Buffalo LinkStation Mini

Buffalo LinkStation Mini 500GB review

This palm-sized NAS drive is designed for home use. Its fanless, well-ventilated enclosure means it runs almost silently, and it's small enough to fit just about anywhere. Inevitably for a drive this size, it uses 2.5-inch hard drives. The model reviewed here offers two 250GB drives, but a twin 500GB version is also available. You can set it up as a RAID 0 drive to enjoy the full capacity of the installed drives, or RAID 1 to mirror your data and protect against drive failure, but the drives aren't user-accessible, so you can't replace a failed unit. The LinkStation Mini's feature set belies its size. It has a built-in BitTorrent client, an iTunes server and a print server should you wish to connect a USB printer. You can stream media to a DLNA-compatible device, which is good news if you own a PS3 or Xbox 360. The LinkStation Mini's WebAccess feature enables you to store, share and access files from any web browser on a PC, Mac or iPhone, and backup is provided by the bundled software. You can control group and user level security. The LinkStation is easy on energy consumption; Buffalo claims it uses 60 per cent less than most NAS devices.