Buffalo DriveStation Quad USB 3.0 4-Drive 8 TB Desktop DAS (HD-QL8TU3R5)

Works great. Quiet and reasonably fast. Make sure you set the settings in the RAID configuration before plugging it though.

We have one of these at work and it's performed flawlessly for over two years solid. So I bought one myself. When it arrived, I noticed that the packaging was horrible, but it seemed undamaged. So I installed it. Nothing. And by "nothing" I mean all four drives showed as FAIL. So it's probably not the drives it's probably the unit itself. I will say this though - The one at work that works perfectly came with four Western Digital drives in it. The one that I got had four Seagate drives in it. In my experience (1980+), Seagate drives fail A LOT. I'd never willingly buy a Seagate, and whenever I buy a new PC, if it has a Seagate in it, I replace it ASAP. So no, I'm not surprised this failed. And personally, I feel like I've been "bait & switched" by this seller, and I certainly won't recommend them to anyone I want to keep as a friend. You'll notice very few bad reviews from me, so believe me when I tell you that if I could have given these guys a lower rating, I would have!

Only buy this if you plan to keep backups of this drive station externallyIt worked great while it lasted. My first USB 3.0 anything; very impressed. Usually got transfer speeds from 80-400MBps. I used it in raid 1 (mirror mode) so I had two 3TB drives visible and the other two automatically backed up my data one-to-one. Stopped working without warning. Fan didn't come on and all lights were red.Lasted two years before the board failed. I used raid 1 so it was configured to work with Buffalo's pcb. Buffalo wouldn't send me a replacement board or sell me the enclosure without the hard drives. The only way I could access my data was to pull the drives and stick them in an old desktop pc. Copied everything to a spare hdd I had and another I had to buy so I wouldn't lose any data when I checked if reseting the raid mode and reformatting would fix it. Nothing would work except buying the same enclosure for another $1200 (cost when I got it) just to swap the circuit board. Ended up getting a jbod enclosure so if this happens again I can just buy another cheap enclosure and not have to transfer data back and forth just to use the drives in the new enclosure.

I purchased this drive new to replace an identical DriveStation which I bought used. I was hoping to transfer the hard-drives and save my data, but no dice!The DriveStation which I purchased used lasted only 6 weeks before failing. On the plus side, that means that most of what I needed to reconstruct the data was still in one place. On the minus side, it did take almost two weeks just for the file transfers from other backups -- 10TB over USB is just slow.Now I just hope this one doesn't cause any trouble....

I gave this drive four stars because the drive that I received did not function. Buffalo Technology, though, has excellent customer service that it available 24/7. Tech support was very helpful and sent me a replacement drive. I've had no problems with the new drive. I set it up as a Raid 10 drive and have been very pleased with the speed of the drive over a USB 3 connection.

The External Drive is excellent, at this time May 25, 2013 we do not have any problem, excellent product, very resistant material, look better that the competition (G Technology); easy to use and easy to install, we can trust the seller and the Factory.

A few weeks after I purchased the 8TB RAID (set up in a RAID 5 configuration), my Mac started telling me it could no longer write to the drive and that I should run Disk Utility. I did, but more errors popped up that basically told me to reformat the drive. Considering I purchased this drive to run in RAID 5 so that I could, hopefully, save my data if one of the disks failed, I was disappointed. I tried DiskWarrior and Disk First Aid. There were some utilities that came with the drive, but they were only windows. Running them through a Parallels virtual machine did not work either.I reached out to Buffalo Tech Support via the email form on their website explaining the problem. TEN days later, they finally wrote back with a quick suggestion to use a piece of software that came with the drive (but only came in a Windows version) to check on the status of the disks. Fortunately, I was able to find the software (NAS Navigator) on the MacApp store. Unfortunately, it did not find the drive at all, let alone provide any sort of hint as to what was going on.I wrote back on the 12th of February and still have not heard back (today is the 20th). I finally decided to call Buffalo. After a 20 minute wait on hold, a woman (whom I could hardly hear over the background noise in her location) searched her database for the same error I was getting. She came up with the fact that I had a virus infecting my Windows OS. I use a Mac (something I had made clear many times previously), so that diagnosis didn't work so well. Eventually she told me "to back up the drive to a Linux kernel and reformat it."That was when I decided it was time to return the product. The woman with whom I spoke decided I needed an RMA and to be charged a fee to exchange the drive. I explained to her that I was officially done with Buffalo and would be returning it to them for a refund. She instructed me to go to my retailer. Fortunately, the good people at Galactics have extended my RMA deadline (necessary due to the fact that it took so long for anyone at Buffalo to get back to me). I'm not sure how I'll erase my drive before sending it back, however, as Mac OS X can't seem to write to the drive--even to reformat it.I have always used G-TECH drives but went with Buffalo this time for the RAID 5 config. The drives were relatively quiet, which was nice. And I understand that technology fails. So it's not so much that I had issues with the drive. But the lackadaisical, uninformed, careless nature with which I was handled by the Buffalo support team was astonishing. I won't be returning to this company.