1TB of storage at home, nice!

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 2 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Shortly after the new year began, I started converting all of my DVDs (and even some old VHS tapes!) into MP4 format with the goal being immediate access to my entire video library on any TiVo in the house using tools like pyTivo or streambaby. About two weeks into the project it became readily apparent that my 250gb Buffalo Linkstation NAS wasn’t going to be enough to hold all of the encoded video so I started shopping around for a larger unit.

I’ve been very happy with my Linkstation … it’s been very reliable and there’s a large community of enthusiasts over at NAS Central writing custom firmware and hacks for these boxes. So naturally I started looking at Buffalo’s more current NAS offerings along with other devices like hp’s MediaVault. Eventually I decided I wasn’t quite ready to pay extra for the reduced capacity (but increased reliability) of a RAID-enabled NAS when I could get more raw storage space for my money instead.

After a lot of back-and-forth, I decided on the Buffalo Linkstation Live LS-CHL. This stylish little black box packs a mini Linux server with a 1TB (yeah, terabyte!) drive into a package smaller than my 500gb WD MyDVR Expander. Like my current Linkstation it requires no software on the client side so it works seamlessly with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Just plug it into your network (oh yeah, it supports gigabit transfer speeds), configure it through your browser, map it as a shared drive and you’re ready to go.

The box does have a lot of features I won’t use but other people might:

  • I don’t need the USB print server because my Epson AcuLaser CX11NF is a network-attached multi-function laser printer/scanner/copier (the built-in print server on the Linkstation only supports printing anyway, not network scanning).
  • I don’t need the Web Access feature because I have my own web server which can access the Linkstation via a normal SMB share.
  • I don’t have any Macs in the house, so I don’t need the Time Machine service.
  • I don’t have any DLNA-certified devices in my home theater setup (and I use the utilities mentioned earlier in this post to send video to my TiVos).
  • I backup to Amazon’s S3 service in the cloud via JungleDisk, so I won’t use the Memeo backup software that comes with it.

It does have some cool features I like though, like the built-in Bittorrent client and e-mail alerts. It has a USB 2.0 port on the back for attaching another external drive for backups or expanding capacity (you can also use it to download photos directly from a digital camera, but that’s another feature I’ll never use since the NAS is in a closet and not on my desk). Finally, if you only need it running when the PCs in your house are running, you can have it power down when it’s not being used (but that does require installing some proprietary software from Buffalo).

One feature I could not get to work is the one that says “iTunes automatically makes the LinkStation available as a content source in your iTunes software.” I copied my iTunes folder to the share and enabled the Linkstation’s media server. I could then see the Linkstation as a “shared library” in iTunes, but it was empty. I couldn’t find anything in the documentation or on Buffalo’s support site on how this is supposed to work. I just gave up … my library is on my PC for easy (local) syncing with my iPod and I back it up to the Linkstation manually.

Over the weekend I copied all of my encoded video, my entire music library, and all of my photos from my PC and the old NAS to the new one … 555gb total! So I’ve got just under 400gb left on the NAS plus about 220gb remaining on the old NAS now that all of the video and music has been moved over. That remaining 600gb should last me a while …

1TB in the home for under $250. Amazing.

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