back to article An uncomplicated Buffalo in SOHO: The LinkStation 441D 4-bay NAS box

Buffalo’s latest addition to the LinkStation family of consumer NAS boxes is the 4-bay LS441D. It’s available off-the-shelf in a number of capacities starting at 4TB and increasing in 4TB increments to 16TB. The unit I’m looking at here is the bare enclosure – the LS441DE. Out of the box all the units are set to a default RAID 5 …

  1. dogged

    > Windows Mobile 7.5

    No such thing, sorry.

    On topic, will it serve PLEX?

    1. Captain Scarlet

      Oh was expecting Plex to be supported but its not listed on https://plex.tv/downloads

      Never seen whether it can be installed manually but with the amount of images for other NAS's you must be able to install yourself, although with the limited ram and single threaded cpu it might be a bit slow, transcoding obviously is out of the question.

  2. Lee D Silver badge

    Is it noisy?

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      In answer to my own question, having purchased a unit, it's no noisier than 4 hard drives and a fan is normally.

      However, if you buy one, keep this reference to hand:

      http://commonmanrants.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/buffalo-linkstation-partition-not-found.html

      The machines DO NOT like disks with existing GPT partitions and seem to store their firmware on the array somehow. I've had to wipe all my disks back to zero to get it to recognise them to boot up initially and even then it was a massive faff involving the above because of the dreaded "emergency mode" that it shipped in.

      Other than that faff, it seems to be quite good value.

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Matt_payne666

      Re: Stop. In the name of love.

      no links to frenas or the ilk yet........ maybe there is something special about this box that has scared/wowed those commentards....

    2. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Stop. In the name of love.

      WTF is it with 'The Register' and Apple/Cloud Providers/MS/NetApp/etc.. Every week there's an article titled 'X has a terrible 0-day flaw', followed by another titled 'Here's a great cheap X', followed by someone in the comments saying get your arse to X and then go to X.

      They're a tech-site. At one point I complained about a single writer who was putting nothing but Apple-crowbarred topics into the front page (and half the time Apple weren't even the point of the article at all but somehow worked in a mention), but you can't really complain about a NAS box advertisement.

      LWN.net at the moment is running a series of articles on free NAS software, so are they equally to blame? Maybe NAS is the new Personal Cloud?

      If anything, I think they are too many opinion puff-pieces and stock-market reports on companies and not even tech stuff on this site, so personally I'm not that bothered about the occasional tech review actually making it to the front page.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    yes but

    I bought x last week and tried to set it up, what a nitemare! I will never buy X again, I only buy Y now.

    FreeNAS would run like crap on this, AFAIK it needs a reasonable CPU and lots of ram (4gb+++) Bring back WHS , I could do with it right now.

    1. Alan Edwards

      Re: yes but

      > FreeNAS would run like crap on this, AFAIK it needs a reasonable CPU

      > and lots of ram (4gb+++)

      Only if you're using ZFS. I'm running it on an HP MicroServer with an Athlon Neo and 3Gb RAM and it's happy with bog-standard RAID-5.

      > Bring back WHS

      There is Windows Storage Server 2012. I've downloaded the DVD image but not played with it yet.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    finger trouble.

    "Having unhindered access to the drives might be fine for the home user but as Buffalo is also aiming the LS441 at the small office environment, it might be more of a concern that malevolent fingers can easily get at the disks."

    Oh so its not unlike the USB drive attached to the pc that it replaces, or the other soho nas's and hotswap arrays that every vendor sells. Just coz the disk can be screwed into a case doesn't mean the case isn't any less vulnerable.

    If you are at all concern about malevolent fingers. Why are you storing critical/sensitive data on a SOHO nas and just one SOHO nas at that. Nas's are no substitute for backups or DR plans.

    1. Robert Sneddon

      Re: finger trouble.

      It's more like the cleaner or someone in the office decides one evening their home 'puter could do with a nice big media hard drive upgrade and next day the NAS falls over with a "drive missing" error.

      My old toolkit for desktop support in offices included a box of tamper-proof screws and the requisite screwdriver bits to secure machines. It didn't stop memory and HDs going walkies (and even a CPU in one instance) completely but it slowed the tealeafs down a tad.

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