TL;DR - it fails to meet performance expectations.
I bought the Buffalo LinkStation 441e 4-bay diskless NAS unit in May of 2018 and there were a number of problems that I immediately ran into when I was trying to use it. For one, I was originally going to try and put in four 6 TB HGST SATA 6 Gbps 7200 rpm HDDs into it, and right away, that didn't work. It wouldn't recognise the drives nor properly identify the storage capacity of each of the drives.
It was only then that I found out that it looked like that it couldn't support drives bigger than maybe 3 TB (the only other drives that I had available to me were 3 TB drives, so I popped four of those in instead, and that seemed to work).
This limitation was not advertised on Microcenter's product page at the time when I bought it. Had I known that a priori, I probably wouldn't have got it. But seeing that I bought it already, I just tried to see if I could make the best of it.
Setting it up was pretty easy and straight-forward.
The administrator's password, if you decide to assign a new one, can only take alphanumeric characters (apparently, or so it seemed). If you tried to use special characters, it didn't seem to work. I think that I had to reset the unit back to the factory default a few times on account of it when I was first trying to get the unit set up and configured the way I like it.
Upon doing so, the other problem that I ran into was that copying files to and from the Buffalo LinkStation 441e, despite the fact that it had a gigabit ethernet (GbE) networking, with four HGST 3 TB drives in a RAID5 configuration, I was NEVER able to get more than 20 MB/s read or write to this NAS.
It didn't matter what I tried to do - the unit just wasn't capable of it. It was also irrelevant whether the NAS was full or nearly empty - it couldn't read nor write at speeds > 20 MB/s (using a Windows client). The Buffalo LinkStation 441e does not support NFS, so I couldn't really test it with a Linux client.
The one thing that I will comment on that I liked about it was that Buffalo has a NAS Navigator so that it will find your NAS units that has a dynamically assigned IPv4 address to it, which is useful and helpful for the initial setup/configuration.
Beyond that, its inability to be able to read/write at anything > 20 MB/s really limited what I could actually use it for.
Pity.
(When you're reading/writing at upto 20 MB/s, even a USB 2.0 high speed device could outperform this NAS unit with four hard drives in it. And I know that drives weren't the limiting factor because I had them in a "real" server before I moved them into the LinkStation 441e NAS and they were able to read/write at > 100 MB/s (limited only by the gigabit ethernet).)
