Buffalo LinkStation Live with BitTorrent 2.0TB NAS

Lazybones · January 15, 2010, 07:20:14 PM

My file server is BIG, Loud and has become very unreliable, not to mention full. Not having much of a budget to replace it I found this. I will let you know how well it works, so far it is rather easy to use, the bittorent feature is a bit limited but the time machine support, itunes support and DLNA (Xbox 360 etc) streaming are BIG features to me and all but replace what I was using my old server for and at $289.99 CAD it is a hell of a deal.

BTW it is a little smaller than the Wii.

Buffalo LinkStation Live with BitTorrent 2.0TB NAS
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/linkstation-live-ls-chl/

$289.99 CAD
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=37883&vpn=LS-CH2.0TL&manufacture=Buffalo

Mr. Analog · January 15, 2010, 10:57:10 PM

That's pretty cool man, what's the transfer rate like?

I love my Drobo but it's slower than a ... really slow thing.

Lazybones · January 15, 2010, 11:04:28 PM

Currently getting up to 200Mbit/s transferring from my old server, however my old server has REALLY old IDE drives in it and has never been very fast. I will test out the speed once my big transfer is done.

One neat thing is that I can expand it with external USB drives as well. Another $199 and I could add another 2TB easy but my next purchase is probably going to be a little nettop PC running the intel atom 330 CPU and the Nvidal ION chipset to make a tiny modern XBMC or Boxee box.

Tom · January 15, 2010, 11:12:25 PM

Speaking of XBMC, I've been playing with it on my media box recently. It is pretty slick.

Thorin · January 16, 2010, 12:05:41 AM

You're not worried about it being a single drive? Are your files backed up somewhere else as well?

Lazybones · January 16, 2010, 10:50:40 AM

Quote from: Thorin on January 16, 2010, 12:05:41 AM
You're not worried about it being a single drive? Are your files backed up somewhere else as well?

As it stands my current raid which uses a proper raid controller running a raid 5 is acting as if there is a bad drive. None of the drives are reporting errors yet the server randomly reboots and there has been a bunch of file system corruption.

My server contains mostly media files that can be replaced. More important stuff I tend to archive to DVD or have additional copies of on my other computers.

Lazybones · January 16, 2010, 02:21:06 PM

The more I use RAID the more I am convinced that its only use is to protect against instant complete drive failure.. More common gradual degradation only seems to be detected by really really good raid systems that have deep SMART and disk monitoring techniques.

At work for example I have seen servers suffer almost complete data loss with their built in controllers. Sure there are many cases where they did work, but I have seen enough where they don't to no longer trust them.

Our SAN on the other hand has had many drive failures over its life time but always quickly takes the drive off-line and powers up a hot spare. We replace the drive quickly and it rebuilds as it should.

Tom · January 16, 2010, 05:19:54 PM

Quote from: Lazybones on January 16, 2010, 10:50:40 AM
Quote from: Thorin on January 16, 2010, 12:05:41 AM
You're not worried about it being a single drive? Are your files backed up somewhere else as well?

As it stands my current raid which uses a proper raid controller running a raid 5 is acting as if there is a bad drive. None of the drives are reporting errors yet the server randomly reboots and there has been a bunch of file system corruption.

My server contains mostly media files that can be replaced. More important stuff I tend to archive to DVD or have additional copies of on my other computers.

That sounds more like memory failure than disk failure. I've been learning a lot about software, and hardware raid the past couple years. Even with hardware raid, bad memory (especially on the card itself) can cause all sorts of corruption. I keep trying to find some non registered/buffered ECC 4G DDR3 modules, but it seems most places don't carry them at all. ECC is something you desperately want for a RAID system, especially software raid. Even with perfectly good ram, the average error rate is something like a couple a year (possibly more), so if those errors happen to happen when an app is writing to the raid, or the OS is updating the fs, any kind of corruption can occur.

There is no substitute for a full and proper /redundant/ backup. Eventually I plan to have one of my old machines setup as my "backup" box with a large LVM linear array to backup all of my data on my main array, and do rsnapshot backups of all my VM's and machines. Of course that box would only be on for a few hours a day max, and it'd all be automatic.

Darren Dirt · January 18, 2010, 09:07:01 AM

Quote from: Lazybones on January 15, 2010, 07:20:14 PM

Buffalo LinkStation Live with BitTorrent 2.0TB NAS
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/linkstation-live-ls-chl/

The little promo video, I half-recognized the art style, then once the voice kicked in I thought, gotta be Korey from Spill. Am I crazy, or?

Lazybones · January 21, 2010, 02:21:50 PM

Well so far so good, seems like the DLNA server works fine with the Xbox 360 and throughput is around 17-20MBytes / second give or take. From what I read this throughput is normal for a low-end ultra compact NAS like this.

I hacked in telnet support last night and am looking to install Transmission (http://www.transmissionbt.com/) as I don't like the built in torrent client.

Melbosa · January 21, 2010, 02:41:14 PM

My purchase this year is going to be one of these I think: http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS509+/index.php

Replace the server I have, which is becoming more and more a VM host with massive storage. Will use above as an NAS and Streaming Device.

Lazybones · January 21, 2010, 03:26:34 PM

Quote from: Melbosa on January 21, 2010, 02:41:14 PM
My purchase this year is going to be one of these I think: http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS509+/index.php

Replace the server I have, which is becoming more and more a VM host with massive storage. Will use above as an NAS and Streaming Device.

Yes Synology or QNAP are much better units.. we have started using a QNAP for our dev storage at work as it is certified to work with Vmware and is dirt cheap compared to any enterprise nas.

Lazybones · January 28, 2010, 03:41:20 PM

I have updated my opinion of the SPEED of the NAS to very good, I was doing a single drive to single drive copy today over USB 2.0 and realized it was hardly faster.

Tom · January 28, 2010, 04:48:39 PM

Quote from: Lazybones on January 28, 2010, 03:41:20 PM
I have updated my opinion of the SPEED of the NAS to very good, I was doing a single drive to single drive copy today over USB 2.0 and realized it was hardly faster.

Compared to USB 2? Thats hardly saying anything, most you generally get out of USB 2 is 20-30MB/s. I can get up to 90MB/s off my share

(if linux wasn't having vfs issues)

Tom · January 28, 2010, 05:00:29 PM

Um, NCIX just put the "Buffalo DriveStation 1.0TB External Hard Drive USB3.0 W/ Memeo Backup" up on sale. $149 (regular $199).

Thought you guys might be interested. http://ncix.com/products/?sku=47763&promoid=1146