LS421DE-EU

I have had this NAS for 24 hours now but for the first 3 hours I was ready to send it back. As others have stated the documentation is woeful. Also, I could not get it to be seen on my network for 3 hours as it stated that it was booted in emergency mode.Searching the internet I found this link to forcing a firmware upgrade.http://commonmanrants.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/buffalo-linkstation-partition-not-found.html[Edit 20/06/14 - I have found another link describing exactly what I did before so let's see if Amazon delete this one too]Do not buy this NAS without looking at this link first as you will need it to force a firmware upgrade to get the thing to work. It is frustratingly hard to find this link in the first place. I had to rebuild the partition table and delete the user config to get mine to work.Anyway, I have a 3tb and 1tb drive in it. The Samsung 1tb drive is not on the capability list but it works o.k.The drive is fast - I was copying over 200gb of data per hour.It is also quiet. The only noise I can hear is the hard disks spinning in it.So frustratingly hard to set up but fast in use.On the strength of this product I have bought a 4 bay Buffalo drive that was a lot easier to set up but is somehow a bit slower in data transfer - still a great product though.Update 05/12/13. I have bought another of these NAS devices as the price had dropped to £75 and I still have a few spare hard disks lying around. As I had learnt from my previous experience I had the second NAS up and running in half an hour - still had to force the firmware upgrade and I had already downloaded it for the first one. Buffalo really do need to update the firmware on the NAS's they send out to sell as it is unacceptable to have to go through such painful steps to get them to work. Still 4 stars though based on performance.....

Ok so I'm generally good with computers, and have never failed to get something to work properly before but here goes, starting with the positives....Pros:-Looks nice - yes it's plastic but actually looks a bit like a grey-brown metal and to me at least appears stylish.-Reasonable quiet - but not silent.Cons:-Absolutely horrible to set up. -As previous reviewers have mentioned this is a nightmare. It took me ~2 hours to make it stop reporting an incorrectly mounted hard drive before it would format the drive and use it. -This took reformatting the HDD 4 times in my desktop and just way too much fiddling.Useless as a DLNA server.I purchased this for the sole purpose of streaming my lossless music collection to my network player (Cyrus Streamline2).However, the server software sends everything apart from artist name, album name and track names in non-latin letters, so when browsing music the selection for choosing to browse using artist/album will appear as something along the lines of ~~~~~/~~~. There are loads of these options and I'm not sure what most of them even are.The streamer never gets problems like this from any other DLNA server.Conclusion:If you want this for very basic file storage, backup and sharing then it would be absolutely fine if you have a lot of patience to set it up. If you want a media server avoid like the plague!

Very compact and discrete as opposed to other dual-bay NAS'es with lots of flashy lights.Firmware and GUI are its weakest points in my opinion and for example if one has to upgrade the drives to bigger ones, it is an absolute nightmare as you simply - I found out - cannot just remove the 2 drives and slide in 2 new ones and hope it will reinitialise the 2 drives; and you simply cannot access the NAS via the IP you previously set up. The NAS Navigator software picks up the NAS again but says no firmware is present. The error lights come on and it's not very well documented, even on the net, as to what to do with the NAS then. So beware when you change hard drives, or simply buy the biggest drives you can at the very beginning.Speed-wise, in RAID 0 and with SMB, I saw a constant 60 MB/s in read/write with 2 Seagate ST3000DM001 (3TB) which is decent but about average. My Zyxel NSA325v2 gives me a steady 65+ in RAID 0. I suppose NAS'es costing double really get closer to the magic 100MB/s-mark in real life but for streaming HD videos, not sure if it is worth spending the extra cash.All in all a decent machine but not much about it is outstanding..

After a deal of research of the available budget NAS diskless boxes I plumped for the Buffalo LinkStation 421E. The Amazon reviews of this model seemed to give a fair evaluation of the NAS box.There was only a couple of downsides to the installation side:1. The documentation could have been much better as the quick start guide only had a pictorial run though. Some explanation of procedure would have been welcomed. Advise that you download the latest full manual and read up before installing the NAS box.2. The installation program could not find the NAS until I turned off my AV/Firewall software. Once I did this, the installation proceeded without a hitch and worked perfectly after turning the AV/Firewall back on.The speed of this budget NAS is very good compared to my first experience of NAS (WD My Book Live) which are OK but operate a lot slower in comaparison to the Buffalo LinkStation 421E. (Mac Pro 2x2.26 Zeon)Would have given the 421E a 5 star rating if only the installation process had been easier.Once you got passed installation (not a show stopper but quirky), this NAS operates superbly. Highly recommended.

Unless you purchase the disks with the enclosure, the only way to get them formatted is through a firmware upgrade after changing the configuration to get access to the debug menu. Such a hack is IMHO unacceptable with a consumer product. This is well explained in other comments.Once finally set up, it is feature rich (DLNA, iTunes server, ...) and works great with Windows clients. The only limitation is the necessity to have the same user names for authentication/authorization. The DNLA server also works great with LG 2013 Smart TVs. I am only disappointed with the slow traffic and dropped connections on OSX.Finally the enclosure is tiny and silent but the build quality is average.