Buffalo LinkStation 210 NAS Personal Cloud Storage compared to wd my cloud In Depth Review

Buy it on Amazon - (affiliate link) INDEX:
00:08 - Hardware overview
02:28 - Web configuration
09:06 - Mobile app
11:33 - Performance benchmark
11:45 - Final thoughts
The more I used the Buffalo NAS the more it grew on me. It is rather spartan both in its configuration and overall physical aesthetics, but it performs quite well especially as compared to the single drive WD My Cloud.
It has the same features many other NAS drives in its price range have: a DLNA server to stream video to smart TVs, support for USB external drives for backing up, etc. But its configuration will be confusing to novice users. This is one area where the WD My Cloud has the edge with its much simpler configuration process.
Most of the important settings (like usernames, file shares, etc) are piled into the 'advanced settings' when they should really be a main function off the main menu of the web based control panel. I had issues getting the cloud service to work with my Apple Airport Extreme router that lacks UPNP capabilities. I had to set up a manual IP address for the Linkstation and manually forward ports to make it work remotely. The onboard software does not walk the user through this process unfortunately.
The iOS mobile app was also a bit confusing. It uses the same icon for uploading files as it does for sending downloaded files to another application. The app overall just feels unpolished. It works but it could be better.
Despite the UI issues the performance out of the Linkstation is outstanding. My test unit has a 7200 RPM Seagate Baracuda drive on board that delivers about 42 megabytes per second in write speed and about 100 megabytes per second in read speeds on a gigabit network. This is almost double that of the My Cloud and means that it will perform better serving large sustained data streams like video to multiple users on a network.
For overall usability WD still has the edge, but for raw performance this is an impressive device that once configured will work quite well on a home or small office network. Like all NAS drives the best performance will be had over a wired (not wireless) network. This drive does not have onboard wireless but can be connected via ethernet to a wireless router.
DISCLOSURE: I received this product through the Amazon Vine program to review on Amazon's site
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