The silver boxed Buffalo Terastation was released in 2005. With its 1TB capacity (~700GB as raid 5) it was a welcomed device to many photographers who needed secure storage for their images.I advised purchase of these devices to many people and I know that there are dozens of them still working fine today. There have been a few devices that have developed problems prematurely but as long as the data was backed up to other devices before replacing a faulty hard disk there should have been no problems.
However, we may be approaching the 5th anniversary for many of these devices and in my experience 5 years is a significant time for hard disks to be running continuously.
This advisory is to say, be prepared!, make sure that you have the devices backed up in at least one other separate place and consider migrating files to another device within the next 12 months.For the same cash that bought the 1tb silver device you can now purchase a much faster 4tb device and many clients have already done this. I now use my own silver terastation (pictured above) as an ftp server, it no longer houses copies of master images but is very happy serving copies of retouched files to clients, a pleasant retirement for this old horse.
