My Buffalo Linkstation has developed an annoyingly noisy fan in the last couple of weeks. Most of the time its near silent or doesn't even need to use the fan, but when the unit is powering up it makes a lot of noise for a few minutes and sometimes the fan suddenly gets noisy whilst running.

I recognise this as a common symptom of a fan on its last legs with a damaged bearing.

I had a look around online and a few others have had the same problem. The unit uses a standard 40mm fan and it seems others have replaced them in their Linkstations, so it looks like this is what I will need to do. Annoyingly they mention the existing fan cable is soldered to the motherboard instead of a power socket, which is annoying. I've not used a soldering iron much and don't currently have one so instead I think I might just cut the old fan from its cable and splice the new fan cable into the existing cable. Or I could fit a proper power connector to the end of the existing cable in case I ever need to change the fan again.

Other than this fan issue the Buffalo Linkstation has been great and very reliable. I've owned it for some time now and it has worked perfectly this whole time. In its whole life I think it has disappeared from the network twice, which just required it to be powered down and then started up again.

It is now dedicated to serving audio and contains a nice large MP3 collection and works perfectly when accessed from an computer on the network.

If there was one thing that I think could be improved it would be the addition of a direct USB connection so you could connect it up to a PC via USB for faster file transfer when adding a large number of files to the unit at once. Other than that it is great.
[Reply]