Buffalo Terastation live! 1tb of glory

The Terastation live does everything you want and more, and is possibly one of the best pieces of hardware I have ever bought.

First I’ll explain how I got to buying a Terastation (Often nicknamed ‘The station of terror’ by myself, and only myself it seems). I built a basic media center in my living room with an old PC I had laying around, which actually had enough juice in it to pump out a decent resolution, and carry 5.1 sound. This was great at first, but then I got a bit more serious, and built a proper media center rig with a 300gb hard drive (don’t laugh, 300gb was a lot back then!). I had all my favourite shows ripped onto the hard drive, a load of DVD’s, and about 43 days worth of music (which had took me a loooong time to rip and tag) – when it hit me.

What if my hard drive got corrupted? over heated? got a virus? got stolen? became self aware?
This is when I first started investigating my options for storing large amounts of data, and having it all backed up with little or no intervention from the user. The terastation does all this.
The terastation works in RAID5 mode, which basically means, it has 4 disks inside, however you are only able to use 3 of them for storage. So the bad news is that you lose 25% of your space… however the good news is that this space is used for redundancy. This means if any of your drives stop working for whatever reason, you can simply remove the old drive (this is a very easy process, just 2 clips accessible from the front of the unit), and you just pop in a new drive of the same size!

I put this how swap theory to the test once, and removed a drive from the terastation, whilst I had a PC playing mp3s that were stored on the terastation itself. I was pretty amazed when the terastation didn’t really break a sweat for playing the music, and all it did was warn me that a drive had failed (this can also be setup to warn you via email). So I replaced the 250gb drive with a 300gb drive, just to see what happened.

Well what happened is I was able to continue using the browser based configuration to setup my new drive, and rebuild the RAID configuration (meaning you are backed up once again). The whole time I was doing this, music just kept on playing, and I even started transferring large files at the same time just to see how far the unit would go… but it never broke a sweat.

I have since upgraded my 4x 250gb disks to 4x1tb disks, and it works just as well. It has gigabit ethernet and 2x USB ports for external drives, I couldn’t live without it, and I would happily buy another if I could afford to!

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