LinkStation 210

For what it is, perfect! A NAS with only one disk is not a complete solution, because there is no built-in resilience or recovery system. That did not matter, because I have 4 other 4TB drives linked to 4 PCs, and this is simply a central repository. The big advantage is that it is always on, 24x7, when the PC's are NOT. It is therefore available for update/interrogation from various mobile devices. A full NAS solution would have cost at least twice the price, and most of its functions would have been redundant. It came with a US power supply, but luckily a retired UK unit worked perfectly.

Good product; great value for money. Performance is good, but recently the company’s UK service was withdrawn and the mobile app stopped working. Sadly, I had to return it.

The negative reviews of this are accurate. Dont buy unless you know lots about these things.

its not Buffalos fault, but getting a win 11 pc to connect tp a pc is not quite as simple as pnp. It does work with win 11 pro, but I have yet to get it to work with win 11 home. (I hesitate to alter the registry for obvious reasons)

Buffalo's email support is excellent and helpful. The seller states that he is registered for VAT but turned out not to be.

The drive came with a US mains plug. No mention of this in the description.

I really do not understand the 'Buffalo haters'. The Linkstation 210 4TB 1-Bay NAS is a basic network drive, with a basic interface. But you only need use the software for initial setup and maintenance. After that, it just sits on your local network as a mapped drive, same as every other NAS. One reviewer said that you must run the software app (NAS Navigator 2) in order to access the drive on a network. That is utter cobblers. The NAS Navigator app is only required as a simpler way of mapping the drive, viewing your files, or displaying any drive errors, perhaps for folks that do not want to start typing in and bookmarking network addresses. The Linkstation 210 covers all the bases. It can be divided up into folders and user accounts. The folders can be mapped to separate drive letters on your network, and the user accounts can be password protected, so family members can have their own private files library. There is also the usual public area, where everyone can access common files. There is a basic media server, and you can configure the Linkstation to upload to the most common media sharing websites like YouTube or Dropbox. The Linkstation also offers a personal cloud feature, where you can access your files from anywhere in the world for free. But you need to be a little more tech-savvy to set up that feature. I have had the larger 2-bay Buffalo 220 NAS in my house now for 6 years, running 24/7. It has proven to be extremely reliable. One of the hard drives began misbehaving after 4 years, and was replaced. The other is still running error-free. Obviously, the single bay 210 does not have the ability for RAID protection. But you can configure it for automatic backup over the network, or via the USB port on the rear. The USB port will work with a shutdown command from an interruptible power supply, so if you power the NAS through a UPS, it will work with apps like Parachute, and complete a proper shutdown, if the battery in the UPS is almost exhausted. In fact that is my only issue with the 210. I wish it had a second USB port on the front of the unit, so you could have the comms with the UPS and also have the ability of backups, without unplugging cables. If I did not already own it's bigger brother, that single feature would have had me purchasing something from Synology instead. Like I said, the larger 220 has been literally running 24/7 for 6 years now, and I have had no issues with the cooling fan, or had any strange hangs or crashes. I have found the 220 to be a very reliable device, and I expect nothing less from the smaller 210. Just remember that Buffalo NAS drives are very popular in the USA, Canada and Japan, so the unit ships with a power brick with the mains plug used in those counties. There is no 'slide-on' pin adapter for any other countries. You will need to purchase a USA to UK plug adapter. The branded one I purchased from Amazon was £8. Although the power brick will plug in to a standard UK shaver adapter, the NAS pulls 2 amps, so it will blow the 1Amp fuse in any shaver adapter. If you just need a reliable, basic NAS/Media Server, to put on a shelf, set up once, then forget about it, Buffalo devices are highly recommended.

The mains adapter supplied was for USA and the apps on Google play are not available in UK, so totally useless in UK. Returned for a full refund.

