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My Buffalo NAS thrashed the disk constantly, even when empty, and within the first 24 hours overheated and wiped its own BIOS. To be fair having reflashed it with one of the hacked BIOSs without the media stuff, it's been perfectly reliable as a file server ever since. It's the media serving part that appears to be the problem.
I have 3 Buffalo NAS devices (no Torrent facility AFAIK).
Nevertheless, I'm not wild about them either, so I'd probably advise you look elsewhere too.
I always have the feeling they're on the brink of failure: with one, I think there's a bad area on the disc (it seems fine now I have a junk file occupying the space). Another went on a wild beeping trip the other day after rebooting, but was fine after a further reboot.
People always say that, but chances are an old PC will be a) bulky, b) noisy, c) use much more power than a NAS, and d) have a small hard disk by today's standards.