Review: Buffalo TeraStation 7120r

Bolstering its storage products for small and medium-sized business, Austin, Texas-based Buffalo Technology in May launched the TeraStation 7000 series, a pair of rack-mount storage servers starting at around $5,000 for 8 TB of storage and redundancy features.

Based on Intel Xeon quad-core processors, these 2U servers can be configured for NAS and iSCSI simultaneously. The TeraStation 7000-series includes quad Gbit Ethernet ports and dual redundant power supplies, and it can deliver a maximum of 24 TB of online storage capacity. The Ethernet ports can be aggregated or redundant.

The TeraStation 7120r and TeraStation 7120r Enterprise both include 12 hot-swap 3.5-inch drive bays and are VMware-certified for NFS. Both also run Buffalo's TeraStation NAS operating system, which presents a browser-based and highly intuitive configuration utility.

The TeraStation 7120r encompasses 4 GB of DDR3 memory and an Xeon E3-1225 3.1 GHz quad-core processor and is available in 8 GB or 12 GB models. The TeraStation 7120r Enterprise is built around the Xeon E3-1275 3.4 GHz quad-core processor with 8 GB of DDR3 memory and can handle up to 24 TB or storage. Both can handle 6 Gb/s SATA drives and can be configured as RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10. 51, 61 or as just a bunch of disks (JBOD).

For testing, Buffalo sent the CRN Test Center a TeraStation 7210r fully populated with 12 drives. Using the browser-based software, we were able to configure the array as iSCSI and access it from our test system, a Dell T1600 workstation. Using Iometer and our standard test procedure for maximizing transaction processing and data throughput, testers were able to achieve a peak transfer rate of 96.6 MB/s using 32K blocks. With 512-byte blocks, the TeraStation's transactional rate peaked at 83,796 IOps.

For resellers looking for cost-effective storage solutions for small and medium-sized companies that can grow along with the customer, Buffalo's TeraStation 7000 series is worth serious consideration. They support Active Directory, share-level replication, disk quotas, memory expansion and PCI-e add-ons. They are also covered by a three year warranty with 24/7 telephone tech support in the U.S.

PUBLISHED AUG. 1, 2012