December 17, 2005

Google's Picasa compatibility witha Buffalo TeraStation

I seem to be having a lot of problems with my Buffalo Terastation and running Picasa on a PC mapping some of the buffalo's drives to lettered drives on my desktop.

There isn't much clarification on google's support page:

    Picasa is only able to manage image files stored on fixed drives (internal hard drives), external hard drives, and some mapped network drives. Picasa is not compatible with Novell or Mac formatted network drives.

    Picasa cannot currently manage pictures permanently stored on removable storage media like USB flash drives, memory cards, or CD/DVDs. However, Picasa can import pictures from most of these devices.

Would be nice to know if the mapped Buffalo drives were included in that "some mapped network drives" column.

My Terastation is in a RAID 5 condition using an XFS filesystem. XFS is not a Novell or MAC-formatted network drive. I believe it's based on SAMBA linux filesystem, so it should be quite ok.

I am trying to scan the terastation again, but instead of telling Picasa to WATCH the folders, I am just telling it to read them once. Maybe that will reduce the number of issues.

Other telemetry:

    TeraStation Name TERROR TeraStation Description TeraStation Firmware Version 1.12 Current Date and Time 2005/12/16 17:9:35 Time Zone GMT+08:00 Windows Network Workgroup / Domain Name DESERT AppleTalk Function Enabled AppleShare Network Zone Settings FTP Server Function Disabled NTP Function Disabled Disk Sleep Function Disabled Email Alert Notification Enabled Fan Status Normal (922 RPM)

As far as I can tell, I'm only having problems with the TeraStation when Picasa is working. The failure mode is either: 1) picasa hangs or 2) the Terastation goes into a many-hour-long diagnostic self-check.

Sometimes the Terastation gets mad and seems to disappear from the network:

    An error occurred while reconnecting M: to \\Terror\media Microsoft Windows Network: The network path was not found The connection has not been restored



UPDATE 2/2/06: Found some basically-dead support forums for Buffalo. What a bummer

Posted by Nils Blutig at December 17, 2005 01:00 AM | TrackBack