Or should I say: Beware of Buffalo support ?
Having 3 Buffalo TeraStations myself - with a net total of 2.25 terabytes of available space, it's needless to say the've become quite important devices for our storage and backup system.
Advertised as easy to use and professional RAID 5 capable, I do now have to warn anybody of trusting in them!
A 1st failure on TeraStation number one was end of 2005, it took technical support from Ireland more than 3 weeks to get a replacement drive to me.
This is a way too long time for a defect RAID 5 device to wait for a replacement hard disk. Nevertheless, the change of the hard disk went without complications, and the RAID array rebuilt itself without any problems.
However, the 2nd failure on Terastation number two, was castrophic.
The device shutdown after sending an error message, claiming disk number 3 were defect.
After replacing the harddrive (learning from failure number one, I've already ordered another spare disk) the Terastation came up, with another e-mail, this time claiming DISK1, DISK2, DISK3, DISK4 - all were supposed to be bad.
The web interface had a small warning message, saying that the complete RAID array was useless and had to be destroyed in order to be used.
Wow. Calling technical support, which is a number in Ireland for all european users, was a challenge.
The guy suggested trying out a newer version of the firmware, which he sent by e-mail (version 2.00, at this time officially unpublished). Replacing the firmware did not help.
Asking technical support for further help on the issue, they said there was none available, instead they pretty much discredited their own product: "never rely on one data storage, just delete the RAID array and rebuild it"
What a wise thing to say.
No further help was available, Buffalo didn't even want to look at our Terastation (we would have shipped it to them).
So anybody please tell me, what good is a RAID 5 array if you cannot replace a hard disk.
We then deleted the RAID structure and had the TeraStation build a new array, no problems since.
In other words: Be careful with what you buy. Maybe Buffalo's Terastation is not a wise choice after all, because using it is not as inexpensive as it looks.
I will keep on using them, though, but now enabling the TeraStation to TeraStation backup options to have the most critical stuff on two boxes.
Regards
Frank