Buffalo LinkStation Live 1TB MultiMedia Network Attached Storage with Built-In BitTorrent Client

I was, first of all, very impressed with the delivery time - Well done Play!

The drive itself is very small and aesthetically pleasing sat on the cabinet. I am planning on using it with a Mac predominantly and am awaiting delivery of a Sonos multi room system so this will also be a major element of it's duties and the reason that I went for a NAS over a cheaper USB hard drive. Setting the drive up on the network was easy enough and the software installed onto the Mac quickly.

The problems started when I started trying to transfer the 200+gb of music, photos and videos off my Mac onto the drive so that the Mac book downstairs could access them too (and of course the Sonos when it comes). The drive kept losing the network connection mid-transfer and so I had to keep restarting. Bearing in mind the size of the transfer, it meant that hours would pass before it would fail. This proved to be very frustrating. I tried all sorts to fix this, for example hard wiring the Mac directly to the router to take the wireless connection out of the equation, but it did not help. Eventually, I thought that I would try something unexpected: I blew the dust off my PC and turned it on. It immediately saw the drive and I went ahead and installed the software. The PC seemed to do a great deal more during the install and suddenly the drive started responding as I had hoped that it would all along!

Right now, it is a third of the way through transferring my 12,000 iTunes tracks from my Mac and so far, so good! It is not fast but as long as it reads it back at a good speed I don't mind.

In conclusion, if this works, this will be absolutely fantastic and worth every penny. My advice to anyone thinking of buying this is go ahead but, whether you plan to use it with a Mac or PC, use a PC to set it up! It will save you hours. I anticipate (optimistically) that it will be a must-have for anyone with a home wireless music set-up as I won't have to power up any computers to enjoy my music in future. Fingers crossed!

This machine has solved all my media streaming problems for my lounge. It serves my PS3, Xbox, Amplifier & TV with all the audio/video requirements I need via its DLNA media server.

It also acts as a backup device for all my PC's.

It has power management so can be told to shutdown at night and power up in the morning.

I have a few very minor niggles but nothing that would stop me whole heartedly recommending it to anyone

I've had a few networkable hard disk based media players and storage devices in this past, but nothing like this.

We have this plugged into our wireless N router under the wardrobe in the spare bedroom. Transferring files to the device is a doddle. Once we'd setup the drive from my desktop PC, we could easily transfer files to it from any PC laptop by simply mapping a network drive to it, without installing any more software.

The torrent client on the server is a slightly cut down version of Utorrent, which I already use, so was already familiar with the interface. The Utorrent scheduler is super if you have timed broadband bandwidth usage limits, which we have with Virgin Media.

Streaming movies from the server wirelessly to our Wifi Blu-Ray (BDP-S570B) couldn't be easier as the Blu-Ray found the server on the network on it's own.

The only very minor niggles I found were:
1. moving files about on the server. Might be a Windows thing, but permission requests popped up a few times per file I wanted to move or rename. This usually goes away and my changes take effect after a few clicks.
2. The folder structure baffled me a little at first when I wanted to stream media. Then I realised anything I wanted to stream should be put in the "share" folder. This doesn't appear in the instructions anywhere.

Another point to mention is that the transfer speed on my setup from PC to server is just under 3MB per second. This may be due to using an N router with a non N wireless card in my PC, so maybe nothing to do with the server itself.

Lastly: I ordered this about 2pm and it arrived the next day!! Blimey!!

I love it. I wanted this to serve media to my playstation and also act as a bittorrent client. Its been working perfectly over the weekend and looks like its been a great purchase. I can also check the progress of the downloads via my iphone while sitting on the sofa!!! Great!

I bought one of these a few weeks ago and it does the job really well.

It was easy to set up out of the box once I had installed the latest firmware and now works perfectly with my Mac, PC, Xbox, iPhone and iPad.

It works great with iTunes pointing at the Linkstation where I have moved all of my media (which took some time, I would recommend doing this in batches). And the apps for iPhone and iPad are great for on the move.

Setting up the Xbox was easy and now I can stream photos, music and video straight to the Xbox with no lag.

The only niggle I would have would be to do with not being able to set up access controls on sub folders but that isnt the end of the world.

I would and have highly recommended this to a friend as a great starting point for dealing with media storage at home. Having read a few bad reviews I am keeping a copy of all media on a USB drive just in case.