Buffalo Forums

I have no doubt that this has been dealt with a hundred times before, but I am totally out of my depth. I am hoping someone can tell me how to fix this in very simple language.

I have a Buffalo Linkstation (Navigator says LS-WX4.0TL/R1) and one of the disks has failed. It still works, I mean I can access all my files, but there is a red light flashing and there is an error message in Navigator about Disk 1. I assume I need to fix this quickly. However, it was originally setup by someone else, and I really have no idea what I am doing. To make it more complicated, I am living overseas at the moment, and I can't easily buy a new drive here. Luckily, I can have one brought out in a couple of weeks, but I will have to make sure I order the right thing.

I've read the manual, and what I can find online and I think I just need to change one of the hard disks, and the instructions look simple (is it really that simple?). But then I was looking at the price of hard disks. I was thinking I should buy 2 drives, in case the other one also fails, because I can only get stuff brought out here every 9-12 months, so maybe I should get a spare. But looking at the price of them, it would be the same price to buy a new 6TB Linkstation as 2 x 2TB drives.

If I buy another Linkstation can I just plug it in to the router and copy straight from the old one to the new one over the network? Or is it better to just buy a new disk and try to replace the broken one? If I replace it, how big is the risk that I will totally mess it up and lose everything? Is it OK to keep using it in the meantime, or should I stop using it until it is fixed?

Apologies again if these are stupid questions.

Replacing the disk is exactly as described in the manual, not too difficult.

It is possible that the other disk could fail soon as well, but it might last another 5 years. Hard drives are unpredictable that way.

If you decide to go with a newer, larger LinkStation you should be able to do exactly as you described, just copy the data over the network from the old one to the new one.

Thanks very much, I think I'll just go for a new NAS. It seems like the safest option.