I have a Buffalo Pro duo 1T (LS-W1.0TGL/T1-V3).
A couple of months ago I had a catastrophic loss of data on it and I could not get back to a bootable state, I finally purchase and used a EXT3 XFS data recovery system (directly from windows) and recovered part of my data. I was a little bit disappointed but mostly to of my own ignorance on how to use a back-up system. I was able to repair the NAS by forcing a firmware update, bought a USB (pro drive from Toshiba) drive and connected to my NAS has a back-up only system...
Last week end, we had a power surge and my NAS went under. Annoyed from my previous experience I figured I was going to spend quite a bit of time and loose again quite a bit of data... Well I was mostly wrong (for the better). The data was safe! Although I had to restructure my RAID 1 array ( force update the NAS and reformat all - for some reason, data corruption even prevented to boot the NAS with both HDD connected), I was able to recover from the USB back-up after a mere day.
The real concern was the fact that I had to reformat the USB Drive to XFS file format and none of my other platform are able to read the data beside the NAS...
So Kudos to the buffalo team, and please make your product able to Read/Write NTFS at one point (especially for the USB back-up) so at least if the Box goes completely out, one could read the data from and plain old PC...