LinkStation™ Duo - LS-WXL/R1

Finally, I got some NAS. I figured this is a much better solution than transferring and erasing 4Gb and burning them to a DVD every hour on my Dad's Notebook. And so, with the NAS, all I have to do is to just upload them from my Notebook, regardless of the speed.

I got the chance to get one when my Dad sent his Lenovo for repairs (as the speakers cannot be detected anymore) at Low Yatt. And going there on a normal working day is really asking for it. Because by the time we picked everyone up and reached the place, it was already half-past eight. And so, with that limited time, I decided to walk around SRI Computers, the only place that I can actually spend money at. At first, I was looking for a Synology brand which I had a very good experience with, in my old company. But there was none. With the clock ticking, I decided to get the next best thing, which is the Linkstation. A quick call to Jeffrey Loo did not help much as he does not have any experience with them and so, I bit the bullet at bought one.

I mean, for RM399, the Linkstation from Buffalo, Japan, is still quite pricey and I still need to shell out an additional RM128 for a 3.5" Samsung 1TB SATA HDD as well. After purchase on that night, maybe I should have bought a Western Digital instead. Maybe because its closing time, or because I am so handsome, they only charged the 3% interest on the 4GB thumbdrive instead. So, I saved quite a bit. Or maybe I did not because when my dad found out, both he and my brother became Credit card experts and ended up with them using one of their cards. The salesguy and I just looked at each other speechlessly.

This is what you get from Buffalo. Everything
short of a HDD. At least with an external PSU,
I can get a replacement if it fails.

The Linkstation can take in two drives and depending
on how you set them, you could either use two full
dives or as a RAID system. Knowing how reliable
HDDs are, I plan to get another 1TB HDD in March
and set them up as RAID, but at the loss of using half
the capacity. This, I think is how RAID works but then,
I am not computer illiterate anymore ever since I got
a life and got married too.

Setting up is a breeze. On initial set up, the manual,
(Yes, I RTFM, TQ) said to do this and do that, which
I did and within 15 minutes, the drive is ready. Oh,
and I like it when the red LED is lit to show an empty
HDD slot.

At the back, apart from a Network jack, there is a
USB port which only reads most thumbdrives. But
I tried with a USB to 3.5" HDD interface, it works
too. There is a fan, albeit a very silent one, in there
as well, which is fine because I plan to put side by
side with the router and that location has no
moving air. There is a setting on the back for the
power supply where is you set it to 'auto', it will
switch itself off to standby mode until a PC on the
network with the NASNavi software is activated.

Close the cover and its ready to start storing!

I have heard of water cooled CPUs in the PC but
somehow, after thinking hard about it, I think I
better leave the fan to work on its own.

With the NAS properly installed, my life is now made easier. However, thre is something I realised which I was not comfortable with. I thought I could remove the HDD from the Linkstation and use another PC to do a HDD to HDD transfer but all the PC could read was that the Linkstation HDD was 'blank'. The same goes when I plugged it to my PC. Not only that, you need their software to 'view' the contents from any PC.

Oh well. At least my task of transferring data is made easier. That is, just as soon as I can locate back all the DVDs and CDs I have archived. I wonder how well this would work when I (eventually) pair it with an iPad. So far, streaming MP3s from it is quite OK but I have yet to try with movie files. I also noticed that on the box there is something to do with bittorrent but that will have to wait because someone has mistakenly put the installation CD to another place which I still cannot locate.