I bought a Buffalo LinkStation last summer and installed it on the office network. David and I used it a bit for a while, but then our needs changed and it mostly sat there idle. I’d back up the odd file to it from time to time, but that was about it. Then one day I noticed that it was unbelievably slow copying files. It would copy the first few megabytes no problem, but then it’d slow to a crawl. It took most of a day to copy a few gigabytes of data. So I stopped using the drive altogether.

I set it up on the home network this morning, hoping that maybe it just didn’t like the office network. No such luck. Still abysmally slow. So I did what I should have done last fall: see what Google has to say about it. And sure enough, the first search hit in response to “buffalo linkstation slow” returned the Slow Buffalo LinkStation blog post over at ManCave. Although his suggestion of checking the network speed didn’t pan out, several of the other posters suggested disabling the print function and clearing the print queue. Sure enough, doing that solved the problem and now I have a place on the network where Debra and I can store shared files.

On a related note, 250 gigabytes doesn’t seem near as vast today as it did when I bought that LinkStation for $250 or more last summer. Yesterday I paid $120 for a 500 gigabyte Maxtor external USB drive. 24 cents per gigabyte. Storage is essentially free.