How to upgrade and add larger drives to a Buffalo Terastation

For some time I had wanted to upgrade my Terastation from a 1TB capacity to 3TB. This wasn’t really a pressing issue until one of the drives failed, leaving me with the dilemma of paying for a new 1TB disk or biting the bullet and going for two new 3TB drives. I chose the latter.

After a couple of hours of googling and reading forums of people trying to decide whether it was possible or not to perform the upgrade I called Terasation to ask them directly to which they responded “We don’t support it, it is best if you just buy a bigger unit” (For hundreds of pounds is the part they left out).

As I couldn’t find a clear step by step guide on how to do the upgrade I decided to jump in, work it out and then create an article for other people to use. So here’s how it’s done.

1. Take screenshots of your existing Terastation setup so you have something to refer back to later.
2. Backup your data to another location – VERY IMPORTANT.
3. Shutdown the Terastation, open the front panel and slide out the old disks.
4. Unscrew the old drives from the hard drive cages.
5. Screw cages to new disks.
6. Slide new drives into the Terasation.
7. Install Nas Navigator from disk onto your PC if you don’t already have it installed. (The disk would have come with the unit when it was purchased).
8. Power on the Terastation and run the Nas Navigator.
9. Error on first nas navigator screen.

10. When you hover over the icon of your Terastation an error appears saying “The EM mode was detected. Update firmware or contact your local technical support”. You will now need to update your firmware.
11. Go to http://www.buffalo-technology.com/en/support/downloads/
12. Put the model of your Terasation in and download firmware .zip.
13. Extract zip and Run TSupdater.

14. Press update.
15. You may receive this error.

16. If you do, click ok and then quit the tsupdater screen. Find the TSupdater.ini file and open it in notepad and find the following entries :

[Flags]
VersionCheck = 1
NoFormatting = 1
17. Change the “NoFormatting=1” to “Noformatting=0” and save.
18. Double click the TSupdate.exe and click the update button.
19. This time you will get a different message :

20. Click Yes

21. It will start formatting and will then transfer and install the firmware.
22. A message will appear saying the terastation needs to be restarted. Restart it and don’t touch it. When it comes up it will finish installing the latest firmware. It reboots itself and then comes back and shows the latest firmware version on the led.
23. When the terastation comes back up – access the web interface you may see that it is now in Japanese. Don’t worry – Log into the interface using ”Admin” & “Password” (which are the default login details for a Buffalo Terastation).

24. You wont be able to read the text (unless you’re Japenese or can read the language) so below is a screenshot of where to find it i.e. 4^th item along on the main menu > first item next menu, third box down and click button.

25. Once you select English from the drop down the Terastation will update itself to the correct language.
26. You’re upgrade is complete you now have a larger capacity Buffalo Terastation.

A word of caution : By default, the Terastation will configure itself as Raid 0 which will not provide any resiliency if a drive fails. Therefore, you should change to RAID 1 which mirrors the disks.
For instructions on how to do this, please see my last post entitled ‘Recreating a disk array – change from RAID 0 to RAID 1’ on Buffalo Terastation.