TS/XL R5 Very slow and crashes

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We have two TS/XL Terastation devices we bought to back up a server.   We have found two major problems with these devices to the point they are almost useless for what we wanted them for.

 

1) Speed:  even with direct file transfers to the device we can rarely get write speeds in excess of 6-7 MB/s, via a 1Gb network connection, whilst the sales leaflet claims speeds up to 60 MB/s, this device "having a new faster processor" to give high speed network access.   Tests of dragging files between our server and other PCs shows transfers rates up to 20 MB/s, indicating the Terastation may be just slow.    We have tried increasing the Framesize on the Terastation which improved performance about 20% but it is still slow.   N.B. the Terastation is configured in Raid 5 mode (could running RAID slow it down?)   We wonder under exactly which conditions you could achieve 60 MB/s?!

 

2) Crashing:  we had  believed the Terastation could be used with our standard backup software (Yosemite) as a remote shared drive.   This all worked initially (speed concerns aside).   However, when we started doing serious backups (tens of GB), after some way into the backup the main server would report a Windows Delay Write fail error and the remote drive (the Terastation) had apparently gone off line.   You could ping the Terastation, but not connect to it in most other ways including the Web Interface, that is until you power cycled it.   It would seem the Terastation (V1.3 firmware) had partly crashed.   We contacted Buffalo support whose response was "we don't support third party backup tools".   This was a very frustrating response to get because the software we are using is only using the Terastation as a mapped drive - which it should do reliably - it is not.    We tried both Terastation units we have and they both do the same.

 

We are not sure what to do now, other than sell them on ebay.  

 

Has anyone else experienced problems with these and possibly found improvements?

 

 APS

 

 

 

 

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