The new Live is a diskful single-drive consumer-focused NAS available in 500 GB and 1 TB capacities. The hardware design is essentially the same as the original, using a Marvell 88F5182 "Orion" processor (@ 400 MHz), Marvell 88E1118 Gigabit Ethernet supporting 4, 7 and 9K jumbo frames, 128 MB of RAM and 256 KB of flash. There is only one USB 2.0 port, however, compared to the original Live’s two.
Power consumption is 11 W and there is no idle disk spin down feature, but you do get programmable shutdown and startup. Fan and drive noise are low, meaning the NAS is barely audible in a quiet room.
CIFS/SMB and AFP and network file systems are supported, and files can also be accessed via FTP. There is no HTTPS admin available, but secure browsing is optional when using the Web Access Service, which includes an option to use the BuffaloNAS.com portal.
The UPnP AV / DLNA media server also supports iTunes. But there is no built-in photo server. There is also a simple USB print server and USB automatic shutdown for APC UPSes is supported. BitTorrent (only) download is supported, with bandwidth controls. Downloads can be paused, but not scheduled.
The single USB 2.0 port also supports storage expansion and push-button file copy. But it can’t be expanded via a USB hub.
Scheduled backups, with encryption and compression options, can be done to an attached drive or other networked Buffalo NASes. There is also a single license of Memeo client backup (Mac OS or Windows) bundled.
Performance is similar to other "Orion" based NASes. Writes with a gigabit LAN connection averaged 11.8 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 4 GB, while reads averaged 17.5 MB/s.
See the slideshow for a walkthrough of the Live’s features and internal photos and the NAS Charts to compare with other NASes.