Customer Reviews
Avoid at all costs!!!! 
2008-10-04
Intro: I've been working with computers since about the mid 80's and I've been an IT Director for a major hotel operation for about 5 years now. Trust me. DO NOT listen to any reviews that say this is a good device. Gigabit Ethernet, Raid 0/1, DLNA Media Server, FTP server and Web Access are a few of the big features this device has to offer but don't get too excited. Most of these features have serious issues and you'll just frustrate yourself trying to get them to work properly.
Limited Memory & Processing Power: The unit does have potential. But that potential gets easily clouded by the limitation of the units processor and memory. It uses a 400mhz Marvell 88F5182-A2 processor with 64 megs of ram. If you're interested, further information on the device can be found here: http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Category:LS-WTGL/R1 . I have a wonderful CAT6 certified gigabit network at home. But unfortunately, the slow processor & limited memory of the device slow file transfer speeds to about 1/3 the speed of USB 2.0. It also makes their Web Access feature basically worthless. Buffalo decided to have the device scan & compile a list of ALL your files on the fly each time you attempt to connect to it over the web. Buffalo support refers to this process as "dynamic webpage generation". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page I can't even begin to tell you how slow it is. The more you put on the drive the slower the Web Access feature gets. Each mouse click currently takes anywhere between 30-45 seconds to register. And trust me it's not the speed of my internet connections. At this point my drive is only at 30% of it's 500GB capacity and it already takes several minutes for the device to compile the opening webpage. During that time I get constant error messages from both FireFox & IE7 telling me that "A script on this page is causing your browser to run slowly. If it continues to run your computer may become unresponsive." Sounds like fun huh?
Poor Reliability: Like a chump I bought two of these devices a few months ago because of their features and attractive price point. Aside from the endless list of bugs with the firmware, I have had one cooling fan and three of their Samsung hard drives fail between the two devices since I bought them in June. I was mirroring the drives so I didn't lose any information but it still cost me 70.00 for each replacement drive.
The Pro Duo also has an exposed power supply within the unit. Because of this, support cannot give you any instruction on how to open the unit or to change the hard drives due to the risk of exposing yourself to electric shock. So if you have a drive failure, support CANNOT send you a drive replacement! No, you must box up the entire unit and ship it to them at your cost. And in return they will send you an old test unit they had lying around on one of their shelves. = 0 They do offer an advanced RMA process in which they will ship you a refurbished unit in advance but that involves you filling out a credit application form and having them put a 650.00 dollar hold on your credit card. They also charge you for the shipping of the refurbished unit to and from your location. Either way, in the end, you're going to pay for any warranty claims wether you like it or not. It is way easier to purchase your own parts and replace them yourself. I promise. To change hard drives, simply unscrew two little screws that go through the two front feet of the front faceplate. Take a look at the unit. You'll see what I'm talking about. Then gently lift the faceplate off the front of the unit, carefully pull out the clear plastic thingy and change the drives. It is not hot swappable so power the unit off first.
Support: Lets talk about Buffalo tech support for a moment. Buffalo has a few wonderful, very knowledgeable technicians working for them. I've talked to a few tards but overall they do have good support. But getting in touch with them couldn't be a more miserable experience. Be prepared for a minimum 40 minute hold time just to speak with someone. Once you do get someone on the phone, they usually can't help you as most of the problems are, as I said earlier, just simple bugs in the firmware. What's worse is Buffalo America is aware of the issues and can't do anything about it because their research & development team for the device is located in Asia. Buffalo tech support has told me on numerous occasions that American Tech Support currently has no way of communicating any of the bugs with R&D in Asia to get them resolved. So don't expect any of the bugs to get ironed out any time soon. I appreciate that Buffalo's Tech Support team is honest with me about these things but could you imagine if your employees were telling your customers things like that?
Final thoughts: There are tons of other bugs I could point out but I am tired of writing at this point. Looking back if I could do it all over again I would've spent the extra money and bought one of the HP MV2120 NAS devices. HP is a well known reputable company with excellent innovative technology. And I believe that they would never release a device that should still be sitting in the beta stages like the Pro Duo.
If you buy this device you are clearly out of your mind or money is no object to you. Period.
