Buffalo Linkstation 420 NAS Review

Buffalo is back and this time I’ve got my hands on the CloudStation Duo (also known as the LinkStation™ 420 series). So what exactly is the CloudStation? CloudStation goes beyond network hard drives and simple storage. Each CloudStation is a personal storage solution designed with you in mind. It is your portal to freely access and share photos, videos, music and much more with anyone, anywhere through the cloud. 

Link: http://bit.ly/bufflink

To access your content from https://cloudstation.pogoplug.com, log in using your registered email address and password. You will immediately see all of the files stored on your CloudStation and any CloudStation enabled devices you own. You can then share, stream, upload or download to and from your CloudStation from anywhere in the world - no technical expertise or advanced networking knowledge required

Just a handful of the dozens of features the CloudStation comes with is file sharing, remote access, mobility, productivity like mobile printing and freedom with the simple easy to setup interface.

Setting the Linkstation is relatively straight forward. Simply plug it in as you would any other electrical device and power it on. The lights will blink for a while it sets everything up, while you wait simply install the NAS Navigator software on your PC that’s on the same network, once run the software will automatically search for your Linkstation on the network and have it all up ready for you. From there simply map the drive to your PC and your network storage is all up and ready!

It’s pretty straight forward but don’t worry, if you haven’t done this before Buffalo does have great documentation to get you going. Buffalo NAS devices are quite simple and one of the easiest (if not the easiest NAS to configure).

Coming pre-loaded with 2x 1TB drives also makes this a breeze to setup and very simple for any user to get going. The Linkstation 420 is setup up automatically as RAID 0 which means you get that extra speed boost which helps achieve those 80MB/s write speeds. The RAID configuration can be changed to RAID 0 if you need the redundancy or JBOD if you’re after basic storage.

Performance of the NAS is quite close to the massive 80MB/s advertisement that’s plastered on the front of the package. Through my experiences copying and various sized data I did manage to get consistent speeds up towards that 80MB/s which is quite handy (your particular network configuration may render different results).

Functionality of the NAS hasn’t changed much over the years and truthfully that’s probably just fine as it is. There’s WebAccess which you can setup through your iOS or Android device which works just as well as it did years, BitTorrent software built in, DLNA and USB device server. It doesn’t sound as feature rich as maybe other popular NAS devices but personally for me, I don’t care too much for those. I just want good solid storage that’s simple to setup and reliable. The Buffalo Linkstation does exactly that and offers it at a very competitive price.

The web interface that lets you configure those options is quite easy to use and very clean. Anybody with a basic understanding of the device should be able to navigate and setup their desired options pretty easily and comfortably.

So whats the final verdict of the Buffalo LinkStation 420? Well, it’s definitely a good one. It offers simple to use and set network storage at competive price with a feature set enough for any household or even small business. Buffalo surprised me the first time round and they’ve definitely kept up that quality in their newer line of products.