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Backup options are extensive and allow local drives, external USB drives and other TeraStations to be used as destinations
You can even remotely modify what is displayed on the LCD panel and control its brightness
RAID array support is good and the appliance can be powered down automatically if a drive failure occurs

Buffalo’s TeraNavigator makes light work of installation by searching the network for appliances and taking you through an initial setup phase. Four storage scenarios are supported where the drives can be used individually, as a JBOD, or can be placed in a four-disk RAID-0 stripe or span presenting a single 1TB non-fault tolerant drive to the network. The appliance supports a maximum of two arrays so you can opt for two RAID-1 mirrors each comprising two drives although this will lose you half the total capacity. Alternatively, go for the full monty and have a four disk RAID-5 array which will cost the equivalent of one drive’s capacity.

Buffalo’s Client utility can be installed on each workstation directly from the appliance, where it displays all available TeraStations, their IP addresses, the status of the hard disks and network shares. You can go directly to the password protected web management interface where you’ll find a virtually identical feature set to the TeraStation. Support for the CIFS/SMB and AFP file sharing protocols means that Windows, Linux and Macintosh clients can access network shares and you can designate volumes to be used for FTP services. Each service can be enabled or disabled individually and read only or full access granted.

Usernames and group membership can be used to restrict access and as each share is created you can decide whether to allow global access or specific users and groups and decide whether each can have read only or full access. As we observed with the TeraStation, Buffalo’s backup options are extensive. If you have multiple TeraStations on your network you can copy data between them and the web interface will show all available units. Up to eight differential or full backup tasks can be used to secure selected shares to another location on the internal drives or to an attached USB storage device. Each job can be scheduled to run at regular intervals and data compressed and encrypted. User’s can also secure their own local data to the appliance and restore it using the bundled Easy Backup utility which enables them to schedule their own backup tasks.

Verdict

The TeraStation Pro continues to set standards for affordable network storage and the quick swap feature does make it much easier to remove and replace drives although hot-swap is not supported. It provides a good range of features for the price but these are pretty much the same as those offered by the basic TeraStation so if you don’t need removable hard disks you can save hard cash by opting for the latter.

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