage requirements, this was more than enough to back up my DV video, pictures, MP3s, personal files, and software. And at 750 bucks from buy.com, way, way, WAY cheaper than tape solutions.

It is a great little appliance - plug it in, run the software to give it a name, and you are off to the races and able to copy files to it. Oh, don't try to use the backup software they provide - it crashes on startup. Their backup software has a dependancy on .NET Framework, and my guess is that the latest service pack from Microsoft broke it. Why test software before you ship it, that is what customers are for! Anyway, as an appliance, it works great - simple web interface, plug and play (no praying at all), and fast access. I got my stuff backed up in no time (about a week ago or so).

Friday, I was surfing for info on the TeraStartion to show my friend Greg and I noticed that Buffalo had a "professional" version with "easy hot swap". And I said "oh-oh - what about mine?". It didn't even occur to me that someone would build a RAID 5 solution that you couldn't swap a dead drive in, but this got me worried. I didn't care if it was hot swap, I was fine with taking it offline to do a drive replacement. So I took out my handy screwdriver and went to work. After removing over 40 screws, I still had no way to replace the drives. You have to take the thing completely apart to change out a drive, a task that after 45 minutes I still wasn't near accomplishing. So I put it back together, put it back online, and quietly resolved never to buy something that this particular friend owned again unless I did my research. Given that this friend needed me to make his home internet work and to configure Outlook for him, that was probably something I should have figured out without this incident.

Again, the device works great, but it is basically a one-shot device. Once a drive fails, you are living on borrowed time. So when a drive fails (hopefully an event a couple of years out), I'll replace the TeraStation with whatever the 2-year-from-now appliance is. Probably 2-4 terabytes with hot swap for the same price point, if hard drive evolution continues at its current pace.