Buffalo Link Station Duo

I'm looking at a Buffalo Link Station Duo 4.0 Tb dual drive with RAID, web access, built-in media server and "enhanced performance". We've become good friends, we've spent a lot of time together, a lot of time. Too much time. Let me tell you the whole story before I return this glorious red box back to its owner, our client.

We ripped over 800 CDs, almost exclusively classical. The drive is to provide a home for the music and serve music to a new Sonos music system. Nothing too challenging there, except that the unit arrived several days into the ripping. We've worked with Buffalo drives before and they're very good, as is this unit, even after the week we've had. We rip using recent Windows and Apple systems, all of which support long file names; and with classical music track names can be very long (and in Italian though that doesn't matter in this instance). Pop songs tend to be snappy (She Loves You - The Beatles) while operatic tracks are long and folder names incorporate performer, conductor and orchestra. No problem for NTFS and HFS drives.

We've been asked to rip into both FLAC and MP3, so believe me, we have a lot of data to transfer. The MP3s were just over 100 Gb, the FLAC files much bigger.

So when the ripping part was completed I hooked up the Buffalo to our network and installed the driver software that comes with the unit. After a couple of glitches (I'll put that down to me) the Buffalo popped up on my Mac's finder window. I copied the MP3s from the locally connected drive onto the Shared folder on the Buffalo. Wait a while, off it goes. I went to bed - yes, it's that long a job so I generally schedule this kind of thing over night. At 19:00 it was going OK.

Next morning, disaster. Whole list of file errors and the NAS had gone offline. I put this down to the router in the office losing its internet connection, and thus its IP address pool, which caused the Mac to stop seeing the Buffalo.

Tried again that night. Next morning, same failure. Decided I should delete the files that had been copied across. That in itself takes a while, but its bearable. Decided to try again that night, instead connecting the local USB drive into a Vista machine rather than the Mac. As I closed up the office files were flying over the network like magic. Next morning, the file transfer was still running, so it wasn't until nearly lunchtime that I saw there were errors in the transfer.

That night I thought I'd clear down the errant MP3s and then try with the FLAC files, from the Windows box. All looked OK so shut up shop. I slept with my fingers crossed.

Opened office next morning, there was an error message. This time I was given a hint that the file name was unsupported, along with a mighty list of the files that had not copied over. OK, mass delete, head scratch time. I looked in the supplied PDF and saw nothing to suggest that a drag & drop copy shouldn't work, but I found another site (not an official Buffalo page I think) which suggested this particular box runs a version of Unix which cannot support long file names. The explanation of the issue certainly fitted my problem.

So, Mr Buffalo, what do you do with 12,000+ files - all with very long names - and it's a four day Jubilee bank Holiday weekend? You can't edit those names down to 12, 20 or however many characters. Instead, I had a brainwave.

Thankfully we work from source files (AIFF) in circumstances where clients require alternative file formats. So I loaded all the original files (held on three USB drives attached to our Pogoplug) and from there, imported them into iTunes. I used iTunes to convert from AIFF into MP3, but pointed the output files at a folder on the Buffalo Link Station Duo. Writing the files under the Link station operating system produced files the drive was happy with. Did the same (or similar, for FLAC - we don't use iTunes for that as it doesn't handle FLAC) and that worked too.

Trouble is each conversion run took in excess of 28 hours, which is why this box is going back to the client very, very late.