Buffalo LinkStation Pro review

Average user rating

2.7

terrible

Average user rating from 3 users

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Buffalo LinkStation Pro user reviews

December 1, 2006

Posted by: Dan Carter

"Base product not bad, ruined by useless support"

What I like:

Fast

What I don't like:

Terrible support, awful documentation, attached USB disk read-only if formatted FAT32

Review:

I got 2 of the LinkStations together with a drivestation for backup.

Other reviews have mentioned that you must allow the LinkStation to format the USB disk in order to make it writeable. This is true, but only if you format as either XFS or EXT3. If you format FAT32 (an option), the drive cannot be written to when shared - bizarrely it can be written to by the built-in backup software. Unfortunately you cannot then clean up old backups etc without connecting to a PC.

Also, out of the box, the backup between LinkStations didn't work. You need to set an option on the fileshares first, which is very poorly documented.

I called (European) tech support on both of the above issues. In both cases, I spoke to rude, agressive, unhelpful idiots who told me all sorts of garbage to try and get rid of me. (Example: for one LinkStation to recognize the other for network backup, they cannot have consecutive ip addresses! - the problem here was actually the fileshare option described above.) By sheer luck, the 5th guy I got through to was extremely polite and helpful, and sorted the issues out without any problem.

Summary: Do NOT buy these products unless you have a pretty good idea of what you are doing, and are willing to wade through a series of halfwitted tech support nonces to get to someone who actually understands their own products.