I had already 2 NAS almost full of back-up. I needed more spaces and I got the Linkstation 410 with 4TeraBytes. The LinkStation 410 4TB is very quite (except the first minute at the initial boot when the fan seems to perform some tests). Writing/Reading large file is very fast from Windows (Shared folder) , Linux (Samba) or Mac ( I back up a 350 GB iPhoto database to this NAS). This NAS is a DLNA server (with "Twonky") , working very well for my DNLA client og my LG Blue-Ray player. It also has a recent BitTorrent/uTorrent server , which could even be accessed remotely. I have set multi-bays NAS (at work) for much more money for way less features. I'd rather have 2 NAS like this one and having a double back-up then putting $800-1200 in a multibay NAS with Raid"x"

LinkStation LS210DE19 – 2T byte single drive NAS I started using NAS well over 10 years ago. My first NAS (which is still in use is a Buffalo LS-GL284 250 Gbytes) and is around 90%+ full. So then I bought a second Buffalo NAS LS-XLFA8 2T byte unit a few years back but it has become intermittent with an overheating problem causing frequent shutdowns. The files I store on the NAS are not that critical BUT I still wouldn’t like to lose them. Consequently I decided to turf the XLFA8 2T unit and buy a new LinkStation LS210DE19 – 2T byte single drive NAS (and also because it was on sale). As a lot of other reviews state – setup is “not easy” but once set up the NAS does what it’s supposed to do. The instruction sheet that comes with the unit for set-up is less than useless and the CD…. well, it does make a good coffee coaster. I found the “Online Manual” for the NAS to be excellent but at 133 pages in length “ya gotta have patience”. I actually found it a good reference manual after I figured out how to set up the NAS. I set up the NAS using NAS NAVIGATOR2 to find it’s IP address on my LAN and then used the NAS management GUI to perform the setup. After about 6 hours the NAS was up and flying. The area’s I configured on the NAS were the: • Basics – Time, NAS Name, etc • Power management schedule • Local User Names and their privileges • Files folders, their shares and Access Restrictions • Network IP, etc • WebAccess to the NAS (I use an Android phone and the Buffalo WebAccess app) So as can be seen, there are a lot of area’s that I have not set up (RAID / BACKUPS / FTP /DLNA / BitTorrent) and a bunch of other stuff which do not use currently. I did use the NAS “USB Direct Copy” which worked well (good explanation in online manual) and NAS WebAccess on an Android phone was straight forward to set up. File transfer rates on my LAN are about 8-10 megabits /sec. For my type of activity this is OK but others would call this rate very slow. (File transfer rates via WebAccess were/are much faster!!) My final conclusions are that the NAS is a good unit, serves my purpose, is priced OK and I would recommend it to others. Now, if you are new to all of this IP stuff then – “get some help” to set it up.

muy bueno

Ignore the bad reviews, they either received a different drive (mine was beautiful, refurbed by Buffalo and looked and acted like it was brand new. I will also say that the drives, although, yes, 1TB each, are very high name brand quality) that I did or they have never worked with a NAS and they didn't want to read the manual. To be fair, being an ee/CD engineer for the last sixty years, I need to be very careful when I described some as "easy to use". I would suggest that anyone not familiar with NAS systems, Buffalo or otherwise, to first try and read the manual. If the manual uses terms you don't understand and/or the discussion seem "complicated", please do not buy this NAS (or any other). I have at least five different Buffalo NAS systems, of all sizes, and this 520 is, by far, the "easiest" to use. If you can't deal with this NAS, you can't deal with any. This is not your fault since the Buffalo programmers and hardware designers have no concept what a normal people knows and doesn't know about computers! Overall, this 520 series is not their most capable but has all functions that the typical user needs (plus a few more). I would buy another one of these in a heartbeat for a media server. As far as speed goes, this thing is as fast as my $1000 NAS systems. It can only be as fast as your network and the drives on each end. The review that said if was slow is wrong.

El producto tardo mucho pero llego bien. Las instrucciones no venían en español ni en cualquier otro idioma porque eran inexistentes, hubo que buscarse la vida en internet. Después de un mes intentando configurar el dispositivo ME RINDO. La devolución me cuesta un pastón ya que hay que devolverlo a mi cargo por transporte internacional. Me he bajado instrucciones, muy malos tutoriales todos en ingles americano casi incomprensibles para mi. No digo que el producto sea malo puesto que me ha sido imposible configurarlo y usarlo, pero desde luego no es nada fácil de usar.