NAS

Client Advisory: Silver TeraStation owners

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.

remote access to Lacie BIG5 devices

Clients who are using LaCie BIG5 devices may have noticed that security updates to Internet Explorer may have blocked their ability to download files using the HTTPS facility (secure web browser).

I will need to look into how to sort this but in the meantime just use Firefox instead, if you dont have it its a free download here:

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

(Its also a very good web browser for general use).

Stephen

Connecting to UNIX shares from Vista

I have covered this before but because of recent changes to Vista (sp1) I have had to redo my LAN security to connect to shares on a local Buffalo Teratation. It looks like its these older devices only that are affected as my new Linux server and a new Terastation Pro 2 dont have this problem.

SO: If you have difficulty logging onto an older terastation with Vista try the following:

Click “Start -> Run.” Then, type in the Run field: “secpol.msc.” That will bring you to Vista’s security policy system. Once there, use “Go to: Local Policies > Security Options” and then find “Network Security: LAN Manager” authentication level. Once there, change the Setting from “Send NTLMv2 response only” to “Send LM & NTLM — use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated.”

Stephen

New Terrastations

Buffalo have added some new Network Attached Storage devices (NAS) to their range. They will be available in the UK from Febuary. I have seen a price of £577 + VAT for the 1TB version.

We like these (and earlier) drives because they can be configured in a RAID 5 array, a great place to store valuable images in some safety. The capacity of the drive is lowered when set to RAID 5 but they can still store approx 12,000 60MB files which works out at about 5p per image (The price of a GePe slidemount 15 years ago!).
This new version has much easier access to swap the drives out if one fails. Im not certain as yet what the real life file transfer rate is but I have a feeling that like a lot of other similar devices they are not very quick.

These drives are suitable for individual photographers and small photolibraries. Larger organisations may need something bigger and faster. Contact me if you have any queries.

Buffalo website