If it is anything like the Terastation & Terastation Pro products, the O/S is striped across all drives in the array. This means that you can't buy one without drives and you can only buy replacement drives from Buffalo in the event of a failure or upgrade.

Of course, there are means of getting around this but it is a bit of a pain having to do so.

If you want to source your own disks, you are better off with another NAS manufacturer. Cheaper too.

Nice to see that New Zealand doesn't warrant appearing on Symantec's "heat map"...must be completely unaffected by Conflicker (yeah right).

After all, they wouldn't be aware of New Zealand would they? It is only the country where Ghost was created and developed until Norton/Symantec liked the idea so much that they bought the company (then turned it into a pile of poo).

Sigh... 'merkins!

"...and it doesn't take 12 hours flying time to get somewhere without Australians."

Seconded!

Australians are the Amercians of the South Pacific didn't you know...

I had cable for 10 years - Cable London which begat Blueyonder which begat Telewest which begat NTL/Telewest which begat Virgin Media.

Had no problems and was happy, started on a 1mb connection with Cable London which got upgraded for free through 2mb, 4mb, 10mb then 20mb with Virgin Media.

In July 2008 I started having problems. 56k d/l speeds with long and frequent periods with no upstream connectivity at all - I couldn't even d/l email as the POP3 server requried at least a packet to confirm the connection. Various people at VM tried to help, including retentions, and they kept promising "relief" dates which came and went. Turns out "I" had two problems - a faulty UBR and an "oversubscribed" UBR. The "oversubscription" (selling more connectivity than their infrastructure can cope with - isn't this fraud?) was causing the fault with the UBR to become more pronounced.

VM were not willing to replace the UBR because, I was "unofficially" told, that they were going to wait until it was replaced under the 50mb upgrade plans. Fair enough, makes more commercial sense, but they wouldn't even move my connection to another UBR to relive me of the fault. The oversubscription I could of dealt with but at least I would have had a connection.

I started receiving a "goodwill gesture" which meant I was paying for a tenner a month for 20mb cable, despite being willing to pay the full £37 for a decent service. To be fair, until July 2008 I was happy with the service. However, when March 2009 came around I decided enough is enough and ditched the VM phone and cable services, hooked up a BT rental contract (argh - 18 month lock in! - isn't this illegal?) and went to an ADSL2 provider.

In the 52 days that my ADSL has been connected, it has not gone down once. Speeds are fine for my purposes and all told I am paying about £2 per month more than the bundled deal I had with VM.

With service like this and the obvious lack of capacity within the VM infrastructure, how can they justify a business model that assumes people do not actually use the bandwidth they have paid for? Surely this is madness?

Epic fail, can't wait for them to go bust. They have spent/are spending over £600 million on capital expenditure for the 50mb upgrade, I bet this credit will cost them a forturne. I wonder how long before they run into "cash flow problems" in trying to service the debt with people leaving them in droves...