EASY & CHEAP NAS – Buffalo LinkStation 520 Review

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A NAS, or network attached storage, can be anything from a hard drive connected to your router, to a full rack mounted server with hundreds of hard drives, and as a newcommer, a non-techie, it might be a little daunting to find a product that is easy enough to get started with just to backup your home photos and videos. Happily though, a company called Buffalo might just have the answer, with this, their LinkStation 500. Let’s walk you through setting it up and why you may or may not want one.

Unlike most NAS devices, this one comes pre-filled with hard drives. You pick the capacity you want – which I should add is a bit disingenuous as the version I have is labeled as a “2TB” capacity, which while technically true, it’s got 2 1TB drives inside, Toshiba ones specifically although you might get different ones in yours, but since it comes pre-configured in RAID 1 – meaning the data will get written to both drives, you only get 1TB of usable capacity. So, if you’ve got say 3TB of pictures, videos and maybe some bluray rips, you’d want the one they label as “8TB”. 

Anyway, to set ip up it’s really simple, plug in the ethernet at the back, and power, flick the little power switch, then go to your router’s IP address, mine is 192.168.1.1, and log in, so you can find out what address the NAS is at. Once you’ve got that, you can head to that address and click through the setup wizard then it’s ready to go. If you want to share files from a Windows machine, open “This PC”, click Computer at the top, then “map network drive”, then type \\NAS IP\Public, click “Connect with different credentials” and use the username and password you used to setup the NAS, default is admin/admin but you’ll really want to change that. I should note that if you’d rather not find it’s IP address from your router, you can use their “NAS Navigator” application from their website.

Ok, so that’s how to set it up, but what’s it like? Why buy this? Well, it’s what us british call “cheap and cheerful”. It’s not fancy, it can’t run Plex or any other apps as it doesn’t have an app store like some other, more expensive options. It’s a pretty basic unit altogether actually, it’s a Realtek dual core and has, get this, 256MB of RAM. Yeah. That’s pretty insane to have that little RAM in literally anything in 2020, but here we are. 

On the note of the pre-installed drives, the Toshiba ones that came with mine, and the ones I understand may also come in them, like WD Green drives for example, are not NAS specific drives, they are the same sort of ones you’d find in pre-build PCs and the likes. It’s not a massive deal in this kind of application, but it would have been nice to see a better suited drive used.

When it comes to performance, as always you are limited by the gigabit ethernet, so it can copy at around 100MB/s, with a few drops to near 80MB/s depending on the file size and such – pretty decent considering its dramatically small amount of RAM. 

On the web interface, you can’t do all that much. You’ve got a basic file manager if you want to directly upload files, and a few settings, plus checking hard drive health info too. Like I said, it’s basic, cheap and cheerful.

So, for the price, is it worth it or should you spend a little extra on a more feature rich Synology or QNAP NAS? Well, if all you want is file storage – a backup for your important family pictures and documents, this is a great option. It comes pre-filled, and is super easy to set up, so that’s a big plus. If you want to use a NAS for literally anything else though, like a Plex media server, you’ll want a more powerful option instead, but that will cost a bit more and won’t come with drives pre-installed. It’s not for me, but I can see the gap in the market for it.