LinkStation 441e

So i overlooked all bad reviews and take the chance with LS421DE, it arrived on time it is true, even though Buffalo claims this NAS to perform 100MBs the box does say 80MBs, box is quite small and the NAS itself is quite compact, it only weight 4 pounds which was perfect for me. I unpackaged it; it came with a driver and apps CD, a very flat cat6 Cable, a power cable, and a bunch of quick guides.Installation wasn’t easy, but not because of the NAS but for the only disks I’ve got which are a couple of 2.5 inch drives one of 320GB and one of 100GB, put them into the NAS was difficult because I lack of any bay adapter, note this NAS is designed to work with 3.5 inch hard disks. after I completed disks installation, I plug the NAS to power and then to my desktop, put the CD on click the autoexec button and then... nothing happened... installation program did not find any Links station on the net, I though it was a disk problem but it has two status led lights that indicates no problem going on, after a half hour of frustration I remember something a read in one of the hundreds reviews I went through before I decided to buy this NAS, it says that this NAS do not like static IPs; the NAS is connected to a gigabit Buffalo Wzr-g300nh that was configured to be a DHCP forwarder, I disconnect the buffalo router from my Cable modem (DHCP Server) and turn on its DHCP server and Voila!!! NAS was detected immediately, drivers, apps an manual last a couple of minutes installing, and there was the web interface, it is slow I must say, but it’s very user friendly everything has a little help button that guide you quickly on setup.By default it's set to work in RAID0, one thing I like a lot is that RAID volumes does not have to be the same size, so with my two old hard drives I ended up with a 420GB RAID0 which is a relieve because for some reason 4TB hard disks are so very expensive now days, so I could save to purchase one, install it in the NAS, and then keep saving for the other one, and another two of 2TB for its USB ports (limited to 2TB per port and no hub compatibility, as afar as I read In forums and reviews). I easily created a share folder and started DNLA server and Bittorrent client. My Buffalo Router Can mount the NAS share as A CIFS so I can use its transmission for parallel downloads.Filling up the Share folder was easy as well, it gives me 50MBs average with top speeds of 59MBs, that’s enough for me considering I will only use it for Media streaming through its DNLA server, I don’t have any trouble streaming bluray remuxes to my Panasonic smartv, plugged ina 500GB Toshiba usb3 portable disk and it recognizes it without a problem, the usb server feature allows you to see it like a local disk in windows which is awesome because I can even install programs on it an run them over the LAN.Will update as I get to experience more features.

I just bought this unit to replace my Linkstation DUO (LS-WX2.0TL). Which is actually doing fine but has a real low transfer rate across network (max 8Mb/s over wired network).Buffalo advertised this unit with performance up to 100Mb. I honestly do not believe that this is true but if I get something close to 30 will let me happy considering what I have today.Just got it, unpacked and to my complete surprise the box says "up to 80Mb/s". I double checked the product code from the box, product and website. The product codes matches. So, looks like there is a mismatch on the ads or maybe the speed increased to 100 due to a firmware upgrade.Anyways, next step is remove the disks from the old unit and load them on the new one which I'll do during the weekend since I really believe it'll take around 3 to 4 hours to complete the task. I'll leave 3 stars for the false ads and will update later.<Update August, 12nd>BEWARE: remember to erase any disks that you are willing to load specially if they are in RAID. The unit will fail to read the array and will keep flashing white forever. It happened to me when I tried to use my disks (that where on raid 0).So, lets talk about the unit itself.<DATA TRANSFER> (Mandatory)I did this test loading back my backup. I'm using this NAS plugged into a CISCO router and not plugged directly.-> Transfering Media - Average file size 1GB.TRANSFER RATE above 49MB/s most of time, increased to 52MB/s when reached folders with 300MB files - Total 111GB - 300 filesIt is not as advertised but WAY BETTER than comparing to my old unit which kepth 9MB/s all time.-> Transfering small files - Average of 150Kb.TRANSFER RATE 4MB/S with good period at 2MB/S when processing manuals with thousands of 1KB files - Total 24GB - 164.255 filesTerrible if you compare to the add, but twice as fast as my old unit.Also, I could add that this behaviour with small files is shared with other brands of NAS.NOTE: STAY AWAY FROM THE SMB2. Crashed the unit 3 times until I managed to disable it.<Update August, 24th>-> FTPI wasn't expecting much on this test, enabled FTP server on my folder and used a filezilla client to test. The results where surprising at least for me. Performance is really good. Specially if you enable multiple connections on your client. In fact this solved the issue I reported above regarding transfer of small files. From now on, backups and big transfers only using FTP.Note: No SFTP support, which is really bad since I was expecting to use it from internet. I heard you can enable it by root your unit, but I'm not willing to do it... at least for now.-> TorrentNothing special. uTorrent, works good. You can also access your queue remotelly from web sites or mobile apps wich is really nice.-> Media ServerIt works good. A lot of video and audio formats supported. Very good functionality, as long as you don't need transcoding which is not supported, so this functionality will rely on your player been able to play the file format and your network bandwidth.-> ITunes Library - WORKS.I'll make tests on WEB ACCESS this week and will update the review.