Home > Consumer Reviews > Buffalo Technology LinkStation Mini 500 GB Compact Shared Network Attached Storage LS-WS500GL/R1 (Black)

I have been using this NAS drive over 1 year. Prior to that, I have tried WD MyBook World Ed. II, and HP EX470 home server.

Pro: size, features and quiet.
It is hard to beat the size and features it offers. Allowing remote access, FTP and RAID 0 or 1., it is "almost" a complete file server package. Its file sharing is a little better than WD Mybook, which force to on sharing sharing content. It offer simple GUI.

Con: Peformance and usability.
If you setup as a "share" drive under Windows, and do simplet tasks just backing up and sharing. It is ok. Transfer speed is kind of unstable. I am on a 100mpb network, a 2GB file takes about 250min!! sometimes shorter. Smaller file like 200MB, it takes about 60 min. Anything over 1GB or so, you just have to prepare to go to sleep.

One of the main complaints I have is the folder and web access features. It is kind of hard to setup with numerious users with different permission. In fact, I can't get it working. If it is only single user setup, it wasn't a problem.

Response time is slow. I have over 200 files/directory in one folder. It takes sometime to refresh, and go in to the sub directory. To the honest, sometimes it takes about 10-15 sec to response.

The worst is the USB port expansion performance. I know the usb port is for adding new USB storage, not to connect to USB port to your computer. However, I expect that if I plug and USB ext. drive and transfer files from the USB drive to this linkstation mini, it would/should be faster than transfer file over the network. I was so wrong. The speed just worse than transfer regular files to the drive from my local network computer. I have no idea what logic or system this Linkstation thinking.

If you are just causal users for backup puprose, and looking for small and quiet solution. I think this is not bad. Would I recommend to others... I have to think hard...

I needed a network storage device to save files which are being scanned from a multi-function printer and I also needed a print server for a larger USB color printer. Additionally, I wanted the device to run very quietly and it had to have RAID 1 capability (disk mirroring for data protection). After a little research this product seemed to fit the bill. My experience is below.

1.) This is a very small unit, not much bigger than the two laptop hard drives it contains, and it runs very quietly. No fan, no loud access noises. Nothing. This was exactly as I had been led to expect.

2.) After wiring it to a switch which led back to my wireless gateway, I ran the detection routine. This is where I had the only trouble I've run into with this device. It simply would not detect on my network when wired to the switch. I had to run a cable directly to the gateway, which was no big deal, but it made me a bit nervous. Not starting out on the right foot.

3.) Now that I could reach it on the network I switched the 500GB RAID 0 configuration to a 250GB RAID 1 configuration. This lets both drives mirror data so that if one fails you don't lose everything. The built-in webserver on the device made this easy to accomplish.

4.) Once the Linkstation was wired to the gateway instead of the switch I was able to run the Buffalo software on all three of my networked systems without a hitch. I set up multiple shared folders with no problem, as well as a network share for my scanner, again with no issues.

5.) At this point I plugged in my USB printer cable into the USB jack on the back of the device and was pleasantly surprised at how easy the print server functionality worked. All you have to do is right-click on the "LP" share on the Linkstation and choose "Connect". After installing print drivers on all 3 of my computers, they were able to print to my USB color laserjet which had previously been connected to only one machine. Considering that most print servers alone cost $80 - $100, this makes the Linkstation a great deal for anyone who needs network storage as well as a networked printer. Although I didn't use it, the USB port can also be used to add a stand-alone hard drive for even more storage.

6.) The last thing I wanted to do with the unit was activate the WebAccess software so that I could use a browser from any computer (outside my network) to get to a selected share. Buffalo provides a service at [...]which will forward requests directly to your NAS device. This was the only other hiccup I had during installation because my brand new wireless gateway, which should be UPnP compatible, didn't automatically do whatever the Buffalo NAS expected it to do. Anyhow, I had to disable the "automatic setup" selection and manually forward Port 9000 to my Linkstation. Once that was done, the unit was reachable from outside systems.

Overall Impression: This unit is jam-packed with functionality for such a modest price. I knew when buying the system that the 5400rpm laptop drives it uses would not be as fast as most other NAS's, but, by coincidence (after I bought the product), I saw a review that speed tested access times for different network storage units and the Linkstation Mini scored in the upper 50%. That was very surprising, so the tradeoff for silence and low power consumption isn't even much of a trade-off. The LinkStation Mini did everything I wanted it to do (Disk mirroring, Print Server, Ultra-Quiet), so I give it a big thumbs-up.

The setup took some time. But works as described.

The biggest PROBLEM is the WebAccess GUI (graphical user interface). Very poorly designed and extremely slow. When doing "preview" of a photo which is about 3 megabytes it takes good 5 to 7 seconds to show the picture. Once you have one picture up in the preview mode you can click next (if you have more then one photo) and that also takes 5 to 7 seconds to show up.

Thumbnail preview is not available either so you end up looking at file names like (DSC_0041.jpg).
It has "MultiMedia" feature which I have not tried yet. May be that will give me thumbnail pic of a file.

The NAS itself has a web-based administration which you can access if your pc is on same subnet (private) as your pc, but I could not access it from outside (public)using WebAccess.

Tried calling support because I had few questions. Automated system told me that technicians were busy and its better to send an email. Since I wanted to talk to a live rep. to see if they know the product ended up waiting on the phone. For an hour no one picked up so I listened to music on hold "Mozart" which put me to sleep. No joke.


One more thing to add to poorly written Webaccess GUI. Once you login to see your files you can't logout because there is no button to do so. You have to close the browser to be logged out.

It's awesome - small, fast, quiet, can be configured as a 250 gig RAID, has gigabit support, has Mac support, auto power-down green mode. Killer for dumping your data to. If you have the money, they offer a 1TB version also. I didn't install the software (but I hear the sofware is decent).

The unit is silent, even when copying files onto it. It's smaller than I expected (a little larger than two iPhones stacked), you can easily carry it with you if needed. The options on this unit are great, especially that it is two 250 gig drives that can be configured in RAID. The unit comes configured as one 500 gig storage, but using the web interface it's easy to reconfigure for a 250 gig RAID failsafe config. The unit allows you to create any number of shared shared folders, and make them individually public read-only, public read-write, or assign users to the individual shared folders for security. It has user management, where you create any number of login names/passwords and assign permissions to each user to allow for read-only or read-write permissions, and which shared folders they have access to.

In this price range you can't find a reliable NAS product that is silent, with two hard drives, gigabit networking, user security, and all these other features. There are some cheaper products, and they have bad reviews.

Easy to install and works well. There is no fan so it is quiet.