Buffalo LinkStation LS410D 2TB review

NAS enclosures let you add as much or as little storage to your network as you need. Even better, NAS enclosures typically have powerful web interfaces that are packed with features such as media servers and advanced user management. NAS Enclosures aren’t for everyone, though, especially if you just want a NAS device that you can get up and running with the minimum of fuss and comes with hard disks preinstalled.

The Buffalo LinkStation LS410D is such a NAS device. It has a single hard drive, a single Ethernet port and a single USB port to which you can attach USB printers and drives so that you can share them with other people on the network. The single disk has a 2TB capacity and a low price per gigabyte of 7p. Unless you own a massive media library the 2TB capacity should be more than enough space in which to store your files, music and file archive. The LS410D is also available in capacities of 1TB, 3TB and 4TB.

The LS410D has a plain, inoffensive appearance and can be oriented either horizontally or vertically. The LS410D’s rear cooling fan was quiet, and didn’t prove irritating when used in a quiet room. Setting up the LS410D was easy thanks to the sensibly laid out and easy to understand web interface. The Getting Started wizard, which runs the first time you access the interface, guides you through the process of creating shared folders. It also lets you create user accounts, determine which folders those users can access, assign them quotas so they don’t hog all the disk space and organise them into groups for easier management.

The web interface is divided into an easy mode and an advanced mode. Easy mode superficially resembles Windows 8’s Live Tiles, and there’s a series of tiles for features such as remote access, the BitTorrent server and the media server. Each tile shows whether that feature is turned on or not. Click a tile and you’ll see basic options for each one. There’s also an Advanced mode that provides more options and extra features, such as the print server for enabling network printing to an attached USB printer and backup settings.

The Buffalo Link Station’s web interface is split into two modes: easy and advanced

We were impressed with the LS410D’s large file write speeds, as the device produced average data transfer speeds of 62.6MB/s when writing and 74.8MB/s when reading. Unfortunately, the LS410D’s small file performance wasn’t as impressive. Its read speeds weren’t too bad at 20.5MB/s, but its very slow write speeds of 8.4MB/s were disappointing.

We had no trouble streaming music and video files stored on the LS410D to a network media player, but the iTunes server feature didn’t work with the latest Windows version of iTunes, which was 11.1.2 at the time of writing. You don’t need to use a computer to download BitTorrent files as the LS410D can do this for you, but unfortunately it can’t manage web or FTP downloads.

You can remotely access shared folders via FTP, but since there’s no support for SFTP it’d be wiser to use Buffalo’s own remote access feature instead. This allows password-protected access through the buffalonas.com website, and via the company’s iOS and Android apps.

As mentioned, the LS410D has just one USB port that you can use to share a USB printer or USB drive among your networked computers. Oddly, you can’t simply unplug your printer and then plug in a disk. First, you must disable the print server and enable the disk server in the web interface, which is cumbersome. Even more oddly, you can’t automatically back up shared folders to attached USB disks.

We think the Buffalo LinkStation LS410D is a fine choice for basic network file sharing, but it’s not great if you have advanced needs. Its performance when copying small files was disappointing and the extra features are too rough around the edges.