Storage is a lot like closet space, you can never have enough and as soon as you think you do, you find more stuff to put in there. Then Buffalo Technology asked the question, “What if your closets could grow?” The company answered that question with the TeraStation Pro II iSCSI Storage Solution, a SAN solution in NAS clothing.

The TeraStation Pro II iSCSI Storage Solution was designed from the outset to bring affordable, high-speed storage to networks of any size, with a slant towards small businesses. The small, toaster-sized unit can house four drives as large as one terabyte each - bringing the total internal capacity to four terabytes, which can be further increased by adding additional USB external hard drives. The internal drives employ SATA technology to speed data transfers and a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port brings gigabit Ethernet speed to the device.

With those specs, one would think the device is all about speed, but there is much more to the Buffalo’s product than that. Of course, fast transfer rates are important for busy networks, but one has to consider many other factors when choosing a networkable storage appliance. For example, ease of administration, expansion and resiliency all come to mind as critical criteria.

For resiliency, the unit supports several RAID modes, including levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and for maximum space a JBOD mode. Maximum protection comes from RAID 1, which mirrors the drives, while RAID 10 combines RAID 1 mirroring with RAID 0 striping, which boosts speeds without reducing data protection. Most users will want to choose RAID 10 as the best compromise between storage space, resiliency and speed, while those seeking the maximum amount of storage will want to go the JBOD route.