Well, after that post on January 12 discussing the relative merits of low power PC versus a NAS, Fry’s put the 2TB model of the Buffalo Linkstation Quad on sale for $529 and I bought it. I’ve been running it for a little over 3 weeks and am really pleased with it. If the Quad would’ve cost $600 or more, I would’ve bought the QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo and outfitted it with a couple of hard drives but for $529 I didn’t even think about it.
Pros:
1) Price.
2) Support forums.
3) Web access from outside your firewall.
4) The UI is the usual Buffalo NAS UI, enhanced for the additional RAID levels and the additional web access capabilities.
5) SSH server is still there and can be started if you pay attention to the howtos over at the Buffalo forums at NAS Central.
6) With a little sleuthing you can figure out how to submit cron jobs to do you backups to another Linkstation as opposed to using the web UI.
Cons:
1) Slower CPU (but still very capable in my opinion).
2) Media player isn’t that cool.
3) No access via iPhone/G1!
4) Not as great a selection of pre-loaded apps available as on the QNAP.
5) Disks aren’t hot-plug (but does anyone really need this?
6) Can’t upgrade RAID levels nondestructively like the QNAP.
So, on the whole, I’m pleased I bought it.