BUFFALO LinkStation 710 2TB 1-Bay NAS Network Attached Storage with HDD Hard Drives Included NAS Storage that Works as Home Cloud or Network Storage Device for Home

Had an issue with the first drive I received, it was not showing formatted, and would not allow access to format. It was replaced (Amazon) and the new drive works as advertised. A little learning curve to set up but help menu and support is very clear and helpful.

I am another victim of Buffalo's outdated technology and I WANT MY MONEY BACK!!!! It would be the least thing they could do since I have to pay for my own data recovery thanks to deceptive marketing. I am extremely disappointed with my LinkStation 710 8TB. I purchased it on June 12th, 2021. I called customer service the day I received the drive. I knew something was not right with it since the device made clicking sounds every so often, but I was reassured that there was NOTHING wrong with the drive. The customer service guys kept saying "It was the new hard drive spinning up and it will settle in the case after a while" or "it is just the fan keeping the drive cool. You have nothing to worry about. The S.M.A.R.T. technology will notify you if there is a problem with the drive." I purchased this LinkStation because I was worried about the life of my current backup system and I was running out of space. I have a GoFlex drive that is more than 10 years old and I thought I would upgrade the system for a better piece of mind. Boy was I wrong. My LinkStation just completely stopped working one night in the middle of a transfer. THE DRIVE WAS LESS THAN 6 MONTHS OLD. On Dec 6th, 2021, I had to ship the broken product to a data recovery company. I thought I had nothing to worry about since my product had a 3 year warranty. I should have checked the fine print. The warranty only covers the drive itself. I was fooled by the FREE DATA RECOVERY evaluation sticker on the product. Deceptive advertising on the product. What really ticks me off the most is the fact that Buffalo did not cover the recovery cost since it was directly due to the failure of their product. They handed me off to an independent data recovery center and I have not heard from them since. How is that for customer service? I feel they have misled me from day one and I want my money back. It is the least they can do to offset the cost of me trusting them with my precious memories and important personal data. The LinkStation was equipped with S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) to monitor the internal drives and detect and report various indicators of reliability and to anticipate drive failure. I guess that never worked. How can I continue to place my trust in a device that cannot perform as expected? It has been one thing or another leading up to the device shutting down completely. The technology was old and outdated. Buffalo did not even respect their customers enough to update the user manuals for their devices. It is a shame that my GoFlex home (purchased in 2010) has OUTPERFORMED and OUTLASTED the LinkStation purchased on June 12th. I have uploaded a picture of them side by side. The item with the green light is the drive that is still running (hint: IT is NOT the BUFFALO LinkStation). DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT THROW GOOD MONEY AT AN INFERIOR PRODUCT.

Works great for the Time Machine backups on Mac Tahoe 26.2. Easy to setup by following their quick start guide and downloading the software. I had to do two firmware updates before using it; took about 30 minutes. Downloaded the owners manual and it easily walked me through setting up the Time Machine backup. First backup takes a few hours. Accessing the drive via Finder is easy and drive is very fast. I've got it plugged into my Xfinity cable modem with the supplied cable. The drive offers more than I need. I'm not doing the web access or iPhone connection. Noisy when doing the backup. Fits nicely on the desk. Hope it will have a long life like my Mac AirPorts. Going to run both the Buffalo and AirPorts for a bit to make sure all is well and until Mac stops supporting the AirPorts.

This definitely not a plug and play device. Getting it into the network was a pain. The instructions leave you guessing and I still haven’t been able to use the acres from anywhere function. If you k ow air really well you might be able to figure it out but this is definitely not worth the effort.

