Buffalo LinkStation 520
A bare-essentials NAS option that could suit a business with basic needs and a minimal budget
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE Diskless, £71 (£86 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276bls
If you’re looking for the cheapest, most frill-free NAS appliance on the market, look no further. The Buffalo LinkStation 520 costs just £86, yet offers all the file-sharing services a small office is likely to need.
To be sure, a lot of creature comforts are sacrificed to get to that ultra-low price. The unit itself is a boxy little thing, with just two tiny LEDs visible at the front to indicate status and USB activity. (There are actually two disk status lights as well, but these are hidden behind the flimsy drive door.)
There’s no front-facing USB socket, and only a single USB 3 connector at the rear. Adjacent to this sits a sole Gigabit Ethernet port, putting paid to
any ideas you might have had about link aggregation or load balancing.
Inside, the LinkStation 520 is powered by a 1GHz Realtek CPU, partnered with just 256MB of (non-expandable) RAM. With such minimal horsepower under the bonnet, it comes as no surprise that the LinkStation doesn’t offer any sort of app store: the basic functions are all you get.
That’s not as restrictive as it sounds, though, as all the key network functions are built in. You can set up users and groups, create shares with custom permissions, and freely access them from Windows, macOS and Linux clients. You can also log in and access your files remotely over the web, via the buffalonas.com service.
And while there’s little on offer in the way of media services, the LinkStation can act as an iTunes server, and even stream video files to a DLNA receiver. Time Machine is supported, and it’s all quite pleasant to administer: the Buffalo LinkStation 520’s web-based control console is a proper Linux-based desktop, which wouldn’t look out of place on a high-end appliance.
To be clear, this certainly isn’t one of those NAS appliances that can grow with your needs. If you think you’ll ever want to run Plex or MySQL, you should look elsewhere. It also lacks some business-friendly features, such as iSCSI and at-rest data encryption.
But for a certain, very limited role, the Buffalo LinkStation 520 could be a good choice. It won’t win any prizes for good looks or flashy features, but it’s this month’s most compact NAS box, and the most energy efficient – and it’s dirt cheap.