Could not access from internet outside of our network 
2008-09-29
It would be a wonderful hard drive if it can be accessed from internet without difficulty.
We set up this Linkstation with NetGear Router WGT624.
The Linkstation can be accessed from computers within the network. The read/write speed to this Linkstation is fast. It is a wonderful hard drive for all computers to use as a central hard drive.
When we tried to access from internet outside of our own network, we could not access this Linkstation.
Tech support advised us to upgrade firmware and we did.
Tech support advised us to set port forwarding to 9000 in NetGear router and we did.
However, we and tech support could not make it work for us to access this Linkstation from internet outside of our network.
It is a very good central hard drive for a network.
If the purpose is to access this hard drive from web when you travel, it may work and then it may not in some systems. In our case, we can not.
This Linkstation also has a backup program: Memeo Backup. We tried it and it worked. For a file folder of 12 GB it took 36 hours to complete the backup.
Pro Duo is great! 
2008-09-18
Easy to install & use. What really surprised me was it's size. It's actually smaller than the image on Amazon's website! Definately, money well spent.
Wowww....... Excellent 2008-09-06
If you are looking for an NAS for backup and multi PC sharing that backup within home network, THIS IS YOUR NAS.
I've tested many of the cheapy one (Netgear SC101 enclosure, WD Mybook World 1tb, Airlink101 250 enclosure, Iomega Storcenter 1tb, Ximeta Netdisk 500gb) and this by far the best. More expensive models properly perform better, but for the price... comeon people, stop complaining.
PROS:
1. QUIET, QUIET, AND QUIET
2. FAST, FAST, and simply FAST
3. Ease of use and setup. All I did was installed the LinkNavigator see what IP # it captured, then map this NAS drive directly via Windows. All less than 15min without reading any manual/instruction.
CONS:
NOTHING YET (maybe the warranty of just 1yr whereas they are using WD drive which should have basic of 3yrs warranty)
Hooked up over 100mb wired network and it transfered 1GB file at speed of 10-11MB/sec and completed in 1:29 seccond. To me that's really fast compaired to all the cheapy one I've tried which were around 5MB max. Plus at 10MB/s, you can pull and watch any video dvix/xivx/vob files without any problem. 1000mb network properly faster but it's ok for me, for the TOTAL UPGRADE PRICE, i like to keep it low.
My whole purpose for this are just backing up all files I have in my main PC, plus capable of sharing these up-to-date files on secondary PCs whenever/wherever I want within my home. I'm using SECOND COPY which automatically copy exact/update new file only/or however you want to setup, this giving me the up-to-date files on this NAS all the time no matter which PC in home I'm using to access the files. I'm happy now cuz everything are backup, and at such low price, this is GREAT NAS people. Think of what you want to do first, then find one that will do it best and cheapest. If it does something else extra, GOOD. Otherwise, don't complain on non-sense extra its offered, cuz it's came free anyway, why bother.
I opened the enclosure, drives made by Western Digital on mine, it's Western Digital SE 16 SATA. Try to find the version 3 Linkstation, it'll give you 2 USB port rather than one eventhough the box outside listed only one USB port. Retail box at the bottom where the UPC and model label sit, you will see number (3) like that which indicate version 3 of this Linkstation series.
A Decent Simple NAS Solution 
2008-08-28
I've had my Link Station Pro Duo for a few weeks and I've found that it gets the job done that it was made to do: stores data over the network.
The NAS comes with two pieces of software:
Memeo backup - Absolute garbage. I let it run for two weeks straight and it never finished backing up my 52 gigabytes of data. It's also not capable of backing up open or locked files even though Windows has had Volume Shadow Copy to help with that in very version of since 2000, and there's Open File Manager for 2000. Compare that to Backup Genie (which I now use) which was able to backup all of my data in under three hours (I highly recommend Backup Genie, it's fairly priced and so easy to use, and FAST).
NAS Navigator - This software is pointless. For the life of me I can't figure out what it's good for. When you open it up, all it does is list all of the Buffalo products on your network. Why do I need to install a 128MB program to do this? And who's going to have more than a couple of consumer NAS devices on their network anyways?
Pros:
* Quiet and efficient.
* Saves a lot of power - auto powers on when my backups run, then shuts off when they're done automatically.
