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Buffalo Technology TeraSation TS3400R review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £689
inc VAT

Although it's cheap and easy to use, this NAS is far too slow for business-critical backups and storage

Specifications

4 disk bays, 2TB + 2TB + 2TB + 2TB hard disks storage supplied, 2x 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet ports

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.

Buffalo Technology TeraSation TS3400R

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.

Buffalo Technology TeraSation TS3400R

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.

Buffalo TS3400R interface

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.

Using a RAID5 volume, our SMB throughput test produced a result of 54.7MB/s in our large file write test and 101.5MB/s in our large file write test, averaging 78.1MB/s. In small file tests, we got a write speed of 10.1MB/s and a read speed of 20MB/s for an average of 15.1MB/s. This is remarkably slow, making this NAS one of the slowest we’ve reviewed in the last year. We ran the same tests on a RAID6 volume. Our large file test produced a write speed of 43.5MB/s. a read speed of 92.9MB/s and an average of 68.2MB/s. Small file throughput was again incredibly slow, with a write speed of 10.1MB/s, read speed of 21.2MB/s and an average of 15.7MB/s.

We also tested the TS3400R’s iSCSI throughput speeds. iSCSI allows space on a NAS to be mounted by another system on the network as though it was a local hard disk, and typically produces faster transfer speeds. Using a RAID5 volume, the TS3400R produced a large file write speed of 79.2MB/s and a read speed of 50MB/s. Small files were written at 32.5MB/s and read at 30MB/s. With a RAID6 volume, large file speeds averaged 58.1MB/s and small ones 31MB/s.

Buffalo Technology TeraSation TS3400R

Buffalo’s own iSCSI connection tool, supplied on the accompanying software disc, means you don’t have to wrangle with Windows’ own ageing iSCSI Initiator program, although the latter must still be set up in order to enable the Windows iSCSI service. You can then use Windows’ disk management tools to assign it a drive letter and use it just as you would a physical hard disk connected to your PC. We really wish more NAS devices came with their own iSCSI tools like this one, as it made it mounting an iSCSI partition much less awkward than usual.

However, the NAS itself has some quirks when defining iSCSI volumes. By default, you can only define a single iSCSI target, occupying the entire RAID volume. To create additional iSCSI volumes, you’ll first have to enable Logical Volume Management, which lets you create and adjust the size of disk volumes flexibly. The NAS’s interface warns that enabling LVM can reduce performance. Our tests showed this to be the case, but the decrease in average read/write speeds was less than 1MB/s in our small file throughput tests and around 4MB/s in our large file tests.

Although it’s easy to use, has a good range of features and is very cheap for its form factor and capacity, the TS3400R fails catastrophically at the most important feature required of a NAS: fast throughput speeds. If you need a large, relatively inexpensive NAS, we recommend instead opting for a lower-cost free-standing model such as the Lacie 5big Pro 10TB.

Basic Specifications

Price£689
Rating**

Storage

Capacity2TB + 2TB + 2TB + 2TB hard disks
Formatted capacity5493.6
Default file systemext3
Price per gigabyte£0.08
InterfaceSATA2
3.5in drive bays4
Free 3.5in drive bays0
RAID modesJBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10

Interface

Ethernet ports2
USB direct access ports (front/rear)N/A
Other USB ports (front/rear)1/4
eSATA ports (front/rear)0/0
Other portsserial

Networking

Ethernet connection speed10/100/1000Mbit/s
Universal Plug and Play supportyes
UPnP media serveryes
iTunesyes
Print serveryes
USB disk serveryes
Web serveryes
FTP serveryes
Protocols supportedTCP/IP, SMB/CIFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, NFS, SSH, Telnet, WebDAV, iSCSI

Miscellaneous

Size44x420x430mm
Weight9.0kg
Vertical positioningno
Ethernet cable includedyes
Additional featuresrackmount
Power consumption active74W

Buying Information

Price£689
Warrantythree years RTB
Supplier
Detailswww.buffalo-technology.com

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