Buffalo’s original LinkStation network-storage device (reviewed September 2004) gave consumers an easy way to hang 120GB on their network without having to break the bank—if they were willing to live with the slow performance.

Buffalo’s sequel, the LinkStation Pro, is designed to address the performance issues that nag most consumer-level NAS devices. Indeed, Buffalo claims that its new unit’s faster processor, Gigabit support, and speedier SATA drive make the LinkStation Pro as fast as a USB 2.0 hard drive.

To test the drive’s speed, we compared it to a 400GB Western Digital SATA drive connected to a Wiebetech SATADock V4 USB converter. Both drives were tested using our Athlon 64 FX-60 test bed with a 150GB, 10,000rpm Raptor drive installed as a source drive. Our PC and the LinkStation Pro were plugged into our corporate network which uses enterprise-grade Gigabit switches. We enabled jumbo frames and set the frame size to 9,000 bytes for both our Nvidia NIC and the LinkStation Pro.

Copying the same files we use for our USB thumb drive tests, we found Buffalo’s claims to be a little exaggerated. Buffalo’s NAS box was best at reading large files stored on it, as opposed to writing large files, and took just 24 percent longer than the USB drive at that task. When writing the same files, the unit was about 50 percent slower than the USB drive. In read and write tests of smaller files, Buff’s unit was about 50 percent slower as well. So perhaps Buffalo overstates its performance claims—then again, a USB 2.0 hard drive can be anything from a 10,000rpm desktop drive to a 4,200rpm notebook PC drive—but we’re still duly impressed by the LinkStation Pro’s performance. It plain smokes all of the other consumer-level NAS units we’ve tested, which take 20 minutes to write 2GB, not two minutes.

The device is available in capacities from 250GB to 750GB; we tested the 320GB version. Like the original LinkStation, a pair of USB ports on the unit let you schedule timed backups to an attached USB drive. Oddly, there’s no print server support. That’s OK, we’ll take performance over a print server any day.

Month Reviewed: January 2007
Verdict: 9
URL: www.buffalotech.com