2. Construction Details

A tradeoff that Buffalo made to keep the cost of the TS down was ease of (dis)assembly. Simply put, you won't enjoy getting this sucker apart when the time comes to replace a dead drive. But at least Buffalo provides a PDF document with photos to guide you through the procedure.

As the larger version of Figure 4 shows, the TS uses a Freescale MPC8241 PowerPC processor running at 266MHz with 128 MB of RAM. The 10/100/100 Ethernet LAN connection comes courtesy of a NEC D720101 USB 2.0 host controller handles the four USB 2.0 ports.

Figure 4: TeraStation Internal view
(click image to enlarge)

The storage in my TS was provided via four Maxtor 6B250R0 (PDF link) 250 GB 7200RPM hard drives that have ATA/133 parallel interfaces and 16 MB of buffer. (The 0.6T and 1.6T models use 160 and 400 GB 7200RPM drives respectively.) But these exact drives aren't part of the TS' spec, so your TS might report that it is using different drives. The drives are connected to an ITE 8211AF ATA 133 IDE controller (actually two with two drives per controller).

The file system used on the internal drives is XFS, a high performance 64bit journaling system developed at SGI. The TS supports TCP/IP and Appletalk transport protocols and speaks both SMB / CIFS and Apple File Protocol AFP 3.X, but doesn't support NFS.