Considering the reviews, most NAS drives for home usage are slow and not very reliable. I went between an WD MyCloud and the Buffalo. The latter is now deployed in my home, but only for a day. It's connected to a satellite of the Netgear Orbi 750 (5400 Mbps Wifi 6) and base speed should be sufficient. Anyway, setup comes first and the drive basically connects to an ethernet port somewhere in your network. Although the Buffalo LinkStation 710 sports a 2.5 Gbps ethernet port, the mentioned satellite is limited to a 1 Gbps port. However, that's unlikely to be a problem. Setup has a printed quick start guide, and most of the time it's fairly clear what to do next. The software link references a Japanese server (in English). This is where to download the two relevant apps (NAS Navigator for setup and firmware updater). The firmware updater is over the network and, for some inexplicable reason, took 30 minutes for the update that ended up failing. A second attempt finished successfully in about a minute. The NAS Navigator software is used to set up a new drive (i.e., to find it), and after that is reduced to mainly being a hyperlink to the web interface of the drive itself. Most information relies on this rather than the software installed on the desktop. Once installed, some options are cryptic at first and user guidance is minimal. You can get it done, however, with a little "guessing". You can create protected folders that only selected users can access. First i was curious how fast the drive would perform as that's both a network issue and the included server/drive. The S.M.A.R.T. info for the drive reveals that it's a Seagate ST4000VX005, which is a 7200 rpm SATA drive. Seagate rates the maximum transfer speed at 180 MB/s. That's not SSD territory, but pretty good for an HDD. Now, there are multiple factors influencing the effective speed and my tests were neither comprehensive nor may they be representative. That said, from my Windows 11 desktop I could achieve a decent 80 MB/s maximum with a fairly consistent data rate. I used a 1 GB file, and that's more efficient than small files. Not directly comparable are my Mac Mini M1 results where I used BlackMagic's SpeedDisk benchmark. As it employs multiple file sizes, it's more realistic, but that's likely not the only excuse for the rather disappointing 30 MB/s maximum for read and write. Overall, the performance is in line with other reports and time has been too short to judge reliability. Once set up, it's easy to use. The supplied software tools, however, are rather minimalistic. The web interface from the drive directly, however, is good. Last, but. It least, the fan is fairly noticeable. In a quiet room, it can be easily heard from more than 2 m.

I purchased the Linkstation 210 but it performed poorly. Silly me thinking if I spent bit more I'd get a bit more in upgrading to the 710. Same issues in both models--extremely slow performance. So slow using these with an iMac that it rendered the NAS effectively useless, Folder browsing would take several minutes before a list of the folder contents materialized, if at all. Read and Write speeds in the single to low double digits even over ethernet. File transfers would take hours. Nothing I tried help. Granted I did not use tech support but I shouldn't have to when I already have full assurance that the product is configured correctly, but just doesn't perform better. The OneDrive feature would not sync everything in my OneDrive account. It's actually limited it seems to five folders deep from the OneDrive root directory and even still within each folder I was not seeing all my files. Absurd. Returning the 210 and 710.

I'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who isn't a professional, doesn't grok network concepts, and so on. While I'm not THAT new, for some things I value convenience and a user experience. When it comes to home network components, UX is definitely in the front seat. Gotta say, the LinkStation is not prioritizing UX. I found the setup to be very convoluted and not adequately documented, such that I'm not sure it's overly approachable for the lay person. Simply put, this really isn't a "it just works" thing. There's more than a fair amount of fussiness in anything beyond very basic setup, and by basic I mean "one folder, one user NAS. The settings application is web based which is, to me anyway, a bit off too. Even some of the simple things are a bit...off. This is my new NAS for Time Machine, and even that setup is weird. For instance, in enabling Time Machine on this NAS, I was required to specify an upper limit for the file size. This is not something I've had to do before, certainly not on the WD MyCloud drive this is replacing. There were some consequential oddities as a result, for instance the NAS name in Finder now has "-Time Machine" appended to it. I'm sure I can address these with more attention, but I don't like to do that unless someone is paying me. Then there's the performance. It's...well, I purchased the 710 which has a 2.5gbps pipe that should make things a bit quicker (obviously your router will need to support that speed). I use my MBP via WiFi though, and even at the 5hz band there's a bottleneck. All of this is to say that for the initial Time Machine backup (approx 30GB) my M2 MBP took...hours. Like "go to bed and check in the morning" number of hours. I expected an initial backup to take longer...but not THAT long. But that's a performance thing that may or may not be important. For me the major criticism is the UX and VERY unclear user journeys. That's why I think this product is a bit hard to love. I'm worried more about the product itself instead of having it simply be in the background. I have it working well enough now, however I just don't like thinking that to get it running at its best I'll need to spend a lot more time with it...

I bought this in 2022 as my first NAS experiment. To date, this thing is running solid. I've added external USB hard drives to expand the storage to an additional six terabytes. The whole system is now running 10 TB. I have it sync with my Dropbox as well. I can remotely access all my files. Just like running a server. I chose a powered external for my expansion, so that I would not put a load on the power supply of the NAS, via USB port. At some point I might upgrade, to a multi-dock NAS, but for right now, this thing is holding down the fort. Can't beat it for the price.

Great External Drive….. the only “problem”, if one wishes to call it that, is the software used to access it: not the actual coding in the software, but rather, the instructions, or lack there of. Good thing that I was somewhat computer savvy, otherwise I could imagine the headaches & frustrations that a non techie person would experience. Good Server/Drive for your money.

غبي جدا كسحابة تخزين ومعقد لابعد درجات التعقيد ، ويحتاج لشخص متخصص ومتعمق في الشبكات وانواعها ع شان يعرف يتعامل معه ، لي ثلاث شهور شارية ولحد الحين ماعرفت له وما اقدر اوصل للبيانات من خارج نطاق الشبكة 😡😑