1. Introduction

One of the complaints I hear from folks shopping for networked storage is the shortage of reasonably-priced products that support multiple drives. Buffalo Technology appears to have heard this cry and their answer is the TeraByte Network Attached Storage, or TeraStation for short. Available in 0.6, 1.0 and 1.6 TeraByte flavors, the TeraStation is the first mass-market NAS to break the TeraByte (that's 1,000 Gigabytes) barrier and do it for around a buck a gigabyte.

The Terastation is packaged in a silver chassis that is about the size of a smallish sub-woofer. You can also get an idea of its dimensions by looking at the comparison shot of it beside Buffalo's smaller LinkStation (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Link and Tera Stations compared
(click image to enlarge)

All the TeraStation's disk Status and Access indicators are arranged in a circle (Figure 2) and use colors and blinking to help communicate what's happening.

Figure 2: Terastation Front panel details
(click image to enlarge)

Figure 3 shows the TS' rear panel with its complement of ports. One item of note is the 3.5 inch variable speed fan, which I'm pleased to report was quieter than the fans in my PC. Another is that the power supply can handle an AC mains of 100 - 240V without the need to set a manual range switch.

Figure 3: Terastation Rear panel details
(click image to enlarge)