Buffalo Technology TeraStation TS5810DN
An affordable eight-bay NAS offering fast 10GbE performance and strong data security measures
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE 32TB (8 x 4TB), £1,800 exc VAT from pcworldbusiness.co.uk
Buffalo claims its TeraStation NAS appliances are the most secure on the market – which should be music to the ears of any SMB currently tussling with GDPR compliance. And indeed, along with a heap of storage and embedded 10-Gigabit Ethernet, the eight-bay TS5810DN boasts several distinctive security features.
For a start, the administrative account doesn’t have root rights. This makes it theoretically impossible for rogue software to get its hooks into the OS – although it does mean that you can’t install third-party apps either. There’s optional native antivirus scanning too, courtesy of Trend Micro, with a three-year subscription costing around £128.
Next up is AES 256-bit volume encryption, ensuring that no data can be recovered from stolen or cloned disks. And if you’re worried that the whole appliance could be stolen, Buffalo’s free Boot Authentication Tool has your back. This network service runs on a separate Windows host and (if enabled on the appliance) is needed to authorise access to your data. If the TS5810DN can’t connect to the authentication service when it boots up, the web interface and shared volumes will be unavailable, and the reset options will be disabled.
The appliance is well built, with a sturdy steel chassis; cooling is handled by two 9cm-diameter fans at the rear. These are very quiet; the SPLnFFT iOS app on our iPad measured a noise level of just 39.5dB at a distance of 1m.
The TS5810DN is available in 16TB, 32TB and 64TB capacities; the 32TB version we tested came with eight 4TB WD Red SATA disks. Should a drive fail within the three-year warranty period, Buffalo offers a 24-hour exchange service, although using your own drives may invalidate it.
The drives came preconfigured in a RAID6 array, so there was little setup required. Buffalo’s NAS Navigator 2 utility for Windows discovered the appliance in seconds, and provided direct access to its (somewhat basic) web interface, along with a handy drive-mapping service.
Access controls are good: shares can be designated as read/write or read-only, and can be made accessible over CIFS, NFS, AFP and FTP. A local user and group list can be applied to each share, or the appliance will integrate with Active Directory (AD), with support for a huge 10,000 users.
For performance testing, we hooked the TS5810DN up via 10GbE to a Dell PowerEdge R640 rack server running Windows Server 2016. A
“The administrative account doesn’t have root rights, so it’s theoretically impossible for rogue software to get its hooks into the OS”
mapped share gave us good raw read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 4.9Gbits/sec. In real-world use, we were able to copy 25GB of files back and forth at average read and write rates of 4Gbits/sec and 3.2Gbits/sec.
For backup duties, the package includes the NovaStor NovaBackup 19 software, with one server and ten workstation licences. This gave strong performance too: our 22.4GB test folder containing 10,500 small files was backed up at 1.5Gbits/sec.
Shares can additionally be set as destinations for Buffalo’s onappliance backup utility – by simply ticking the Backup box during creation – and Rsync support meant we were also easily able to replicate shares onto a Qnap appliance.
As we’ve mentioned, you can’t install apps on the TS5810DN, and it’s worth noting that the built-in cloud options are very limited. You can upload files to an Amazon S3 account, and sync with Dropbox, but other providers aren’t currently supported.
Still, the TS5810DN is great value: the 32TB model costs nearly £300 less than Synology’s eight-bay DS1817+, and has the avantage of a built-in 10GbE port. The software isn’t as feature-rich and user-friendly as Synology’s, but if your focus is on data security it’s a worthy choice.