Okay, I have bought Buffalo products in the past and am always amazed at the price point, but I keep forgetting about the dismal, no, make that abysmal, support. Come on guys, hire some techies that can problem solve.
My story starts with a great price on an LS-CH1.0TL network nas drive. WoHo! I take it home and hook it up (without looking at the manual - this one is my fault) to my gigabit home network (not bragging, it becomes important later) with netgear gigabit router, and flip the switch -- to auto, because auto would be a power savings mode right? I then run upstairs and slide the disk into a win7 box and start the install process. After a very odd install cycle it finally gets to the point where it searches for the nas drive. Can't find it. Hmmm. Well, okay, read the manual. Oh, auto IS a power saving mode, but a very odd power savings mode where the client must be installed and running before the drive will spin up -- and, turn off windows firewall (well, okay).. Alright, back downstairs, turn it off and then turn it on to ON, not auto. Run back upstairs turn off firewall, and yep, sure enough, it's recognized.
Now the fun starts. Ahh, the firmware is old. Let's update to the newest version. Download the updater, run it WITH THE FIREWALL TURNED OFF, and get an ACP_STATE_FAILURE message. I start reading the manual and the forums and it appears that you're suppose to run some crazy java program in the command box. How can that be???? Getting ready to put it back in the box and return it when I remembered that the manual had said if using a gigabit network set the frames to jumbo, so I did. The largest jumbo option. Hmmm, just maybe if I set the framerate back to default... Yep, that did it. Worked fine when updating at the default frame rate. Later I learn that my pathetic gigbit network does allow jumbo frames, just the smallest of the jumbo options. There was NOT ONE thing in the manual or on all the forum that pointed back to this solution, just some crazy ACP_COMMANDER stuff.
Great, things are going well. I'm transferring files, setting permissions. Looks good. Sooo, lets move on to webaccess!!! Hey this is neat! I get a free buffalonas.com internet name! I click the button and get ,"Error accessing BuffaloNas.com, check internet settings." Two hours later, I find the solution to be some combination of the following:
1. Use a static IP and set the first DNS address to the home router, and the second to a web DNS address like google's 8.8.8.8.
2. REBOOT the nas using the client (it's under maintenance I believe). THE REBOOT IS A MUST.
3. If you have a netgear router (or apparently any other that says it supports upnp, just ignore it. Buffalo says it will work with this but probably won't. Instead use the advanced webaccess option, use buffalo.nas, do not use https, use a weird name for your nas, set a password (stop calling it a key please - i'm looking all over for a piece of paper in the box with a key - it's just a password), set the external and internal port to 9000, because otherwise it gets beyond confusing, set your router to port forward port 9000 to the nas ip address, cross your fingers and you should have success. If not try rebooting the nas one more time.
I just spent 4 hours of my life configuring a system that should have been plug and play. I saved $20 over the closest competitor. Is it worth your time? You decide. I like the results, I'm just so frustrated with the poor documentation.
