Buffalo CloudStation Duo - Your
personal cloud
Price $428.8
Manufacturer Buffalo
Web www.buffalo-technology.com
The Buffalo CloudStation Duo is small,
but quite heavy. While some NAS devices might look more suited to an office,
the Cloudstation Duo can be unobtrusively installed without looking out of
place.
Flicking open the front gives quick
and easy access to the two 1TB hard drives that come installed. Removing them
is a bit fiddly at first, but is a lot easier than many other NAS drives. The
fact that the Buffalo CloudStation Duo comes with two large hard drives already
installed and set up in a RAID 1 configuration is great and eliminates a more
fiddly and complicated part of the setup procedure.
Installation involves going to the
https://cloudstation. pogoplug.com/activate website and going through the easy
to follow step-by-step walkthrough. It took just a couple of minutes to set up
the CloudStation Duo, and the majority of settings were done behind the scenes.
However, we had to wait for an activation email to be sent before we started
using it.
While we were waiting for the
confirmation email we downloaded and installed the desktop app, which allowed
us to easily view and browse files stored on the Buffalo Cloudstation Duo
without having to go through Window's networking options. You can also map the
drive over, though we encountered an error message regarding default sharing
problems, which is a common issue that required some fiddling to fix.
Performance-wise copying files over is
quite slow, averaging about 11MB/s, so large backups is going to take awhile.
D-LINK Powerline DHP-W307 AV
An easy way to extend wireless
Price $131.2
Manufacturer D-Link
Web www.dlink.com
Home networking always used to be an
arcane art, where trying to connect two or more machines in one house required
mystical rituals, and possibly a sacrificial goat, in order to get the two
talking.
Things have come a long way though,
and nowadays attaching a PC to the network can be as simple as plugging an
Ethernet cable into the electrical wiring of your house. Not directly,
obviously - that way spiky hair, smoking skin and death lies.
Wireless connection can still be
tricky though. If your router doesn't have the strength to fire the data
through walls into other rooms you could find yourself in that horrible state
of disconnection where you have no web access. That's where wireless extenders
like this come in.
The D-Link Powerline DHP-W307 AV
Wireless N Starter Kit takes the connection from your router though the
electrical wiring of your house and spits a wireless access point out of any
other socket available.
It's also Homeplug AV compatible, so
any modern powerline kit will work with it, even from rival manufacturers. And
the actual connection is as simple as plugging into an electrical socket.
The only really tricky part of the
installation was placing security on the secondary access point, and that was
only down to an obfuscating wizard in the browser-based setup that did a good
job of confusing things. Note, it does require a separate login to connect to
the extender, but that's a very small price to pay for house-wide wireless
internet access.
