1) Better support for MAC - including ability to update firmware, tftp, etc.
- I was led to believe the Quad (fully) supported the MAC before I bought it, but find that I have to find a Windows PC in order to update the firmware.
2) More Backup options!!
- Ability to write to a USB drive formatted as HFS+ (or NTFS) - in other words not be forced to re-format a USB drive to use it. Many (if not most) people here appear to have bought the Quad for the purpose of backing up their computers, however, when they experience trouble, and lose their data, are told: "People should NEVER depend on one system to store all there data! ALWAYS backup your data to another device!". However, the Quad doesn't make backing up an easy task. If my only option is to back up to a locally attached USB drive, and I have to re-format it to a format that mt MAC (or PC) can't read, then having a backup copy of the data doesn't help me out at all! I need to be able to read the backup!
- Ability to automatically back up to another network share. Not necessarily another Buffalo product.
3) Ability to read (and backup to!!) a USB CD or DVD drive.
4) Overall improvement to reliaility. I've worked with business computer systems for years, and more recently 'PC" servers, and have never lost data due to a single drive failure in a Raid 5 set. Every system I've ever worked with continues to run with a single drive failure, and the drive can be replaced hot, data rebuilt, no users were ever impacted during a disk failure. I know the Buffalo Quad costs less - but in the past year of ownership have experienced many issues that i can only explain as firmware-related issues. So far, haven't physically lost a drive, but have had issues with permissions (on the default 'share' network share!), drive powering off and taking days to come back on line, days to change from Raid 5 to Raid 1, - and losing the Quad n the process. From reading the forum it seems that other users have some of the same types of issues - it just seems the system should be more reliable!
When it's working, the Quad is a pretty nice box, and Time Machine support is a very nice feature!