Buffalo Terastation

March 8, 2009 10:17 AM

What is the best way to use Japanese filenames on NAS drive in Mac OS X?

I have a Buffalo Terastation NAS (model TS-1.0TGL/R5), and have some trouble with filenames which include japanese characters. When I mount the drive with SMB, any filenames with japanese characters are not displayed properly (I see those gobbledegook wingding type characters). Any attempt to copy files (with japanese characters in the name) to the drive fails. When I mount the drive with AFP, things seem to work ok but I am then stuck with the fact that AFP does not support files larger than 2GB.

Can anyone point out why I get this problem with SMB, but not AFP? I am also considering setting up the terastation as an NFS server (which takes some work I think), does anyone know if this would make a difference?

Also tried changing the "encoding" option when I mount with SMB, this seems to make no difference at all. I have no trouble using japanese filenames generally within mac os, only on this NAS drive. When I use the drive in windows, I can read and write with no problem at all.

I looked at a bunch of terastation forums, but struggled to find any help for someone needing to use both japanese and access from mac os x. I am using firmware 1.12 (Japanese), which I believe uses Samba v3. Tried a bunch of other firmware versions, none seemed to help.

Thanks for any help.

posted by theyexpectresults to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I did some research when I was in the market for a NAS box myself, and the 文字化け problem is a "known issue" with Buffalo's products. I wound up getting something else (a Synology, although if I were doing it today I'd bite the bullet and buy a Time Capsule). I realize that doesn't solve your problem—sorry.
posted by adamrice at 10:47 AM on March 8, 2009

Try adding Unicode support to a hacked Terastation
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:19 AM on March 8, 2009

Response by poster: Try adding Unicode support to a hacked Terastation

Thanks, but the last poster in that link suggests that it still doesn't give full unicode support.
posted by theyexpectresults at 12:51 PM on March 8, 2009

Response by poster: Posted for any future googlers:

Kind of resolved these problems. Set up an NFS server using the hacked firmware. Connecting via NFS seems to allow the filenames to display correctly in OS X and also doesn't limit file sizes (or the length of filenames).

Additionally, NFS is better in terms of maintaining a connection in OS X: it doesn't unmount when the computer sleeps etc. Others also found that NFS improved transfer speeds (although I didn't).
posted by theyexpectresults at 8:06 AM on March 16, 2009