Buffalo Technology TeraSation TS3400R review

The Buffalo Terastation TS3400R is cheap as far as rackmount NAS devices go. It comes fitted with four 2TB Western Digital Green hard disks that are installed in easily accessible drive trays. It’s a slim 1U rackmount unit with a single PSU. There’s no redundant power supply, nor space to fit one.

The TS3400R has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, so you can have a redundant or load-balancing network connection. Alongside these, at the rear, are two USB3 ports and two USB ports. There’s another USB port at the front. There’s also a serial console port in case you’re ever unable to access the NAS via the network and need to troubleshoot it the old fashioned way. The TS3400R has a 1.6GHz dual-core Marvell Armada XP MV78230, which isn’t very powerful compared to the Intel Atom processors we’re used to seeing in business-grade NAS devices. It also has 1GB of DDR3 RAM and comes with some useful software, including a 10-licence version of NovaBackup Business Essentials.

When you connect to the TS3400R’s web interface, you’re presented with a surprisingly slick and streamlined interface. While it lacks the friendly window-managed style user interface of rivals such as Synology’s DiskStation range, all the options we needed to configure the TS3400R were easy to find and alter. The usual features of a business-class NAS are available, including web and MySQL servers. The TS3400R also has a management and monitoring station for IP cameras on your network, allowing you to use it as a CCTV monitoring interface. You can also enable features such as syncing to an Amazon S3 account and remote web access. Sadly, it doesn’t support third-party software packages, which limits the capabilities and flexibility of the device.

We typically expect rackmount NAS devices designed for business to be faster than their free-standing counterparts, and were disappointed by the TS3400R’s performance in our SMB throughput tests. We tested the NAS in both RAID5 and RAID6 configurations. RAID5 protects you against one disk failing and provides you with 5493.6GB of storage. RAID6 is protected against the failure of up to two disks, but is usually a little slower and only gives you 3660.6GB of capacity. RAID5 provides sufficient protection for most businesses as long as any failed disk is replaced promptly. We had to update the firmware do before carrying out our tests, as the NAS shipped with a firmware that produced significantly slower transfer speeds.