* Offers lots of backup options -- Choose RAID0, RAID1 or spanned disk.
* The case is rugged and heavy like a miniature PC.
* Data copied over the network achieves superb transfer rates.
* Runs Linux open source operating system.
* You can download the NAS software source and modify it to your liking then reflash the firmware with your new OS.
* Platform independant - works on any operating system.
Cons:
* Gods help you if you forget the web interface password. The reset procedure on Buffalo's website doesn't work. I forgot my password and had to keep guessing until I guessed it. Think upgrading the firmware will get you around that? Think again. You need the admin password to upgrade the firmware.
* Tech support hold times are regularly half an hour or more. I've never had to call but this is what all the customers I've read about have said on various forums. I hope I never have to call them.
* The web interface is clunky and cumbersome, doesn't use AJAX (hello it must be 1998 again) and often "forgets" the settings you input, requiring you to put them in several times before they "take."
* Web interface uses "GMT offset" instead of time zones, so unless you're in the military you'll probably have to look up your offset to set the time zone.
* The "access your files remotely via the web" is very confusing to setup and there are much more elegant, easier to use solutions available (Orb for example is much more suited to the tasks the "via the web" feature tries to do and fails miserably at).
* You pay for a terabyte of space but you get 916 GB of space because the operating system of the device is stored on the hard drive, and it's huge.
* There's a lot of extra whizz-bang features you don't need for backing up data that occupy a lot of hard drive space and you can't remove them (media server, print server, web access).
* Firmware updates are about 150 MB downloads and there's no unified update. If you have an earlier firmware version you have to download every 150 MB firmware update and install them sequentially with each update taking about 15 minutes to complete.
Very reliable unit, you should get it!!!! 2008-08-23
The Pro Duo is a 2-drive NAS solution that can be configured in RAID 0 for performance or RAID 1 for redundant storage. If one drive fails, the other still has a copy of the data. As an Active Directory client the Pro Duo can be integrated into any business network and Web Access makes remote file access easy!
Garbage, stick to USB 2008-08-10
Mine Amazon order lasted 45 days and I lost everything saved on both drives. You would think using Raid would help ensure the information from being lost.
Well it doesn't for this Buffalo product, I now own a $300.00 paperweight and sense Amazons 30 day warranty ended, I've been trying to deal with Buffalo for a replacement. Guess what? They don't follow up very well. Stick to USB for backing up your files and you won't regreat buying a Buffalo brick in a box. I didn't believe the other reviews on this and other sites and now I wish I really had. 500 gig of data lost for trusting a company thats not customer friendly. Buy at your own risk and I mean RISK. Buffalo even warns you to backup your files for this product, But thats what I want it too do??? Good luck!
Buffalo support a cut above 2008-07-29
Have been running the linkstation pro duo for a couple of weeks. The product works pretty well - fast enough (on 100mb network); easy to set up, small, quiet, good management tools.
Where Buffalo really stands out is on a little card that comes with the product: 24x7 toll free tech support, with a human being at the other end. Sure, you wait on hold for a while (for me about 15 minutes). But you get to talk to a human who has some understanding of technology and who will go thru things step-by-step, and follow-up if needed.
This kind of support is rare in the industry, esp for products in the several hundred price range. Its good to know that you have the backup for the product.
There are better options. 2008-07-27
This is the least expensive of the 3 NAS model that I own (see my other reviews). Good points are that it's small, silent and runs cool. Instruction is not very clear. Doesn't show how to switch out a drive if it the raid fails. Transfer rate is relatively slow. It's been reliable for the last couple of months. Not bad overall, but I think there are better options out there.
Buyer Beware!!! 2008-07-23
Pros:
Raid 1, Network attached, small size.
Cons:
Raid controller failed within 1 month. Buffalo replaced a Hard drive after a week of troubleshooting. Less than a month after replacement of the HD the unit failed again and Buffallo sent out a new Revision 3 unit. Came with 2 USB ports and a printer server. I was excited, I thought it may have been re-engineered. It lasted another month. I have since moved to an HP mediaSmart Server. Much better than the Buffallo Solution
Other Thoughts:
Save yourself time, money and headaches. Stay away from this NAS device. There are more reliable solutions out there. You get what you pay for.
