Buffalo TeraStation 5200 2-Drive 2 TB Desktop NAS for Small/Medium Business SMB (TS5200DN0202)

UPDATE: 10/14/16 Replacement drive failed less than a year. I suspect it's the unit since it's the same bay. All I've used this for was to back up files once a week. So I either replace the drive or toss the whole thing. Not reliable.UPDATE: 12/1/15 Finally got the drive. Sent via FedEx ground with Thanksgiving in between made it almost two weeks. The new drive didn't come with the software and apparently the second drive didn't have it either. Buffalo has the idea that in case the unit goes bad the drive can be put into another device. But I have to imagine another Buffalo device so not sure what the benefit is. They do, however, now allow you download an image and install it via USB. That actually was very simple and easy to do although only from a Windows computer. Keep in mind this is a fresh start so all data will be gone. Since I had an RMA and support case I was able to talk to someone over the phone instead a chat window. He was very helpful and spoke English well. The problem I still have with the NAS devices is that they are proprietary and replacement takes a long time.UPDATE: 11/16/15 Was working great for a week then all of sudden I could hear alarms going off and found the LCD blinking red. No error message telling me what was wrong. Finally two days later I was able to access the drive software and found that one of the hard drives failed. Even though these are fairly new and have a 3 year warranty I have to send in a copy of proof of purchase, wait for a response, then pay the shipping to send it back and apparently pay for shipping the new one back. You can get a 1 TB drive for about $50. Time and money makes it worthless. It's also irritating I couldn't access it for so long to find out what was wrong. The unit itself is probably bad and another hard drive will probably fail soon.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Out of the box this thing is heavy for only a two drive unit. I suppose that’s a good thing, built solid. It’s the first NAS I’ve received that actually has a lock on the drives. It also comes with a little plastic connector to help keep the power cord attached which is a nice touch, I’ve had power cords pop out when I’ve moved a device. You do have to remove some cardboard inside the drive bays and a couple pieces of protective film.First you connect the power cord and network cable and turn it on. The power button will actually blink than light solid when it is completely powered up. Then you can either install the CD or download the software onto your computer. In my case I have a MacBook Pro without a DVD drive. But I prefer to download software anyway to make sure I have the latest version. However, the software could not find the NAS.I checked my router to see what the IP address was. Then I just opened up Safari and typed in the IP address and had direct access to the NAS settings. First thing I do with all devices and computers is set a static IP address. That way I know where they are and avoid IP conflicts if a device goes into sleep mode. I also change the admin user name and password.I created a folder and copied 50 mb of RAW photo files from my MacBook to the NAS over a 100mb network. It took a bit less than an hour which is what I get with my WD and Seagate NAS.I have one NAS I used for keeping a backup of my photos. I have over 2GB of RAW photos and prefer not to lose them. Editing the photos over the network with Lightroom can be painfully slow but as a backup these are great.I also use a NAS for backups or keeping copies of other files but I have one where I store our music and videos. They work great for that as well.The Buffalo NAS meets my expectations except this one only came with two 1TB drives. Using RAID 1 you only get a total of 1 TB of storage which doesn’t last very long so it’s not a good use of this NAS.I recommend not installing the software and just connect to the NAS directly through the browser. Works great and you don’t have to worry about installing the software or updates onto your computer.Overall this is a great NAS but I’d get at least two 3TB drives for it. As a RAID 1 you will have 3TB of backed up data, one drive goes out you still have your data.

This makes the third NAS drive I have owned and played around with and I am fairly impressed with certain things about the Buffalo and a little disappointed with others. So I figured I would just give this a kind of Good the Bad and the Ugly type reviewThe Good:1) Very Quiet2) Dual Gigabit ports.3) Two USB 2 Ports and 2 USB 3 Ports4) Unbelievable but it has a serial port on the back, Wow this is great for people with older UPS systems.5) CPU is not bad, it's an Atom Dual core 1.8 GHz CPU which is just as good as the one used in my Seagate NAS.6) I actually like the locks on the front panels. It's the first drive I have seen with it and it's good to have if you have kids around the house.The OK:1) Speed on my write tests clocked in at about 75mb/s which is not bad and certainly better than my western digital MyCloud EX4but it's not stellar compared to Synology drives and I found on a Raid 0 test that the speed seemed to go down. In any case Raid Zero is not something any sane person should be using so Raid1 test was what interested me.2) Read Test was a little better at 80 Mb/s. It's not bad but as I said it's not the 100+ Mb/s you get with some other drives.3) Construction quality is good, but once again not fantastic. I certainly prefer the Western Digital EX4 in this regard but I will say that the Buffalo is better than the Seagate dual bay NAS when it comes to construction, So I guess I would say it's middle of the road.4) The drives can be swapped out rather painlessly and they are locked away with a key, so that's nice.5) The on screen LCD status is nice but could be a bit more informative.The Bad:1) The Internal software is great for setting up the drive etc but it lacks any kind of addon applications or expansion of it's capabilities.This is something that can be very useful, like having a NAS drive do a backup of your wordpress page at a certain time everyday, P2P sharing and FTP backups of websites. Nope none of that is available with this drive.Summary:Depending on the price your paying, this can be a very good home/small office backup system. It's certainly fast enough and the reliability for me has been perfect so far.

This NAS drive is really simple to set up. My mac was able to discover it on the network once I connected it. I found the folder that had the software I needed. Once I installed that, it was simple enough to rearrange the RAID array. I didn't want the two drives to be separate. I wanted one giant drive so that I can have robust file transfer between my computers that I use. This was very easy to do.I was delighted to find that it has 2 USB 3.0 and 2 USB ports on the back. I plugged in my old portable backup drive, and now it's available on the network. This is delightful, because now I can have that available to throw files in between the NAS drive and my computer to go. I don't need to just keep it all in one place. The longest step, of course, is the initial backup. That took all night, and it was done the next morning. After that, I set up Time Machine to do a backup once a day, and it was more than enough.This is exactly what I needed for shared storage between computers on my local network, as well as cold storage of files that aren't mission critical, but that I might need access to periodically.